bitflipper

Global warming, bring it on. My ears are cold. The back of my neck is cold. My whole head is cold.

I was just thinking back on the varying lengths my hair has been over the years. In 1968 I was hauled before the school board, along with my bandmates, and told that if we didn't all get a haircuts we'd be suspended from high school. We were chastised for being a bad influence on other students, told that we were heading down a path to damnation. Shortly after my father, an air force officer, requested an overseas deployment to serve out his last few years before retirement. They gave him a spot at a spy installation in England. This is 1969, the Beatles are still together and Carnaby Street dictates fashion the world over. I was quite enthused about being there. To me it was a pilgrimage. When I arrived at my new school, I was shocked that some of the teachers had longer hair than mine. The first friend I made let me know that hair rules were not a thing there. So I did not cut my hair again for three years. It was a magnificent head of hair, too. Voluminous - I looked like a walking tumbleweed - and rather long, past my waist. When "Almost Cut My Hair" came out, it caught my ear because Mr. Crosby was informing me about something I'd not been aware of. That in America you could be harassed for having long hair. Then I saw Easy Rider, and began to feel a bit apprehensive about returning to the US. So days before leaving the UK, I took a pair of scissors and reluctantly chopped off my locks. To a very conservative length, or so I thought: just past the shoulders. I felt I'd be able to blend in and not suffer Peter Fonda's fate. Turned out that shoulder-length was just the fashion in Seattle in the 70's, in fact almost a requirement if you wanted to work as a rock 'n roll musician. My guitarist had a fashionable "shag" haircut. I thought it made him look effeminate, but he enjoyed a rather impressive track record with taking barmaids back to the motel. The shag style wouldn't work for my wavy hair, but I got some tips from a beautician on how to manage long hair. She introduced me to the hair dryer, a device I'd not be without for many years. Every night before a gig I'd spend half an hour prepping my head. Eventually, I tired of the road and took a day job as an electronics engineer, thanks to my mentor and previous boss from when I'd taught electronics. On a hot day in July, I cut my hair "short" (not really) to mitigate the heat. It was kinda nice. No more blow-drying to straighten the curls. A tiny amount of shampoo would do the job. I could even wear a hat if I wanted to. And the shorter style seemed more fitting for the nerd look I needed to cultivate in my new job. But I couldn't leave music alone, and after a while formed a band and quit my job. Haircuts were no longer required beyond an annual trim. So dust off the hair dryer, we're on the road again. Nowadays I have my own business, work at home, and can present myself any way I want. T-shirts and jeans. Hair long, hair short, combed or uncombed, it doesn't matter. I cut my hair short for my annual trip to the Philippines, let it grow for a year, cut it off again. Doesn't matter to me which stage it's in. Until now, anyway. Time has caught up to me and is enforcing its own rules, rules that would have made my Nebraska school board proud. Sure, let those hairs grow as long as you like. But there won't be enough of them to obscure your scalp. Ha ha. BTW, today I am wearing a hat.

Please...I have hats.

Thanks for the advice, everyone. Especially Kenny. Nothing holds credence like a been-there-done-that story. Update...the boy did not rise to the challenge yesterday, and refused me. I let it go. After all, the idea of having him do the deed first arose as I pondered the shock he'd receive when suddenly presented with a Boppa Dave who no longer looked like Boppa Dave. I do not wish to traumatize him. But now that the idea has been planted, I think he's been sufficiently prepared. His little sister, though, remains an unknown. Meanwhile, a poll of my household had proved indecisive: 1 for, 1 against and 1 abstaining. So I'll have to do it myself. Yes, photos will be posted. Now, where do I go for a tattoo to complement the new look? And just which look should I adopt? Perhaps the quiet smoldering look of a veteran of the Tet Offensive who doesn't like to talk about it. Or maybe the gruff retired biker, resigned to the fact that he's too old to bash heads but threatening for an excuse anyway. How about a wizened sensei character, an Obi Wan who only speaks in meme captions? There's the withered rock star look, still cocky but thankful that they make black leather jackets in his size. Maybe the soft-spoken but smoldering - ah, there's that smoldering thing again - retired seen-it-all cop. Or the crude tat of someone who probably once ruled a prison yard. As you can tell, I'm drawing on movie stereotypes of bald guys for inspiration.

