Vernon Barnes

"Probably" the best Minimoog emulation (but I still favour Minimonsta for some reason) Worth it at this price if you are in the market for a virtual Minimoog. NI Monark, is close, Arturia Mini V is a bit behind IMHO Model 72 is beautiful to look at.

IIRC Windows 3.1 Windows ME VISTA 64- the machine that lasted 14 years Windows 8 - new machien replaced the VISTA one as a DAW in 2014 later upgraded to Windows 10 Windows 10 At work DOS -3.1 - XP - win7 The new DAW is now setup and very is fast.

If you don't have it already (and have full Kontakt of course) grab Tonewheel, the filthiest, guttisyest Hammond library you will ever find.

I think I have almost everything set up and installed now. Just three issues, I can't find the authorisation info for True Pianos I am not too concerned as I seldom use it these days. Some Sonic Reality BFD libraries not showing up in BFD they are in the scan path and authorised. I need to look into authorising the old BFD2 libraries that are not in the new InMusic account. The prize goes to Waves for the most hassel free instalation of multiple plugins ( surprisingly).

I can't say I ever had issues in the 14 years I was using the VISTA machine until very recently. In fact for me it seemed more stable than the machines at work that used XP and needed periodic re-imaging to fix issues. Of course it depends on what software one was using and what was connected. I believe there were compatibility issues with hardware and software in the early days.

This cropped up as an aside on a Coffee House thread on The Darkness. I am sure I posted this before some time ago but its worth a bump. Drummer Emily Dolan Davies has a lot of free drum tracks available here https://emilydrums.com/stem-club/ You get full song length tracks with all the mic positions as separate tracks. She says There is a lot of useable stuff here and at the very least it would be a great introduction to mixing real drums for those who have never done so. And not a deal but an opportunist plug. I used here bespoke remote recording service for me Red Over Red EP "The Slyboots Incident" https://redoverred.bandcamp.com/releases

Yes Stems Club is really good. Lots of free multitrack drumming. It makes a good advert for her remote recording business.

They have always been bonkers! As an aside and an excuse for a bit of self promotion I have ex- The Darkness drummer Emily Dolan Davies playing on my Red Over Red EP "The Slyboots Incident". She was on the Darkness album "Last of Our Kind" and toured with them in 2014 and 2015.

Its looking good so far. Into the long install and authorise process now. One suffers for GAS.

This post will be the last thing I do on my ex-DAW a 2007 vintage Windows Vista 64 machine. It was relegated to internet / email / downloads etc when I got my current DAW in 2013, and tomorrow a new DAW will arrive, and the current one will become the general purpose computer and continue use for photograph editing etc. Its disk space will be useful for archiving too. Its probably only in the last 6 months that Vista has become untenable, the computer has served me well and I feel sad to see the end of it. On the other hand I am looking forward to having much more powerful i9 powered DAW with NVME drives.

Grabbed that, looks very useful.

I am not against subs. I have Presonus Sphere, EW Composer Cloud and Roland Core. It's going to take several years before my Sphere sub costs as much as an outright purchase, and by which time there would have been some paid upgrades. I wanted Notion as well as S1 so it's better value for me than someone who just wanted S1. It also includes other useful plugins and content that are extra over a straight licence.

There is not much I would want that I don't already have. I will probably sit this one out.

I have a SSD system drive in a computer bought in early 2013, its still going strong. One of the hard discs failed during that time.

Some posts by Dave Kerzner on Instagram indicate he is working on content for Sampletank 4. Hints at classic keys Tony Banks style.

As M2.MVMe drives become more main stream the price of SATA SSDs will have to fall?

Yes, bounce any tracks before stopping the sub. Some of the other synths have the option to buy a permanent licence, but its very expensive.

I think its good value. It just gets you Zenology which is a sort of ROMplier but its got a good and ever expanding library of sounds and it has a very low footprint. Now with the effects added it made it an even better buy.

I just had a quick run through. Its a very nice suite of effects but most will have these things covered elsewhere. I did like the step phaser and step flanger presets however, they are a little different. Its just a single plugin and once you open it you select the effect type etc. It looks like it will be part of the core subscription, so I get to keep these as long as I pay my $3 a month. Roland have been pretty good at adding a couple of Zeanology sound packs a month, so I am happy on the sub, at the moment.

I have the core subscription, its pretty common for them to make "test drive" items available to tempt you into a higher level of sub. I have installed these FX but not tried them yet.

On the face of it M.2 NVMe 3500 mb/s versus SSD at 530mb/s should be over six times "better" but how does that translate to real world performance when a drive is used as a sample drive for Kontakt, EW Opus and Superior Drummer? I understand the bottlenecks with the older SSD are in the SCSI interface and this is bypassed with M.2 NVMe. With M.2 NVMe currently around twice the price per TB it would be good to know if the investment would be really worthwhile in a new build.

How is it for sketching when writing where the parts will be replaced by a guitarist later? Can it handle things beyond 4/4?

That is what I had to do,

Certainly MODO for sound. To muddy the waters further the Ample Sound basses sound terrific and have a different set of songwriting tools to EZBass and should be included in a comparison. Ample's riffer function is very powerful with a large library of parts that really nail things like string selection for greater realism, EZ is better for chord progressions.

I am thinking about a new DAW. The Studio Cat link is useful as it explains a few things. I am in the UK, so I would not be buying from them. I will probably use Scan Computers who built my current DAW about 7 years ago and I have been very happy with it. Interesting comments from Studio Cat on using HDD as an audio drive and performance comparisons between HDD, SDD and M1 drives for sample streaming. I am not sure the performance advantage of an M1 is sufficient to justify the much higher cost compared to a SSD, I am going to need quite a big sample drive.