bitflipper

Oh, yeh. That became a meme around here for years afterward. For historical accuracy, I maintain a file where I collect funny forum posts, and the entry I have in there reads "I find the audio engine to be 20-40% better in Nuendo". Ron Kuper then offered to test his test files, saying he'd done null tests against Cubase/Nuendo and found no differences. The poster sent him two MP3s. When others suggested that they needed to be lossless files, he came back with this retort: "i dont see the point in you coming back with a lot of useless scientific information about the difference in extraction of two wavefiles.Surely its what we hear that matters. Any wavefile will sound much the same even if played through windows media player,". IOW, a null test means nothing if *I* perceive a difference.

He said a lot of things that were, um, not well-reasoned. "And how is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

Sheesh, this thread sure took a somber turn. Sorry about that, I only wanted to share an enjoyable experience. In a couple weeks we're playing a 25th-anniversary high school class reunion. We'll be playing 50-year-old songs to people who hadn't even been born yet when they were current. Fortunately, rock 'n roll is timeless. To quote Homer Simpson: "Everyone knows rock attained perfection in 1974. It's a scientific fact."

Can't sneak anything past Steve! iirc that image was likely lifted from wikipedia's article on the sampling theorem. I adopted it as my sig in response to a heated debate on sample rates (remember when those were the kinds of topics we kicked around? More innocent times, I guess.) Once any subject has reduced down to subjective matters of opinion, it's hard to argue for or against any particular point of view. One guy loves distortion, the next guy goes out of his way to avoid it. There isn't a correct answer. It's easy to feel like there are no hard truths. But physics and mathematics are not subjective. Harold Nyquist figured out how many samples would be necessary to accurately transmit a specified frequency range, when he was working at Bell Labs. But smart as he was, he could not come up with a mathematical proof. That challenge was ultimately conquered many years later by a fellow by the name of Claude Shannon, arguably one of the smartest math dudes to ever make the rest of us feel hopelessly dumb. Claude was the guy who originated the idea of using binary numbers and Boolean logic in computers. So none of us would be doing what we do without those guys and their big brains. Confidently incorrect forum posts like this one (from Gearslutz) actually piss me off: Sure, it's silly to get angry because "somebody on the internet is wrong". But it's not fair to the novices who read nonsense like that and then perpetuate it. There's plenty of room for opinions in the digital music space, but real fundamental truths are at its foundation.

For the two years my dad was in a "memory care" facility, I'd go in and play piano for the residents during their evening meal. Great gig; free pudding and you can repeat numbers all you want. Interestingly, most of them reacted very positively, even those who would otherwise spend their days staring off into space. One lady had been a classical pianist, and I had a conversation with her about what it was like performing in the 1920s. Afterward, her caregiver told me she hadn't interacted with anyone in months. So I totally concur with your assertion that music appreciation lingers to the end, even after losing basic mental facilities such as recognizing your children or feeding yourself.

Yup, it's sure looking like something weird happening within the plugin. Still a puzzle why others haven't experienced the same thing, e.g. OutrageProductions saying he's used it "for years" with no problems. I don't have it myself, so am unable to test. At this point I'd be inclined to just substitute a different plate reverb and move on. The Rev-140 is a very good one but fortunately it's not unique and there are plenty of alternatives to choose from. Q: just for thoroughness, does it misbehave in the same way when used as a track insert rather than on a bus?

And you're certain it's just this plugin? If you bypass it and add a different reverb plugin the problem does not persist? If it does persist, what happens if you delete the Rev-140 and leave the alternate reverb in?

I agree that it's underhanded when a company slyly sells a product that's about to be discontinued or deprecated, but only if they're being deliberately deceptive. Even then, I've gotten some good deals that way. Sometimes, an unexpectedly good deal, e.g. finding out later that I qualified for a cheap upgrade because I already owned the retired product. For example, I bought Kontakt 2 a month before it was superseded by Kontakt 3 and was briefly miffed about it. But it turned out that I'd bought K2 at a discount that was nearly equal to the upgrade price to K3. Native Instruments was more customer oriented back then, I think.

Yeh, it sure beats golf for an old-guy hobby. Although I suppose both teach you patience. The youngest member of my band is about to turn 30. He rarely gets stressed over musical things, mainly because he's got the deserved confidence of a superb player. But he does stress out over his non-musical life, e.g. girlfriends, roommates, inconsiderate bosses, and of course, money. The rest of us are all over 50. We mostly only stress about which part of our bodies will fail next.