The problem is that publishers have hired third parties to aggressively troll the internet for copyright infringement. There have been many indefensible injustices as a result. YouTube videos taken down because they had seagull sounds in them. Instructional videos using popular music to teach music theory. Videos shot while a radio happened to be playing in the background. Movie reviews forced to mute scenes. Even original music being claimed by the likes of Warner Music Group, the worst offender.

My last haircut was in January. I had had it cut short in anticipation of my February trip to the tropics, because as a northern denizen I have poor tolerance to heat. This has been a longtime practice. In past years, I'd subsequently let it grow for the remainder of the year, as evidenced by my avatar. That photo was taken just prior to a trip to the Philippines. While there, my wife cut it all off in our driveway, before an audience of the entire neighborhood. However, that tradition predates my hair noticeably thinning on top. It no longer grows uniformly. Now, letting it grow long means adopting the classic Krusty the Clown mushroom style. Not a style that appeals to me. Hence my current dilemma. Given that a) my personal stylist of 40 years is no longer around, b) I've no idea when another haircut might be possible during this pandemic, and c) I have no confidence that I'd be able to cut it myself and achieve anything close to satisfactory results, I've arrived at the only logical solution - to shave it all off. And I've decided that the deed should be done by my 6-year-old great-grandson. The boy is reluctant. Turns out his last hair-cutting experiment had evoked a rather negative response from his mother. Unfair, I think, given that his little sister had been a perfectly willing participant. Apparently, Mom did not consider 3 to be the age of consent. So he's struggling with some cognitive dissonance; Boppa Dave says it's OK, and Mom never contradicts Boppa Dave. We'll see just how much sway Boppa Dave holds over the little man's sense of propriety. (Needless to say, video game-loving rock 'n roller Boppa Dave has long been a source of questionable influence.) Today we merge our separately-sequestered families in celebration of Mother's Day. For a brief time, I will again be surrounded by three generations. And if all goes to plan, Boppa Dave will end the day bald. As is, I think, befitting of a patriarch.

If you're running on a laptop, make sure to disable your wi-fi adapter. Latency mon is a must. Be sure to let it run for a while so that it's gathering statistics while you get the noise.

This doesn't sound like any noise I've heard that's caused by the interface or buffer settings. It sounds more like an intermittent analog connection, e.g. a broken mic cable, or a mic that's had an internal mounting point broken. I've had that happen twice: once after tipping over a mic stand holding a ribbon mic, and after dropping an SM-58 onto concrete (yes, you can hammer nails with those things, but they're not indestructible if you set your mind to it). Does this noise go away if you increase buffer sizes? Note that MOTU interfaces do support zero-latency monitoring, meaning you don't need to set your buffers to extremely small values while tracking vocals. My interface stays at 2048 samples all the time, whether I'm tracking or mixing.

Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but it occurred to me that those face shields will probably fetch a much higher (like 10x) price than drum heads. Medical equipment is very profitable. I once met a multi-millionaire who lived in unbelievable luxury (e.g. he had a lake built next to his house for his float plane). The source of his great wealth? He invented a slide tray. A piece of molded plastic to hold slides and sold to hospitals.

That was fun.

I liked that a lot. Always thought that song could have benefited from an accordion. I like the guy in the back - he's got the Bavarian duds ("I'm with the band") but just sits and eats a sandwich. Their producer, perhaps?

Love it! Thank you, Jerry, for this wonderful gift. A lot of work went into that, it shows. And is appreciated.

Please link any and all covers of Toto's "Africa". I'll start with a few of my favorites. These represent a spectrum of very different interpretations, which just goes to show how great a song it is.

I have to take issue with his claim that Hans Zimmer made the ostinato popular. That goes back at least to Gustav Host's Mars. I'm also not a big fan of ostinatos. They are to orchestration what the arpeggiator is to electronic music, a cheap crutch for lazy composers. But yeh, I do like this guy's style of presentation. Also be sure to check out everything by Spitfire's Christian Hensen.

When that happens, open Task Manager and see if there is a zombie instance of the executable. "Zombie" is the term for a process that's still running but has no user interface and no way to interact with it. If you see cakewalk.exe in the task list, kill the process there and save having to reboot. When this happens it's because CW has been unable to completely shut down because something external to CW (e.g. the audio driver) has become unresponsive.

In my experience, the "audio engine" is not fragile. It's actually quite robust. If there is ever an issue with a specific plugin, it's going to be with the VST interface and how it's been implemented by the plugin vendor. Sometimes, changes need to be made to CW to accommodate the peculiarities of a particular plugin. There have also been times when the plugin itself was buggy or did not conform to the VST spec. But those have nothing to do with the "audio engine".

