bitflipper

Right here in Seattle, at the Snoqualmie Casino. It's their first North American tour and this was their next-to-last stop. I will definitely look them up next time I'm in the islands. I'm guessing the price of admission will be considerably lower over there. Well, if you don't count airfare. They've been invited to play the Cavern Club next year. They're best known for their Beatles covers.

...that was so good they made me question why I even bother trying. But it's too late for me to take up a different avocation, so this morning I'm trying to come to grips with my own inadequacies, to remind myself it's important to do what you love - even if you suck at it. The band enjoys an effect that I call the "Carpenters Effect", a smooth vocal blend that can usually only be achieved between close relatives. Think Lennon Sisters or the Bee Gees, and of course the Carpenter siblings. They are five brothers and cousins with broad vocal ranges and impressively good pitch. Good enough to emulate double-tracked studio vocals. When all five sang harmony it was transcendent. This is the band. And yes, they pulled this off live last night. And it wasn't even their best tune. That would have been The Beatles' Don't Bring Me Down in 5-part harmony.

Mostly true, yes. I'd even extend that window to 5 years, and in some cases 10. The prudent consumer does, however, have to beware of old products that just never were very good from the start and are now being discounted in a last-ditch attempt to squeeze a few bucks out of them. I've been suckered into buying some products that once had a lot of buzz, that were previously too expensive to have actually tried them, and that turned out to be crap.

That's certainly not a problem, then. Well, you gotta knock down the possible explanations one at a time. It may seem like you've made no progress, but you have: at this point you do know that it's a hardware problem.

This has nothing to do with your problem.

I let Windows turn off my screen, too. A habit going back to burn-in concerns on CRTs. I do have the timer set to a long time (2 hours, I think) to avoid the annoyance of having it go black when I'm just looking at it. So no, I don't think blanking the display would have any effect. What you're seeing is overhead from changing some setting, e.g. a disk drive spinning back up after a power-saving shutdown (probably not your problem, given it's an SSD). Thinking about it further, it seems the DPC has to be in response to the BIOS doing something and alerting Windows of the change. One of those would be throttling the CPU clock speed to save power (aka SpeedStep). This feature can be turned off in the BIOS. Note that your BIOS may call it something else, e.g. "Cool 'n Quiet" (AMD). Although Cakewalk does recommend disabling SpeedStep, it should normally not be a problem and it isn't the kind of thing that happens continuously. It normally wouldn't be triggering many interrupts like you're seeing - unless your computer has a heat problem. It might be worthwhile to check how hot your CPU is running. There are several free tools for taking your CPU's temperature. I use CoreTemp. What's a good temperature? A rule of thumb is < 80 degrees C, but some CPUs routinely run hotter. Some are fine running up 100 degrees C.

I've seen complaints about ACPI.sys having excessive DPC latency before. Usually on laptops, usually having something to do with power settings. You might try some different power schemes, just to see if it makes any difference. Make sure that sleep mode is completely disabled. I've always used the "High Performance" power preset, which, iirc, disables sleep mode. Also go into the Advanced power settings, expand the USB Settings category and verify that USB suspend is disabled (assuming your interface is connected via USB). ACPI does more than just power management, though. (Well, technically ACPI doesn't do anything on its own, as it's a driver that interfaces with your BIOS. The idea is that ACPI.sys lets you change certain BIOS settings directly from Windows that in the old days would have required booting into the BIOS.) It might be worth booting into the BIOS and poking around in there. It may allow you to disable ACPI.

And I have a choice to make on where to take my vacay, Fiji or the Bahamas. Rich peoples' problems, am I right? My kneejerk reaction is that once you've distressed the hell out of it, any remaining nuance from microphone choice would be minor. So go with the D112. Why? Because you can't hurt it. Even if The Hulk is smashing the drums. But then who am I to say? I use samples. And Toontrax used mics that cost more than my first house.

Given your specs, two VSTis should be well within your system's capabilities. I routinely work projects with literally dozens of VIs, and my system is less powerful than yours. Your issue may be external to the DAW. While it's processing audio data, the CPU is also busy with background tasks that compete for attention. If some other process is excessively chewing through CPU cycles it'll be almost pointless to optimize the DAW. One category of potential CPU hogs is overhead from interrupts. A tool exists for getting DPC stats (Deferred Procedure Calls, meaning the software that runs in response to an interrupt), which can help pinpoint the culprit(s). Hop over to respendence.com and download their free LatencyMon tool.

I spend a lot of time bending MIDI notes, typically with faux basses and guitars. It's a hassle. I usually end up drawing in the pitch wheel events by hand, moving them as needed and zooming in to PRV to make sure it returns to zero just in time for the next note. It really only works reliably when the synth's bend range has been set to the interval you want. That assures that when the pitch wheel hits its maximum value, the oscillator will land on the target note. Great if your bass line is in a polka, going from root to 5 and back. Unfortunately that's not my kind of bass line. Fortunately the pitch wheel to oscillator relationship is (normally) linear, so if the synth's max bend is 12 semitones, the halfway mark is 6 semitones, and you can calculate the precise value to hit it. This is what Fluid Pitch is doing.

