Shane_B.

Oh quit yer' grumbling Mr. 220V @ 50Hz. ⚡⚡

It's really rare to find a guy who has been a copier repair tech for that long. The toner and developer dust, not to mention the chemicals we used daily, usually caused illness or they had enough of being on the road constantly and dealing with pissed off customers and quit. I did it for over 20 years and I've only ever known three guys who made it to retirement. One made it to 62 and the other two retired early in their mid 50's. Wow! I haven't heard the term ARCNET in decades. I seem to remember having to get certified to be able to install ARCNET based P.O.S. systems way way back in the very early 90's when they were all starting to switch from their proprietary wiring systems to a 'standard' networking system. I'm glad you are still working and have moved up. I'm very lucky that my wife found her dream job in the middle of all the chaos 10 years ago. I could go back in to copiers but I don't want to drive here in the KC metro. I'm trying to get in to a factory about 20 minutes from my house but they told me I was overqualified and not to apply again. I hounded them for a couple months. That was a very long time ago. They have huge signs out front along the highway saying they are hiring full and part time again and I'm going to stop in. Maybe there's a different person hiring now and they won't remember they already told me not to come back. LOL. I want something where I'm on my feet moving, not sitting driving. Anything but retail. Uhg.

I hear he's a real gas.

I thought for sure it was going to be 'Question for those uneducated in the US'.

Hey, I tried to make it about music. I mentioned the Christmas tunes. ?

This one I got was sitting somewhere damp a very long time. It smells moldy. I cleaned what I could get to and it worked so I transferred as much as I could while I could. ?But yeah, I imagine whatever drives it if it is belt driven will eventually die. You can buy packs of belts in various sizes. Belts were a little different. I always used oil on those. I've never had a tape based machine of any kind that would keep the roller engaged unless it was playing. I know the mechanically activated ones you could, but I guess I knew better even as a kid. I had a high end Sony dual cassette one time. All digital controls. I wish I still had that. My first Tascam 4 Track was mechanical IIRC, but I never left it in the play position when not in use. But yeah, I could see rollers getting dented. It happened on copiers and especially printers because they would sit for long periods of time without being used. There is a unit called the fixing assembly. It bakes the toner to the paper so it doesn't smear off. The top roller is aluminum coated with teflon with a 1200 and higher watt lamp running through the middle. The bottom is a heat resistant foam roller. Those would get dented if they sat for a long period of time and it would cause problems. Then they changed from aluminum rollers to a heat resistant "fixing film". I could definitely see it with the pinch rollers in tape decks. I hate how things have changed in electronics. I had 3 of those 4 sided 5 foot tall spinning parts racks at work. Filled with belts, IC's, transistors, diodes, and other specialized copier and cash register pcb components. I remember changing the ribbon and ink in the old mechanical brassy National cash registers back when they were still used regularly. All but gone now. My brother started out in the business working on those and started his own business and I worked for him. He could tear those things down to the base and put back together in his sleep. Those and IBM typewriters are mechanical miracles. All but gone. I hear you about the eyes not being what they used to be. When I was in my early 20's I could hold a PCB up to my face and look for cold solder joints and broken tracings. Those days are long gone. I had one of those lighted magnifying arms on my bench but never used it although my brother who is 12 years older than me always had to.

My wife and I were out and about on Saturday Friday, doing some after Christmas shopping looking for some sales and driving around listening to my Christmas music I've recorded over the years in CbB and S1. It was a tradition I started since the first year I moved out west in 98. I'd record a song and send to family at Christmas every year but stopped 10 years ago when we moved to MO. I have quite a collection of Christmas music I've recorded over years. We ended up about an hour south of where we live in a nice little town called Clinton. I saw a sign that said "Tightwad 13 Miles" so of course I had to go check it out. I came in to town and the sign said Tightwad Population 69 and about a block in to town there was this ... This is one of the things I love about MO. They used to have a sense of humor. The town I live near is called Peculiar and there are other places with funny names too. But Tightwad MO is a real place. Back when my dogs were still around I would take them for rides and we'd go exploring. There are still tons of tiny little towns in MO with populations from 100 down to a dozen. It was a good day filled with my favorite music, it was 64F, sunny. But seriously, I could live there. And now with Elon providing high speed satellite internets to us country folk, there's no reason whatsoever to live near town anymore. Unless you like being in town. ??

