bitflipper

Words I never thought I'd hear out of anybody's mouth: "Dee Snyder, thank you for being a role model".

Here's another interesting take on the economics of live performance vs. record sales. Once upon a time, it was not unusual to see an album sell millions in a week. Today, you can make it into the Top 10 by selling 25,000 copies. Live music is where the money is. But this is at a level most musicians will never experience even peripherally (Swift puts on a 3-hour show with no opening act). I wonder how this translates to smaller acts trying to fill a theater. Will fans have already blown their life savings going to a TS concert? I have to believe that as big as TS's numbers are, most people can't afford such luxuries and there are still going to be healthy second- and third-tier economies. Of course, none of this affects my world. As long as people want to get laid for the price of a beer, there will always be a place for the lowly bar band.

This obscure YouTube channel is dedicated to logistics and trucking, but they did a good job of putting Taylor Swift's Eras tour in perspective. With tickets going for up to $100,000, this one pop diva's road trip represents a major transfer of wealth from those who can afford that to those who make your bed in a hotel. "If Taylor Swift's tour was a country, it would have a GDP higher than 50 actual countries." That's based on an estimated $5 billion economic impact in the US alone, and they haven't even taken it outside the US yet. The presenter then goes on to explore the logistics of such a huge show. 80-90 trucks. $30 million in transportation alone. And, of course, he's excited about the now-famous $100k bonuses paid to the drivers ($55 million in total staff bonuses). A truck driver's dream. And a shot in the arm for struggling trucking businesses. I couldn't name a single Taylor Swift song, much less sing along with one. I would definitely not clean out my bank account for a ticket or even cough up $45 for a t-shirt. But I can appreciate the boost to the live music industry. Taylor Swift tribute tribute bands may supersede Elvis impersonators at your local casino.

In the meantime, I'd suggest switching to the WASAPI driver.

Les Paul recorded three Top 10 hits in hotel rooms. Physical space need not be a limitation. I have a 3,000 sq ft house, but I only shower and sleep there. Most of my days are spent in a 400 sq ft garage with the windows permanently nailed shut. It's not even a proper studio, just a garage cloaked in a Home Depot's worth of rigid fiberglass. I'm guessing your frustration has other reasons beyond a downsized living space.

Here's a longtime PT user who doesn't mince words...

Unless you're a ProTools user, in which case this is likely to be an ongoing frustration. It never bodes well when a company is taken over by a private equity firm, which only cares about profits - not product quality, staffing or customer support. They will slowly drive consumers away (mostly to Logic) while milking existing products for the last drips of profit until they eventually auction off the office furniture. But for those of us happy to live in a Cakewalk world exclusively, then yeh, mostly meh.

I have experienced this error in the past, and fixed it via the installer (\program files\spitfire audio\spitfire audio.exe) as the video above shows. iirc, I found the solution at the Spitfire website. The issue can arise when you install LABS while logged in to Windows under a different user name than you normally use when running your DAW. In your case, it looks like you were logged into Windows as Admin2 when the libraries were originally installed. Then, when you subsequently logged in as "Just Be", LABS went looking for the content in Admin2's user data and couldn't find it. (As a side note, this isn't a problem you're likely to run into with other virtual instruments because most are either not user-specific or they prompt you at install. You've probably seen other installers ask if you want the program to be accessible to Everyone or Just You. Which makes sense for things such as system utilities but not for virtual instruments. If Spitfire assumes a specific user rather than Everyone, that, imo, is a mistake on their part.)

Once we complete the transition to everything through the PA, that will be trivial to do. Because the mixer is also a 16-channel USB interface, I'm looking forward to making band demos going straight from the mixer into Sonar. But we're not there yet. Bass and guitar were separately amplified yesterday. The previous week we'd had all but the bass in the PA, but the packed room was so frickin' loud that I suspect a mic in the audience would have been drowned out. There was also a second purpose for making this recording. We have no FoH operator so I mix from the stage. That's challenging until you figure out where everything's subjectively supposed to be and can get the monitoring sorted. For example, I learned from the recording that the keyboards were consistently too quiet, suggesting that my monitor volume is too high. It's a process. I've tried to get the singer to give me some feedback, as she routinely wanders the room with a wireless mic and likes to dance with audience members. But she's pretty useless when it comes to anything remotely technical, being perfectly content as long as her vocals are on top of everything. So if you're ever in Seattle, mettelus, please come help. Beer and burgers will be on me.

