John Maar

While I was looking for USB mic options, I noticed that a couple of them had a headphone jack for direct monitoring.

This may not be helpful because it's not free, but the first thing I would recommend is getting the best directional mic you can afford. If you don't have an audio interface to plug a mic into, search for "best podcast usb mics 2024" or something like that. There are some good ones out there. Because you are teaching, you don't need a singer's mic. A podcasting mic is plenty. And you don't need to pay hundreds of dollars. For example, here are two $99 options: PreSonus Revelator Dynamic Shure MV5 In case you hit a lottery ticket, here's a really good $250 option: Shure MV7 You want to look for cardiod or unidirectional mics. Omnidirectional lets everything in. Bi-directional lets, no surprise, front and back in. There are headset USB mics, too.

I first saw Buddy Guy 4 years earlier, in the summer of '65. He wasn't wearing a suit, that's for sure. He was my first experience with electric blues guitar. All of my earlier influences were Delta blues played on acoustics and resonators. He blew me away! And that's a young Buddy Miles! I only saw him once, a few years later, shortly after he recorded that live album with Santana. Great show!

That's the way I did it. Twice. Didn't work. That could be because the first time, it installed to my Download folder. When I moved the files to the correct location, the authorization may have been lost or invalidated. Anyway, it's working now.

Son of a basket of fried chicken! That did the trick. Merci beaucoup! Why, oh why, is the authorization manager feature not built in to the product manager? This whole process reminded me of a design engineer I worked with over 30 years ago. His one and only goal in life was to make his designs as complicated as possible and still get them to work. Some of the time. In the lab. One time, he was tasked with designing a test unit for field use for our remote telemetry products. When I saw his design, I told the head of R&D that it was a disaster waiting to happen. I was the most junior designer and he was #2, so I wasn't listened to. We built his tester and had to sell it for over $6K. It turned out to be almost unusable in the field. The head of R&D came back to me and asked me to design its replacement. I included a microprocessor that "gasp" required software instead a being a purely hardware unit like the original. It was 25% of the size and we were able to sell it for $1K with higher profit than the original. And it was rock-solid in the field. When I gave up on that company and went to work for our main competitor (Motorola), that black hole for development dollars was still there, doing his thing. My goal at Motorola was to drive my old company into bankruptcy in 24 months. It took me 30.

I give up. It is registered correctly in the IKM PM and in my online account. ST4 sees it, but the presets are grayed out and the Library icon has a Lock icon on it that I can't get to go away. When I click on it, sometimes it loads the IKM PM and sometimes it loads my browser with the IKM website. What a waste of time.

Ahhhh. OK, I found that, installed but locked. I'm still working on it. I've deleted all of the related files, so ST4 and the IKM PM both think that it isn't installed. That's as far as I've gotten so far. I'm update this if and when I figure it out. I think I'll still with the Pianoteq 8 version anyway.

Geez, but I hate IKM's Product Manager. After registering the Brandenburg Piano in the Product Manager, I ran Install, it defaulted to my Download directory. I assumed that it would download there, and then install in the appropriate location. NOPE! It downloaded AND installed into my download folder AND added my Download folder to the list of instrument folders in SampleTank. Sheesh. I had to go to the IKM website and figure out that the Brandenburg Piano was a SampleTank 3 instrument and then figure out where the contents of the 3 folders in my Download folder that got created (not including the 4th folder that had the downloaded file itself) needed to be moved to. I then deleted my Download folder from the list of Instrument folders in ST4. I then ran SampleTank 4 and rescanned all instruments. Then I spent some time trying to find the B.P. instrument. Was it called the Brandenburg Piano? Oh, hell no. It was called the Berlin Grand Piano! To find them, you have to click on "Piano" in the Categories column, then scroll down the Instruments column to the 4 Berlin Grand Piano presets. Give me an f'ing break. After going through all of that, and scrolling past the Art Deco Piano presets, I remembered that I'd had to do the exact same thing many moons ago for the Art Deco. Too bad I didn't remember that.

Found it. Thanks. Installing now. 👍

I mentioned above that I have Steinberg and Waves on my "never again" list. I forgot to add two others, Slate and iZotope. I've purchased 2 iZotope products over the years. Both had problems being correctly scanned by a couple of plugin scanners. Sometimes they scanned, and sometimes not. Too unreliable. Uninstalled both. When I was first getting started with "in the box" recording and mixing, I bought some Slate plugins. They only supported licensing via the iLok dongle and not soft licensing to my PC. Sometimes my desktop got along OK with the dongle, other times not. When iLok cloud licensing came out, they updated those plugins to support the cloud, but didn't add machine licensing at the same time. Over about 10 years, they never once responded to any of my attempts to contact them. When I moved to France, I sold my desktop PC and bought a high-end Lenovo laptop. It has never once recognized the iLok dongle, so I can't even deauthorize the Slate plugins that are on it. As I also mentioned, I have a license for Komplete 9 that I've never upgraded. Successive releases just looked like bloatware to me. Komplete 15 seems no different. Hard pass.

I own T-RackS 5 MAX v2 and IKM wants 199 € to "upgrade" to 6 MAX? Hard pass.

I love living in France now, but I really miss the Cali spinach.

Cool! Thanks. I just tried those settings with the new Cherry Audio release of Blue 3. Sounds close, but not quite. What chorus and vibrato settings do you use?

None of them. Windows manages the audio without an ASIO driver.

I have 3 entries: ASIO Fireface USB, BC Connector ASIO and Machine MK3. Now that I have my new RME Fireface UCX II up and running with its multi-client ASIO driver, I plan to uninstall BC Connector.