That was very 80's. ?

I paid $250 for the one I got on Facebook Marketplace. It was the 4 Input, 4 Track, 4 Output version. He had a 6 Input, 4 Track, 4 Output one he wanted $325 for IIRC but I didn't want it for recording, I just wanted it for playback. The original one I used was a different version of the 6/4/4 but luckily the heads lined up and the I could adjust the speed to make it work. I wouldn't be surprised to see Tascam release a new tape based machine. You can still get the rubber pinch rollers but I've never needed one. Keeping them clean with Distilled Water is the key. I used to work on office and business machines. Copiers, cash registers, printers. There is a chemical called Fedron that will actually bring rubber rollers back to life, but it's a last resort and it is nasty. If it touches anything plastic it melts it. Distilled water is the only thing that should ever touch a capstan rubber pinch roller. Alcohol dries them out and kills them. Distilled water without all the tap water chemicals cleans and rejuvenates them. That's all I've ever used on my tape machines. A tiny bit of oil also cleans them and brings them back to life on office equipment but I would not do that on tape machines. Distilled water on the capstan pinch roller, alcohol on the plastic and metal, and I still have my Realistic Tape Head Demagnetizer. When I was a kid I used to put drops of 3 in 1 oil on the back tires of my AFX race cars and hold them there. They would start to smoke and get really tacky. You could take corners at full trigger throttle and they wouldn't come off the track for about 5 minutes. Hah.

Things I like about CbB. The updates are free, for now. I like how Noel has been set free to fix it and he's done a great job. I still use Session Drummer 3 and Dimension Pro. I get those because I was a paying customer before it went free. I don't know if everyone gets those or not. I still use Zeta once in a while too. There are some excellent string samples in Dim Pro and SD3 uses real samples of drums. I'm sure there are newer better drum samplers out there but I'm so used to it, and the type of music I do doesn't require drums to be a major part of the mix, although I have done songs like that and it sounds great. Again, they are real samples. And if you use the PX64 Percussion VST that's buried in CbB there isn't much you can't do with SD3. I still use the PX64 Percussion VST in Studio One. It's a bit flaky though still. Sometimes it bypasses and doesn't tell you so I use it as an Event FX in S1 to do non-destructive freeze and can keep adding Inserts. I'm not in to external midi gear at all so the things those complain about being missing in other DAW's does not apply to me. I have a basic midi controller that triggers my synths and drums and I'm A-Ok. The GUI in CbB feels Windows 3.1'ish. That is my main gripe with it. The way you use your mouse on the timeline to expand or shrink the view is extremely clunky, especially compared to S1. Everything else, it's apples to apples for what I use. Although, Studio One gets a tiny edge on stability. I can honestly count on 1 hand the amount of times Studio One has crashed on me, and I used it with no HDD's at one point all off of thumb drives. That said, in recent times, I can almost say the same thing about CbB. It will still hard crash with a plugin problem but it is extremely rare. Studio One seems to have found a way to keep it from hard crashing and just tell you about it. Same as Reaper. Although, I have to say S1 is becoming spyware and I'm prompted to report a problem now when something happens and I do not like that at all. Melodyne is extremely clunky and will cause problems regularly on every DAW I've ever used it in. It's a great program, but the GUI sucks and it works best on bounced clips with just a few words sung. Replacing a synth is super easy in Studio One. You just drag the synth from the Browser over to the Track the current one is on and it asks if you want to replace and you say yes. Boom, done. One area where S1 kills CbB is setting up outputs. It's automatic. For example, I still use Session Drummer 3. It has 12 stereo outputs. You drag it in to a Song, open up Instrument view in the Channel window, click on SD3 then click Expand, and a checklist of all available outputs for SD3 are displayed. You check the box next to the output you want enabled and S1 automatically creates an output channel. Takes all of 3 seconds. It takes forever in CbB. These are just tiny nitpicks though. I really don't have anything bad to say about CbB now. Noel has done a fantastic job getting it stable now that he's been unleashed. I would have no problem switching back to CbB full time if something changed for the worse in S1. I have CbB and S1 on my system and keep both updated and I still use CbB for some midi things. It's a lot easier to export midi tracks in CbB. You just drag them to the desktop. It's it's pulling teeth in S1. And TTS-1 still works in CbB. People can laugh at me, but there are still some great sounding instruments in it. You have to use a DXi wrapper in S1 and S1 says there is a problem loading it after you use it a while. It works for a little bit and you can freeze, but it stops working after a while for me every time.