This sounded like such a great idea when it came along that I bought it immediately ($30, iirc). And never used it. Two years later, they had a sale ($30, I think). Forgetting that I'd previously purchased it, I bought it again. That was two years ago. Still haven't used it. Decided just now to give it a go, out of respect for the 60 bucks I've given them. Now, if only I could get it to work. Inserted it as a synth, because that's what the scanner says it is, but only the MIDI part. Made sure MIDI Out was enabled. Inserted an instance of Zebra2, just the audio part. Set its input to Fluid Pitch output. MIDI notes come through to the synth, but wheel events are not constrained as expected. It would have been quicker to just define the pitch bend range in the synth, even automate it if necessary, so at this point I'm not convinced Fluid Pitch is worth the effort. Unless, of course, you're doing microtonal music, which seems to have been the inspiration for the effect, seeing as it's from an Indian developer. Still sounds like a great idea, though.

Unfortunately, the dump file may not contain any information that'll be useful to the Cakewalk support people. A dump is just a raw snapshot of what was happening at the time of the crash/hang. It will identify which module was in play, but little else without a symbol map to correlate addresses to parts of the code being executed. Said symbols are only going to be available to the developers of the plugin, not to third parties such as DAW vendors. This why when a plugin fails you usually have to contact the original developers for help. There have been cases in the past where the issue wasn't technically a bug in the plugin, but rather in the way it interacted with the host. There have been cases in the past where Noel & Co. were able to code a workaround that avoided the problem. But these are exceptions to the norm. Usually, only the original coders can address the problem. Somebody can correct me if they know otherwise, but it seems Sonic Timeworks is defunct. Which is a longwinded way of saying you're probably out of luck. I know, it can be aggravating to have to let go of a favorite plugin. I was unhappy when Kjaerhus abruptly vaporized. iirc, that developer had also created at least one of the Sonar plugins that had to die as well. It's a fact of life that specialty software companies generally do not enjoy long lives. Cakewalk's own longevity is an anomaly, and even its doors were shuttered for awhile.

For me, it's usually my own cognitive resources that run out before the computer's. For example... Let's say you edit a vocal, reckon it's done and commit. Like the confident badass you are. Then, three days later something just sounds "off" and close examination reveals that you'd accidentally adjusted a blob that didn't need adjusting, because you've committed the ultimate pitch-editing sin: making a choice based on the picture without closely listening before and after. Now you have to re-edit the clip and re-commit, something I am loathe to do. Melodyne's good and its artifacts are subtle - but it's not perfect, and artifacts compound with each re-scan and bounce. It's at this point that you're glad you only have to re-do a 1-second phrase and not an entire vocal take.

You'll have the best experience editing smaller clips individually and bouncing them back to audio as each one's finished.

To aid your google searches, the classic term for drawbar settings are "registrations". Try searching on "Hammond registrations", or "Hammond registration {specific song}". A few that people seem to always ask about...Whiter Shade of Pale: 88860000; Booker T and the MGs (e.g. Green Onions): 88880000; Santana (e.g. Evil Ways): 88860088; Keith Emerson, Vanilla Fudge, Steve Winwood: 88888888 Don't forget to fiddle with the vibrato/chorus settings. The majority of classic rock songs don't use percussion, with a few notable exceptions, e.g. Green Eyed Lady.

Could you be logged in under a different Windows user name?

Yeh, it does sound surprisingly good. I might actually use this. Odd it doesn't include a volume control. That's going to make it difficult to integrate into a kit. No, the $20 Pro version doesn't have one, either. All the parameters are automatable, though, so you could make it simulate different cymbals on the fly.

I get most of mine from Sweetwater, but only because I am lazy and a creature of habit. They're expensive - my local music store is cheaper - but the quality is good. Never had one fail. But those prices at Seismic Audio are good enough that I could afford to buy spares, making it seem like a safe gamble. At the moment I have two critical cables in my gig bag that have no backups (25' TRS to XLR, keyboard to QSC K10.2s), so I'm thinking I might pick up a couple spares since they're only $17 each. Thanks for the tip!

Bzzzt! Wrong. The correct answer is "Why Don't We Do It In the Road".

I was doing great up until the half-second samples. I was surprised that I got any of those. l was hoping for some easier clues, like the opening chord to Hard Day's Night. But no, he had to throw in Julia. Well, at least he didn't include "Run Like a Shadow".

You won't regret it. I initially thought the Fiddle was just a one-off novelty. It isn't! To my surprise, it's proven useful in genres beyond bluegrass, including classical orchestration where you'd layer a solo violin over a violin ensemble for melodic definition. Loved Merry Maggie, btw. The Fiddle would fit right into that one.

OK, Beatles experts, you think you're so smart - try this one:

Sadly, 30 years ago you either couldn't afford the stuff you have today, or it didn't exist yet. 40 years ago I desperately wanted an Oberheim 8-voice, but it cost as much as a new car. Today a faithful recreation of that instrument sits on my hard drive and cost me, iirc, less than 50 bucks. Back then I was gigging with an electronic piano (Roland EP-30) that only kinda sorta sounded vaguely like a piano. Today I have dozens of pianos on tap, including multiple Steinways and Yamahas, both on disk and in hardware synths. There's never been a better time to be a music-maker than now.