The flaw in that theory is that Jacques says it sounds normal up until he exports the project, after which it continues to exhibit lower output. If that's accurate, then I am stumped because the act of exporting should have no impact on a plugin's behavior that wouldn't also be heard in normal playback. The test project he's going to do will be illuminating. It'll be interesting if the behavior can be reproduced with a minimal project (one audio track, one bus with the plate on it, both routed to a common master bus and then to hardware outs). I'm guessing it won't, and that the issue lies within the specific project.

On the upside, dementia does allow you to enjoy your old record collection as if they were all new. Wouldn't you like to hear Dark Side of the Moon or In The Court of the Crimson King for the first time again?

What's the big deal? That software compressor is a model of a piece of hardware designed 70 years ago that hasn't had substantial revisions since. And the emulation is pretty good. It's not going to stop working. There was an update earlier this year to my longtime go-to FET-style compressor (PSP FetPressor). Cool, I thought. Maybe they're adding some modern features such as a dry/wet mix knob. Nope. The "update" was that they were making it dependent on Pace. Big Nope. I backrevved to the previous version. If they never update it again it won't bother me at all. It's great as-is.

I'm putting a lot of hope into that being true. My father, his mother, his sister and my mom's mom all died from Alzheimer's. Every time I forget where I left my keys, I panic a little.

Last night I met a fellow who's been playing piano for 32 years, with a penchant for honky-tonk. He's the bartender and owner of last night's venue. 32 years on the keys, but get this: he only took up the piano at age 60. I can only hope that I have as many intact brain cells at 92. Interesting guy. I suspect he has mob ties. Meeting him was the highlight of the evening. Lake City Way used to be a major highway into and out of Seattle. Nowadays it's one of those too-busy "stroads", a daily rush hour traffic jam and site of many accidents. Reminds me of Hayward, CA with a few more trees. But sandwiched between the chain retailers and car dealerships there sits an anachronistic anomaly that bills itself as "Seattle's Last Roadhouse". Built in 1932 and looking like it hasn't seen many major improvements since then, it's a local landmark. I've driven past it hundreds of times and never really given it a second thought beyond "you don't see places like that anymore". There's no readerboard, just a small hand-made sign out front that reads "Live Music Tonight". This place is unusual for several reasons. They're only open one day a week, from 7:30 till midnight. They don't serve food or mixed drinks, just beer and wine. It exists solely for live music. Guests pay $10 to get in. There's a large dance floor but most of the patrons sit and listen to the band, and applaud enthusiastically. As well as generously feed the tip jar. It was a treat. Looking forward to going back there. Owner John Spaccoratelli:

Software written for a specific operating system can take advantage of any and every feature that O/S offers. Windows has made great strides with low-(kernel)level audio support, much of it based on solicited input from expert users such as Noel. This is why WASAPI Exclusive Mode is a viable alternative to ASIO. Cakewalk's close association with Microsoft meant, for example, that classic Sonar was always immediately ready for each new version of Windows on Day 1. When you write cross-platform software, you have to take a much more generic approach and are often forced to make compromises in order to maintain a common code base. Optimization is harder. Testing is harder. You are going to have to hire experts in each of the supported operating systems. Development generally takes longer, so you're less able to turn around quick fixes and enhancements like we've become accustomed to.

That's a pretty good summation. This is pure speculation, but I can imagine Next far exceeding Sonar in the size of its user base and the two products having a similar relationship as Cubase is to Nuendo. It will be a long while before Next has a comparable breadth and depth of features to Sonar, but over the next couple years it'll cover more and more of the same bases. By then it will have become a viable alternative to Sonar for the majority of music creators who have no interest in becoming audio engineers, at a lower price point and gentler learning curve for new users.

Yeh, you just missed it. There have been many pleas, not for new plugins, but for the return of old favorites. Some that come to mind from recent posts (as recent as last month) are CA2A, Dimension Pro, Adaptive Limiter, Z3ta and LP-64. Most of us old-timers still have them, but the user base has expanded greatly since the demise of classic Sonar. Some of the old bundled plugins were licensed from third parties (e.g. PerfectSpace, Pantheon, Breverb). Couldn't sustain that with a free DAW. Some of the old favorites were made by now-defunct companies (e.g. VC-64), so they're out. However, Cakewalk actually owned the code for some of them, or they were developed in-house. Those are the ones most likely to return, now that Cakewalk's hiring. Cakewalk, I believe, outright owns the Sonitus suite (having bought Ultrafunc, its developer). It'd be nice to see those great plugins spiffed up with bigger UIs and a few bugs ironed out. Oddly, no one has asked for Guitar Rig LE. (C'mon, it wasn't that bad!) A legitimate argument can be made that nobody really needs those, given the cornucopia of free and cheap plugins out in the world today. But they were a good value for someone just getting started.