Oh this is gonna be good. ?

No, not crazy at all. Analog is making a comeback. It actually never went away. I was also reading that kids are finding that they can get a nice natural distortion out of them. LOL. Everything is coming full circle. LP's are coming back, cassettes are coming back, analog recording is coming back. I've tried them all from Radio Shack, to Memorex, to Normal to Metal, and all points in between. The best tape I ever used was the Maxell UDII 90. The gold one. The cassette plastic and label colors changed over the years, as well as the quality. There was a newer version with a grey plastic case. They were garbage. Almost every one of those I used have a warbling sound on them now and some of the masters are destroyed. But at a certain point you couldn't get the gold ones anymore and I had to switch, back before the internet and eBay. I still have gold colored master tapes from the 80's that have not aged a day. Never stretched, never lost any frequency response, still roll smooth. I used them in my car, spilled coffee on them, soda, squished donut icing all over them. Still play great. If you can find NOS ones of those, jump on them. Here's a pic of the ones I use. Borrowed this photo from eBay. I just bought a vintage Tascam 4 Track on FB marketplace to replace the one I used decades ago that died. I've been transferring my old masters in to my DAW and having a blast. I also have a Tascam 8 Track but it only has 4 outputs. Honestly, the 4 track sounds better. Must be the tape speed because it is normal speed while the 8 track is double which may be why the tapes make a warbling sound over time as well. I don't know. This was back when I got my 4 Track on Facebook marketplace.

Phase Elimination Never Is Simple Relevance my dear Watson.

I've come really close in the past. LSS it was a song written in a specific style for an artist that died. There was supposed to be a film about his life and death. The contract was on the table but the record company got sued by the guys estate to stop production and it all went in to the garbage. But I got close. I'll always be proud that some big wig in NYC heard my music and wanted it for a movie. I would have had nothing to do with recording it but still I wrote it. There's some guys here who make a living off music. Hopefully one day they'll have some.kind of hit and won't have to worry and stress over money more.

I really try to avoid the downer stuff these days. Stuff like my post and the beer. Lol. I actually have an original song I'm working on that I believe could actually make money in the right hands. Nice to dream eh? Hah. I read that people died in TX because the power went out during that cold snap and nobody was prepared because it never gets cold there. Sad. I'm a bit south of KC in MO. I'm right on the North/South weather line. For example when we moved here 10 years ago my neighbor laughed at me because I was getting my tractor ready for winter to plow. They said it never snows here. Only ice and freezing rain. We had three blizzards that year with 8 inches of snow each time plus two more storms with about 6 inches each. Yesterday it was 64F bright and sunny. Today it was 14F and so far we have had freezing rain and 2 inches of snow here. 6 inches and more 20 minutes north. Going down to 0F tonight. It's very unpredictable here. I preferred IA where you knew it would be -21F regularly and you could prepare.

I set it to Private. I could change it to public. The worse that could happen is they take it down for copyright stuff. Side note ... It's all done in Studio One but I don't post there because for some odd reason they don't allow you to post private soundcloud links. Thanks for listening and responding.

Thanks guys. This isn't an original tune of mine and I'm sorry I forgot to mention the original artist. It's a very old and very obscure country song by a lady named Lynn Anderson. Conway Twitty recorded it too. The version my brother and I did is almost identical to the original L. Anderson version. I don't like Conway's version. Thanks for listening and the feedback. I wish I could have gotten all 7 done that we recorded. Hopefully I'll still be around next year to finish them. Edit: Her big song was Rose Garden. That fast guitar part was in Rose Garden and they reused it in this Christmas song. I tried to emulate it and it was a lot lot harder than it sounds.

Xerox could never get a hold in IA. Canon was God in the High Volume arena there. KM tried. They are what drove me out. Stupid things like software issues not allowing you to lift the doc feed all the way or it would throw a code and lock the machine down. And no update to fix it. It was an absolute nightmare working on them. I had one offer working for Ricoh. I would have had to drive to downtown KC every day. 1.5 hour drive 1 way. Then drive around the city all day. They offered me my tenure from when I worked for the company they bought out and a 50% pay reduction. I told them to stick it the recycling bin. What I find odd about the age thing is, people are living longer, in better health older, younger people don't want to work anymore, and I can't even get a temp job at a factory. That was when I was 40. In my experience, once you are passed 35 you are screwed with a capital F if you have to switch careers and start over. I had to do it twice. I survived the first time at 28. Didn't make it the 2nd time at 40. The world has changed and not for the better. There are too many people and too many of them don't want to work and the people that do somehow seem to be getting swept under the rug. That's the upside down world we live in now days. The only way either my wife or I will ever get ahead is when one of us dies and the other loses the expense of the other and gets their insurance money. It's sad.