A large percentage of CW users are Kontakt users. More than a few use it almost exclusively for their virtual instruments. I use Kontakt in almost every project that's not a simple audio recording, and have done so since c. 2005. I'd urge you to cough up the dough for full Kontakt. Using the free player will restrict you to only those instruments that are compatible with it, and they are nearly always much more expensive due to licensing costs that developers pay to Native Instruments. Full Kontakt opens up the huge world of Kontakt instruments that are not compatible with the player, and therefore far less expensive.

HD280 Pro, then. Good for editing, also good for vocal tracking, and they're cheap. I would never use them to kick back and listen for pleasure, as they have no low end. But that's what makes them good for editing and tracking. That and their very good isolation. ATM-H50 is also a good choice for editing, just don't be fooled by their hyped bass. Also inexpensive. Either of these can be had for under $100. FWIW, I've had both of the above for many years, during which the Audio Technicas have broken twice, while the Sennheisers are still like new. Nowadays both have been retired for editing duties, replaced by Sennheiser HD-558s. These are open-back, though, so may not be suitable if you need to be quiet or if others in your household refuse to be. But I am fortunate to have a quiet space here and appreciate the 558s' comfortable velour pads.

Depends what for. Tracking? Editing? Monitoring a live performance? Working out? Or just lying in the dark enjoying some herbal therapy? I have separate cans for each of these. Except for the working out use case. Don't do that.

Ever notice how well trombones go with distorted guitar? Me neither.

I'd suggest getting an SSD for your samples before replacing the boot disk. When I replaced my C drive with an SSD, the speedup was disappointing. Noticeably faster, but not life-changing. That's because most of what happens on your C drive is of a transient one-time nature, e.g. loading programs. Cakewalk and other applications start up quickly, but projects take just as long to load. Where the SSD pays for itself is when reading audio data.

Hibernation puts your computer back into the exact state it was in prior to sleeping, restoring the entire contents of memory. Including any wasted memory and unneeded background processes. Only a hard reboot gives you a clean slate. Yes, it takes longer to get going initially. I just go make a pot of coffee. I'd try to discover which virtual instruments are taking the most time to load/save. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to do that other than the painstaking process of saving and restoring different versions of your project with different instruments deleted from it. However, logic dictates that the largest memory consumers will likely be the prime culprits, and you can find out that information from Kontakt. I have identified instruments in past projects that gobbled insane amounts of RAM even though they played a small role in the composition, and those are the first things to get frozen. A frozen instrument has zero load time. Granted, I often have to un-freeze some of them later to tweak the composition, but in the meantime I can enjoy very fast loading times while working on other stuff. One thing I avoid doing is loading a lot of instruments into a single instance of Kontakt. Yes, doing so does save some CPU, but it makes freezing and un-freezing more time-consuming. Separate Kontakt instances for smaller groups of instruments gives you finer granularity when deciding which tracks to freeze. So while it may make perfect logistical sense to combine a whole orchestra into one instance, chances are there's a piccolo flourish or a tambourine hit that you won't need to edit and can therefore be moved into its own instance and frozen. Same idea goes for Omnisphere, an even worse memory hog than Kontakt. I've had slow-loading projects suddenly speed up after freezing a single Omnisphere instance. Non-sample-based synths are never a problem, so I'll often try Zebra for percussive hits and bells over Omnisphere. It might not have the same tonal complexity, but if it works in context that'll be one track that won't slow me down. Are you using an SSD for audio/samples? The newer NVMe drives are so frickin' fast it's almost like reading/writing to memory. I don't have one yet, but I'm just waiting for prices to fall some more. Unfortunately, I have over a Terabyte in just Kontakt libraries alone, so moving them to an NVMe SSD will be expensive.

Rebooting is the only way to fully reclaim allocated memory. What you've probably been seeing is the result of gradual memory loss (not yours, your computer's) that inevitably occurs over time. If you have a lot of RAM it may take weeks before the problem becomes noticeable - unless you're running extremely memory-intensive applications. This happens with all operating systems, but Windows has historically has been particularly guilty of memory leakage issues. I remember it being discussed a lot when Windows 3.0 came out. Back then a typical system might have only 4 MB of RAM, so memory management was something you had to be cognizant of. Nowadays we have so much RAM we can be pretty sloppy, leaving the computer running for months at a time and rarely if ever checking memory usage. So if you currently have 16 GB, doubling that to 32 GB should let you go longer between restarts.