bitflipper

My biggest freebie score was a 6-foot tall rack, when my office closed down in 1993. All the furniture got snapped up, but I was the only one with a pickup who could haul away the rack. I ended up gifting it to a buddy of mine who had a proper recording studio and enough stuff to actually fill it up.

Too expensive. I have exactly $193.01 to spend. I started with $200 but downloaded an MP3 album for $6.99. A symphonic metal band from Sweden featuring four girl singers that does epic covers of 80's-era American Top 40 hits. Couldn't resist.

Here's a different take: what they are good at is cutting corners to lower the cost of manufacture. Long before China was flooding the world with cheap garbage, they were subcontracting for North American and European manufacturers. Working for foreign companies who stressed one prime directive: make it cheaply. Since that was their bread 'n butter, that became the nexus of their collective expertise. Chinese engineers learn the same stuff in school as everybody else, so it's not like they suffer from mass incompetence. Every engineer learns the concept of "high quality, on-time, or cheap; pick two". When a trusted high-end brand such as Telefunken hired them to increase the profit margin for microphones, the engineers were given a clear mission - make an existing product that looked the same but was cheap to manufacture. So they did. They came up with a microphone that looked exactly like a $3000 Telefunken but cost under $100 to make. Unfortunately, it did not sound like a Telefunken and when users tore them down they found that the guts of the mic were far inferior to the German-made original. You could in fact buy the same exact microphone under a Chinese brand for $150. It was the greedy executives at Telefunken who were the villains of that story. The only thing that's changed is that the Chinese got smart and cut out the middle man, instead selling their cheap crap directly to consumers. Amazon made that possible.

Ever go magnet fishing? I had a blast doing that, using an extremely powerful magnet I was told was salvaged from an industrial magnetron. It had threaded bolt holes perfect for attaching a heavy rope. Well, I enjoyed it until I snagged something too big to pull up. My magnet now sits at the bottom of an 800' deep lake in Idaho, probably attached to a steamboat that sank there a century ago and rumored to be laden with silver.

To be fair, I have no problem with meaningless brand names. What the hell is a Korg, anyway? First time I saw that name, I pictured a Japanese monster movie. Roland was a made-up name by a guy (Ikutaro Kakehashi) who didn't speak any English but wanted something that easily rolled off the tongue of an English speaker. A couple years ago, I purchased an extension cord. It was nice: all-metal construction, heavy 15' cable, 10 outlets spaced to accommodate wall warts. So when I recently added more powered speakers to my setup, I went to order two more of them. The exact model was no longer available, but there were four products that appeared to be identical, down to the bright yellow color. I didn't really take notice of the brand, which was CRST. Might have been a pun, as in Jesus Crst, what is this piece of sht? The ground pins literally fell off before they were even used.

I received multiple Amazon gift cards for Christmas, totaling $200. My office/studio/rehearsal space is a garage with a wood rollup door, the only surface lacking acoustical absorption. So I figured I'd spend my $200 on some stick-on acoustical panels. When I searched for acoustic treatments on Amazon, they showed page after page of acoustic foam products. All surprisingly cheap. Got my hopes up for about 10 seconds. First thing I realized was that it was the same handful of products under dozens of different brand names. Names that are random strings of characters, such as WVOVW, OTUOER and ZHOJEREL. All with "customer" ratings of 4.7 stars. And all clearly useless, being too thin and apparently not even made of acoustical foam. We're talking the kind of low-grade lightweight packing foam you throw away. All the product descriptions included the word "soundproofing" - a red flag in itself. I always go straight to the 1-star reviews on anything I buy from Amazon. Every one of them complained that these panels did not isolate sound. Those buyers had obviously been misled into thinking that's what these products are for. Many also complained that the panels came smushed into vacuum-sealed plastic bags and were malformed and squishy. I had to explicitly search for "Auralex" to find any product that was not Chinese junk. Ultimately found a good deal, even though the panels were 5x more expensive than the fakes. But there was only one vendor selling Auralex, and that vendor was not Auralex. Some reviewers complained that what they got wasn't even actually Auralex. We'll see. Amazon does not seem to care if products they sell are fraudulent. (Example).