I was a Panasonic guy myself but got forced in to Canon and Ricoh when I moved from NJ to IA. Panasonic made the best copiers imo. But they knew it and charged more and wouldn't budge when the price wars came. The bean counters in offices didn't care about how well they ran or how great the color copies and prints were. The bean counters just looked at the bottom line and that drove Panasonic out of business. Anything Panasonic is superior to almost everything else but you do pay more. What I like about them is their parts department is the same for end user as service centers. They will sell any part for any of their products to anyone to repair it themselves. I don't know of anyone else who does that. I worked on office equipment over 20 years. Took a job as a manager, the economy tanked, the business closed, I couldn't get back in to the industry, the wife lost her job in IA, found her dream job in MO, I couldn't find a job here because the economy was still dead, been out of the workforce so long now nobody will even talk to me, plus my age. So I'm stuck just waiting for the tall dark boney dude with the scythe to come a' callin'.

I got drunk and went to bed at 9:30. The traditional fireworks and gun fire woke me up at midnight. Good to see some traditions are still held sacred. Christmas was a total flop this year. XM cut their Christmas music channels ofd at midnight Dec 25th. Store decoration shelves were empty before the 25th. It's like there was a concerted effort to wipe out tradition this year. Can't handle alcohol as I fight the aging process. In my own defense it was the strongest I could find. 10.2% alc.. Basically 1 was like 2.5 so I essentially downed 8 beer in the time it takes to have 3. 2021 was a horrible year for so mamy reasons for me. I've never felt so alone and isolated and miserable in my entire life as I did this year. But I was so busy I hardly had time to think about it until now. I didn't sit down for 10 minutes all year 7 days a week from January to mid December. I was and still Am exhausted. I did a TON of work inside and out here at my house not to mention what I went through with my dog in the coldest month in 200 years here while my wife was in Hawaii telling me I was overreacting. Something's gotta change this year or I'm throwing in the towel. Edit: Oh yeah ... Happy New Year.

A(m)typical

I agree they are very responsive. I bought Ozone 8 Advanced a long time ago and a couple months later they released Ozone 9 Advanced and wanted a ton of money to upgrade. I asked if there was anything they could do to lower the price and they upgraded me to Ozone 9 Advanced for free and let me keep my Ozone 8 Advanced license. I think I'll just contact them and make them an offer. I think I saw they have a 25% off sale going on some stuff, I'll ask if they can extend that to Nectar 3 Plus. I've used their software off and on over the years but Starting with Ozone 8 Advanced it was the first time I ever felt like it was worth dishing out a ton of money for. I've only recently had some time to really dive in to O9A and force myself to use it to the fullest I could. I mixed and mastered 3 songs in a little over a week during the middle of December. Volume wise, mix wise, and sonically it was the first time I ever got close to a professional sounding recording. Tonal Balance Control 2 alone is worth the money. The area where I struggled was with getting vocals to sit in the mix properly and Nectar would have helped immensely with that. Ozone 9 Advanced, Neutron 3 Advanced, Tonal Balance Control 2, and Nectar 3 Plus is an amazing set of tools imo.

Been waiting forever for Nectar 3 Plus to go on sale. It never seems to though. I own Ozone 9 Advanced, Tonal Balance Control 2, and Neutron 3 Advanced. Nectar 3 Plus is $249 and comes with Melodyne Essentials. I already own Melodyne Studio 5 so Essentials does me no good. They sent me a crossgrade bundle offer on sale that includes Nectar 3 Plus, O9A, TBC2, and N3A, for $299. In other words, I can give up my serials for O9A, TBC2, N3A, obtain new ones then give them $50 more than I would if I just flat out bought Nectar 3 Plus. Seriously ... who comes up with this crap. And they wonder why people are tempted to used hacked software.

"Keep your retirement and your so called social security ..."

After seeing his IUD thread I'm not sure.