Logic and Reason have left the chat.

I'm not battling anyone, nor am I blindly defending my preferred DAW. Just basic troubleshooting while trying to avoid a classic causation vs. correlation logical fallacy. Let me explain my reasoning, and feel free to correct any logical errors I may make in the process. Let's start at the beginning, by looking at what a c0000005 error is, and how it comes to be raised. This particular error code represents an access violation, which means the software has attempted to write to an address location that it does not have permission to write to. Usually, this is the result of an uninitialized pointer, a variable that contains a memory address but that hasn't been given a value. Because all variables initially default to zero, the pointer is pointing at address 0. Although 0 is a valid memory address, it's in a part of memory that's reserved for the operating system kernel and cannot be written to by user applications. The O/S protects itself by refusing the operation and raising an error so that the offending application can deal with it. How does a pointer get initialized? That's up to the programmer who wrote the code. That's why it's safe to assume that a c0000005 error is a bug in the code that raised it, and ultimately human error. I apologize if you knew all that already, but it's important to understand how this error happens and why. The key concept is in your statement that "...This is not the only plugin that has generated a c0000005...". The salient point is that it was the plugin that attempted to write to protected memory, not the DAW. The error was raised by the plugin, not the DAW. Granted, the plugin may have been referencing an invalid pointer that the DAW supplied it with, that's not impossible. However, any pointers passed to the plugin (e.g. input and output buffers) would be the same pointers the host passes to all plugins. If they were invalid, the DAW would crash every time you attempted to use any VST plugin. From a software developer's perspective, it is always the module's responsibility to validate arguments, and to never assume that the caller guarantees they are valid. Usually, that means the plugin will refuse the invalid pointer and notify the host that the call has failed, in which case the host would be tasked with processing the error. When this is the case, it won't be the plugin that was identified as the offending module in the dump, but rather the DAW. But if the stack dump shows a plugin's DLL as the failing module, then that's where the problem originated.

Absolutely. Well, there's that one guy who's kind of a jerk. But the rest of them are A-OK.

I could send you a screenshot, but it would be the same resolution as my 2560x1080 monitor. I'm told it looks pretty good. OK, here ya go...snipped from the About Box.

Preach, brother. I remember when Waves gave away their products for free, then after five years started demanding money for them. Um, wait. I may be mis-remembering a few details. Cannabis: it's nature's preview of dementia.

That orange actually looks pretty good here, on a dark-themed browser, on an actual monitor. I don't know how you guys can do anything on a friggin' phone. I tried that a couple times while killing time in a doctor's waiting room. That lasted about 2 minutes before I looked around and found a two-year-old copy of Time magazine. Since then I take a book with me.

What is this "music store" you speak of? My music retailer is online, and their air conditioning consists of a desk fan.

I had a humorous interaction with my car dealership this morning. I wanted to schedule service because my A/C isn't working. However, they now insist that such appointments be made online. I'm no Luddite, so I went there and began entering my information. However, I got nowhere when it came to selecting a date and time, as there were no clickable links anywhere on the page. Then I noticed in the corner of the screen a generic stock photo of a smiling lady with the caption "Hello, I'm Scarlett. Is there anything I can help you with?". So I type into the chat window: I am having no luck scheduling a service appt. via the online scheduler. Can you do that for me? Scarlett then replies: Hi my name is Scarlett. It’s great to have you with us! After a long pause, "Scarlett" adds: Hey! To assist you in scheduling a service appointment, here is the link to our service scheduling tool: [link to the same page where I started] Is there anything else I can do for you? My reply: I am now confident that A.I. will not be taking over the world. Thank You. Scarlett: You’re welcome. It's been a pleasure serving you today. Thank you for visiting us. Have a great time! Yes, Scarlett, I did indeed have a great time. Unfortunately, the forecast is for "hot", and for tomorrow "hotter still", and I have no A/C in my car. But I am happy that I was able to give you pleasure. BTW, the reason I couldn't schedule an appointment is that there were no slots open through most of the summer. I'll have A/C by October.