When we had a sax player in the band, that was an ongoing problem. Everybody could turn down except him. At low-volume rehearsals he'd sometimes turn away from the rest of us, but even then he'd still be too loud. I was all set to buy him a wind controller. I am not wealthy, but I can fit almost anything into my budget if it makes the band sound better. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), he left the band after a big argument with our singer. Those two had never gotten along from the get-go. I still miss having a sax in the band. Playing those parts on a synthesizer is embarrassingly weak. Plus we can't make those lame jokes anymore, e.g. while he was switching from alto to tenor we'd fill the silence by explaining he was bi-saxual. Actually, on reflection I don't think he found those jokes very funny after the first time.

I like your attitude, Bob. If you hadn't become a musician, you might have landed at NASA instead. It does scare me how many single components my band relies on, any one of which could kill the show if they failed. For example, moving to electronic drums made a huge difference in the overall sound of the band, allowing us to play at literally any volume and still sound good. But should that drum "brain" (manufacturers apparently think drummers are too dumb to understand "sampler") ever fail, the drums make no sound at all. (Well, technically it still makes tiny ticky-ticky sounds, but I imagine that'd be difficult to dance to.)

What's wrong with this picture? Safety glasses, check. But (chortle) where's her goddam static strap?

"I'm an IT guy who gravitated to a DAW back in the mid-1980's!" Every DAW user in the 80's became an IT guy whether they wanted to or not. Remember what it took to simply add a CD drive to a DOS machine? Or fiddling with DIP switches to configure the IRQ priority for your network and MIDI interfaces?

I once walked into a warehouse full of retired disk drives. It was at a high-security facility where they work on nuclear submarines. When I asked my guide/escort what that was about, he explained that they have a strenuous protocol for disposing of old drives. They would start with a magnetic wipe, placing the drive into a very strong oscillating magnetic field. But that was just the start of the process. Then they'd physically disassemble the individual platters and sandblast the oxide coating. Finally, the remaining aluminum substrate was run through a chipper, leaving rice-grain sized pellets of aluminum that were then melted down. You might try that.

My first storage purchase was a box of 5.25" floppies. I was pissed that I had to buy a box of 20. Every data cassette I had would fit onto two floppies, so what on earth was I going to do with the other 18?

Active speakers have downsides: having to run power to them, limited distances, the need for longer, more expensive balanced cables. Passive speakers' cables can be made out of lamp cord from the hardware store in a pinch. However, having only active speakers (8 of 'em) means my entire "rack" fits in a single plastic box:

So that's how you wear headphones with a cowboy hat.

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=Ubiquitous+Bubba&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Ubiquitous Bubba. The forum was his scratchpad for creative writing exercises. Clink Swank is another who'd occasionally throw out some droll zingers. "Our tools don't adapt to our demands. I've been having this argument with my guitar for about fifty years". But one of my favorite quotes is from none other than our ol' pal himself, Patrick. "Can you drag and drop your unending sadness into a project and then delete it?"

I can't imagine any good reason to ground the rack. Every piece of gear mounted in there is connecting the rack to ground. I cringe every time I see a rack with power amps at the bottom. That's mainly done because they are the heaviest components, making the whole assembly more stable when rolling it off trucks and such. It also tidies up heavy power cables, plus the power amps are the things you're least likely to be fiddling with when in use. But you have to account for heat flow, leaving a generous space above the amps and ideally have vents or even exhaust fans. Back in the day, I worked on large computer systems that were basically 6'-tall 19" racks. They had fans and air filters, and I personally learned the penalty for not observing heat flow principles. CPUs don't like to run hot and will eventually rebel in a most inconvenient manner. But even with all the precautions taken in an 80's-era computer room (e.g. temperature and humidity controls, fire-suppression systems, dedicated grounds) we did not run a separate ground for the chassis.

I miss Crush... "I'M SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW" - Crush, on the SONAR forum "I'M SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW" - Crush, on the Studio One forum "I'm so frustrated right now" - Crush, on the Reaper forum

Are you talking about my assertion that 36 Hz is a low-enough floor? Yeh, you're right. I can't assume there aren't some folks recording Sensurround content in anticipation of an Earthquake remake.