I liked the music just fine, but why is the second example so distorted? It sounds like something that was recorded in 1985 but badly remastered in 2015. YouTube says the content loudness is +2.6dB, way hotter than anything recorded in the 80's. Maybe the uploader thought he could improve the recording with aggressive "saturation" and a clipper after learning the art of mastering on KVR.

Can't say it's ever even occurred to me. Sounds like microphone abuse Yeh, I'm definitely going to highpass the recording. My intention is to load the file into Sonar, split it into individual song files and trim the "silence" (and bad jokes) so that I can give the new guy a folder on a thumb drive that also has links to YouTube videos of the original recordings plus lyrics and chord charts. That's a lot of work, but we have only 4 weeks to work in the new guitarist before we have to start cancelling gigs. I refuse to play the 20-minute version of Johnny B. Goode just because we don't have enough material for three 45-minute sets.

Last night we played one of our favorite venues, a winery in the Cascade foothills. The stage is right in the vineyard, surrounded by grapes. Even better, a stage you can drive right up to. I got to use my fancy new crank-up speaker stands for the first time, as there was room to place the subs properly - in front, side-by-side. We left the covers on them. These covers let you do that, with a zippered flap in front that can be folded back and velcroed in place. Putting those covers on is a PIA, as you have to lower the subs into them, *****-end first. We gotta start making enough money to hire a roadie. I am still blown away by how good those RCFs sound. Better than a hack band like us deserves. I set up my TASCAM DR-07 mini recorder on a mic stand out front. The idea is to record our arrangements for the new guitarist, when we find one. Unfortunately, our current guitarist happens to be pretty good. Good enough to set our expectations high, so the search goes on. It was the first time I'd used the DR-07, which I'd bought just for this purpose. I didn't even know if it was working correctly. I set levels and let it run for the entire 2-hour show, hoping for the best. Ended up with a 1.4GB MP3. Never seen a 1.4GB MP3 file before. Turned out what I got was 2 hours of wind noise with some music under it. Enough for our future guitarist to learn the arrangements, though.

It's true. The reason you don't see much spam here is because it's usually gone within minutes of its posting. It is not an automated process. It's because we really hate spam. I am delighted when I get to stomp one, although that only happens when those in time zones to my East have gone to bed for the day. Fortunately for me, even wookies sleep sometimes.

I assumed kittens are implied, along with baby seals and human infants.

No. Kicking puppies, littering, lying to children, taking up two parking spaces, pranking strangers for Instagram, posting revenge porn , telling gullible rubes they're going to hell if they don't buy you a jet, telling noobs that if you don't record at 192KHz you aren't a pro - these are things bad people do. Admitting you can't hear an audible difference between the 14 compressors already in your kit, that's just confidently embracing reality.

Well, I figured the AEA was positioned up high enough to be beyond the reach of any random flying drumsticks - assuming your friend wasn't also practicing his stick-twirls.