How cool that this person went to all that trouble to put all these tests in one place, plus giving very good background information for each one. First test I did was "hearing loss". Said I have mild to moderate loss. Not unexpected for an old rocker, but sheesh, it doesn't exactly put a positive spin on the day. What I don't get is given my loss of sensitivity, why do I complain that most concerts are too loud? I also did the low frequency harmonic distortion test. A few years ago I did away with a separate subwoofer (it was stolen, along with my 7.25" ADAM P11-As) and went with an 8" speaker that had excellent low-end extension (due to its large enclosure) and decided that I did not actually need a sub. But I hadn't tested again since those speakers died and were replaced by smaller, less-expensive 8" speakers. I was happy to see them doing fine down to 36 Hz, more than good enough. The dynamic range / dither demonstration was great. It clearly shows the benefit of noise-shaping. Of course, it's mostly irrelevant with modern standards and nobody really needs to concern themselves with dither algorithms, but it's still interesting. Same with the aliasing test. If your playback system fails this one, you're one cheap-***** mf. The first time I ever heard aliasing, I didn't know what it was. It sounded like birds chirping. That was on a $12 MP3 player I picked up at a drugstore 20 years ago. I haven't really heard noticeable aliasing since, although most of the time it shows up as a vague graininess you can't put your finger on, and is more often caused by poorly-designed synthesizers than anything else. Try testing one of the sweep tests (e.g. the MATT test) by placing a microphone at your listening position and recording it. I've done this many times using Ethan Winer's swept sine file while testing room treatments and speaker placement, and it's helpful for identifying room resonances that are making your room lie to you. Using that method, I was able to identify a problematic resonance at 70 Hz. Converting that to wavelength (L = 1028 / f, or 14.6 ft), I figured out that it had to be floor-to-ceiling and added more absorption to that axis to flatten it. A more sophisticated version is a tool called REW, but just recording the swept sine (or, in the case of the MATT test, a stepped sine) gives you a pretty good picture without need of any additional software beyond your DAW.

The demo sounds wonderful, but I'm not hearing anything I can't already do with my existing libraries. This would be a great buy for someone not already invested in gobs of orchestral libraries.

Did you create the file I suggested above? If so, post it, along with a screenshot of your scan paths and the names of the VST3 plugins that aren't showing up in the DAW. I'll bet we can figure out what's going on from that information. Another possibility not mentioned thus far is that the plugins aren't showing up because they failed their scan. This can happen if there is a missing file dependency or insufficient Windows permissions. You can determine which plugins failed to scan via a scan log. In Preferences, go to the VST page, check the "generate scan log" option, then click "Reset", then click "Scan". After the scan completes, the log file will be %appdata%\cakewalk\logs\VstScan.log. (Reset wipes out all current registrations, forcing the scanner to hit every DLL it finds.)

Always good to hear from you, ol' pal. Even ex-Pats should send a postcard home once in awhile. VST3 was supposed to end the old "where's the DLL?" game by always placing them in the same spot. DAWs, in order to claim VST3 compatibility, had to include that location in their scans by default. However, DAW compliance is only half the contract. Vendors' installation programs also have to respect the convention. Most do; however, they usually don't force the VST3 location and let the user specify any path they like. Consequently, VST3 versions can be found all over the place. And because subsequent updates usually honor their previous settings, a mistake dating back to the early days of VST3 can be propagated for years. I'd suggest figuring out the file names of the missing VST3s and running a search to find any that aren't in the standard VST3 folder nor another folder that's in the scan path list. From a DOS window, type the following: c: cd \ dir *.vst3 /s > vst3.txt & notepad vst3.txt

Greetings, Human. Right back atcha!

I zoomed in on a live performance to see if they'd show the keyboards - it was a Roland RD-700, a digital piano / sampler. But it's a fairly generic-sounding patch. I'd expect to be able to find a pretty close match in Omnisphere. Like maybe "Early Chromaphonic Pad 1".