Well, I survived the three-hour tour. My daughter, who's far wealthier than me, had booked the boat for a private excursion so it actually went 4 hours. Our guide was knowledgeable and respectful of the whales, clearly an ecologically-sensitive preservationist in spite of his exploitive job. I still have reservations about following whales around. Now I know how movie stars feel when they're just trying to have lunch with a pack of paparazzi lurking about. There were several other whale-watching boats out there (I tried shouting that they couldn't look at them because we'd booked a private tour and those were OUR whales, but they apparently couldn't hear me), all tipping off the other boats as to which pods were where. Still, I'd rather see them swimming free than performing tricks at Sea World. (If you've never seen it, I highly recommend the fantastic documentary "Blackfish". But be forewarned: it's one of those documentaries that will leave you fuming.) We saw them play. We saw them fish. We did not get to see them mutilate any harbor seals, though. They seemed to be content with salmon. As would I. I have to admit, those Orcas are truly majestic. Boats have to stay some distance from them, but the animals have no such restrictions and often came right up to us. We saw a total of 12 of them in 3 different pods, including babies as well as elder giants. It was interesting enough to keep me from falling asleep, despite having only four hours' sleep the night before. I normally veg out on the Sunday after a late gig. I can't veg today, either, as today's chore is unloading the van and setting up for guitarist auditions tomorrow and Wednesday. On that front, we're hopeful because one of the candidates was enthusiastic enough to come to Saturday's gig. Now, if he'd only stuck around for the loadout and helped move gear, I'd have been inclined to offer him the job on the spot.

Sheesh. The way you can casually flex like that makes me jealous. If I owned an Earthworks there's no way I'd let a drumstick near it.

It was either the worst gig in recent memory, or the best. I've decided to classify it as the latter. Now, every band likes to have an audience and hates to play for an empty room. But last night was ridiculous. Packed wall-to-wall. They couldn't have squeezed one more person in there. The fire department would have declared it a safety hazard. I wasn't worried, as the emergency exit was 10 feet from me, so I probably would have survived a stampede. No air conditioning, so sweating buckets. To add to the stress, last night we debuted the new PA system. The drummer couldn't get enough volume out of his monitor, a mystery I didn't solve all night (still learning the new mixer). The drummer complained he wasn't loud enough. The guitarist complained he wasn't loud enough. The singer complained she wasn't loud enough. But by any objective measure, we were exceedingly LOUD across the board, louder than we've ever been. But the crowd was exceedingly loud as well. The PA performed well, though. No distortion with everything except bass (still waiting on a SansAmp DI) going through it. I have become a huge fan of RCF products. I like to buy American-made stuff when I can, but RCF (which is Italian) just puts QSC and JBL to shame. I was horrified at the end of the night to find that people had been using my subs for end tables. My brand-new subs that cost more than my first car, wet with beer. Fortunately, they have a hard finish that's apparently waterproof. Still pissed me off, though. Hit the pillow at 2:00 AM, immediately zonked out and woke up this morning still wearing my glasses. Now I'm off to a 3-hour whale-watching tour. Yes, a 3-hour tour. If you never hear from me again it's because I'm trying to make a radio out of a coconut.

It might be dead, or it might not. I don't know. Our editor, David Baer, has retired and doesn't want to do it anymore. To be honest, his job was a chore that I wouldn't have wanted. Whether somebody steps up to take on his role remains to be seen. For myself, I stopped writing for them a few months ago upon realizing that plugins and sample libraries just don't excite me anymore. I've got so many! It was nice getting freebies, but at some point (talking to you, bapu) you really do have enough.

You could duplicate it pretty easily with any mono synth, including an ARP. Or any modern soft synth like Zebra or Diva. Here's a free (and pretty good, though 32-bit) Minimoog emulation that can do it. Basically just a slow portamento and two notes from the lowest key to the highest, and some increasing frequency modulation via the mod wheel at the end. Probably a square wave.

Much less embarrassing than a list of all the plugins I paid for and never used.

Possible solution

I hadn't noticed this new icon until today...I think it means "stop already!". Now, to be fair to Simon, having the ability to do parallel processing within the fx bin would be a nice feature to have. I probably wouldn't use it, but I'm sure somebody would. And then come here asking why their reverb sounds so weird.

I wouldn't worry too much about recommended specs. As others have noted above, the recommended specs are just that - recommendations. Not requirements. Of course, if you run on a potato you're gonna have to be creative sometimes, e.g. freezing tracks, using large buffers and holding off on mastering until the end. But we've all been there and know it's do-able. My guess is that if your system handles CbB OK today it will handle Next, even if Next is not as heavily optimized as Sonar is due to it being multi-platform.