bitflipper

Late at night I slip into bed, put on my best headphones and pick something at random. Often, it is my own stuff, sometimes going back more than 20 years. And quite often, I am pleasantly surprised that it's better than I'd remembered. Sometimes I hear a little detail and think "ooh, I should do that more often", or "I gotta find out what library that effect came from and use it again". Sure, occasionally my reaction will be "what the hell was I thinking?". But reviewing your past work is a great way to get better at it. At the end of the day, the path to music-making satisfaction is tailoring it to an audience of one: yourself. If you like it, it's good.

Yes. The one I so carefully baby and transport in a custom case that cost more than my previous mixer. That one.

Wish I'd taken a photo of last week's stage. It was outdoors, in the Cascade foothills. When I looked up their website there was a photo of what appeared to be a nice, covered stage. But when we got there it wasn't nearly big enough for the five of us, so I set up in front of the stage, on uneven grass. Now, here's my stand: It's called a spider stand and looks like it might not be stable on an uneven surface. Surprisingly, it is. German engineering. But every time I set those heavy keyboards on it I wish it was 4x4s rather than spider legs holding it all up. Because the stage was so small, we had to place monitors off to the sides, on sticks raised up to about 7'. A gust of wind rocked a canopy next to them, which pushed a monitor over. Luckily, its momentum was somewhat slowed by crashing into my mixer on the way down, before settling atop both keyboards. Even with my heart temporarily stopped , I couldn't help mentally totaling up the replacement costs while watching it all in slow motion. Incredibly, there was no serious damage. I still don't quite know how. That's a 35lb speaker falling 7 feet onto my little Yamaha DM3, then on to the Kronos and finally the Montage. The mixer wasn't even dented. I remain a fan of Yamaha mixers! Both keyboards were askew but didn't fall. So good job K&M. I will stop saying your products are overpriced. Apologies to Notes for straying off-topic. In my defense, I am still traumatized by this near-tragedy and who better to commiserate with than all of you guys?

I snapped that photo between sound check and going onstage, so it was more likely our soundcheck that forced that lady to retreat into her phone. At least she didn't get up and leave, so there's that.

Hey, Craig, your psychedelic animation video got used again last night:

Cheese, man, don't share that result with her! If she finds out you can actually hear just fine, she's gonna start formulating hypotheses to explain why you're unresponsive when she's offering helpful self-improvement advice. In none of those hypotheses do you come out looking better.

That is in fact a fact. I have to make a conscious effort to go easy on the 2-5KHz band, because even though it makes everything crisp and bright to my old ears, I remind myself that most people won't hear it the same way I do. But the FoH guy tonight is at least 40 years younger than me. His ears shouldn't be shot yet. Then again the first time I met him I asked how he felt about the PA (because it seemed oversized for the room) his response was "oh, it gets plenty loud!". Priorities, I guess.

I'm playing a venue tonight where I'm convinced there really is a SUCK knob on the console. It's an expensive PA in a permanent installation with a dedicated FoH operator, so it should sound a lot better than it does. But it seriously sucks, with a seemingly-intentional 5KHz spike that feels like an icepick to the ears. We only play there because they pay well, we get free food, and it's over at 9:00 PM.

The easiest and most reliable solution is to add volume automation to the MIDI track, even if it's just a single data point at the start of the song. That way, you'll always know where the volume is going to start out regardless of other factors. It's easy to edit in the PRV if your initial choice turns out to be too low/high. When adding a Kontakt instrument, my standard procedure is to open the Instrument Settings and set the cc7 range to 0dB or +6dB, and to bump up the DFD buffer size. The latter has nothing to do with volume, but both are steps that I end up doing so often that now I just set them up from the get-go.

I didn't know if it was day or night

Once upon a time this was my go-to limiter. Good to see it's still being maintained. Even though W1 has since been superseded in my own toolbox by fancier ($$) limiters, I think this still has a place on individual tracks due to its light weight. Although if somebody's just starting out and making do with freebies, then this will also work just fine on the master bus and is a lot simpler to use than, say, Limiter No. 6.

Lol, that's the attitude! Help keep the industry afloat.

Why? Is that the premise of a current show on Netflix? I'd like to see that. Of course, any fictional treatment will get it all wrong...the key to initiate the malware will be a physical thing that spies shoot each other over and one heroic CIA agent will destroy just as an LED countdown timer has 1 second remaining. While sweating over whether to cut the red or black wire - finally impressing his hot female boss who had to have him retired after a bad psych eval.

Y2K was a gift to coders around the world. I, with a partner, worked for three years completely rewriting the property tax system for a local county. Three years of 80+ hour weeks - at 90 bucks an hour for each of us. Shaking that kind of money out of a county budget was only possible due to popular culture overhyping the coming apocalypse. Remember a TV show called "Millennium"? Its whole premise was airplanes falling out of the sky and elevators dropping at midnight. Of course, software devs already knew about the problem and had actually been working on it since the 80's. But I was careful not to seem too flippant about it, lest I inadvertently dispel their fears. That fear made my mortgage payments for three years. Unfortunately, because we all survived Y2K, nobody's taking very real existential threats seriously now. WW3 won't start with a surprise nuke attack. It will begin with a massive power outage.

Clever! Same applies to devices that read magstripes, like the ones on the backs of credit cards. I used to have a keyboard with a built-in magstripe reader. We used it at trade shows to log the badges of visitors to our booth. I wrote the software for that, so naturally I first sat down with the reader to see what's written on the backside of credit cards, hotel room keys and employee time cards. Made me realize how insecure programmable hotel room keys are, since they can be easily duplicated. Ever have your hotel room key not work, requiring a visit to the front desk to have it reprogrammed? You'd probably stood too close to a magnetic field, such as a transformer. Or had a souvenir fridge magnet in your pocket next to the room key. Or you were a mischievous tech geek who likes to experiment.

I'd suggest installing the VST2 version for simplicity. When I installed the VST3 version, it scanned OK, showed up in the vst inventory in the registry, and was listed in the Cakewalk Plugin Manager as enabled. However, it would not show up in the Insert Synth menu until I subsequently also installed the VST2 version, after which both versions were listed. I haven't installed a VST3 instrument in awhile, so I don't know if this is a Sonar issue or not. When copying the presets for the VST3 version, the actual path is %userprofile%\Documents\VST3 Presets\gunnar ekornaas\MinimogueVA. You will need to create the "gunnar ekornaas" and "MinimogueVA" folders before copying the files. If this is your first VST3 instrument, you'll probably have to also create the "VST3 Presets" folder.

Yes. It now runs as a service - that most user are probably unaware exists. Still an improvement.

Dave Plummer posted an update this morning, with a thought-provoking comparison to the Tylenol-poisoning incident that I'm sure most of us here are old enough to remember. At the time, I believed the Tylenol brand was dead for good. Who would buy a product that had a history of killing people? Clearly, I was wrong. Crowdstrike will take a temporary hit in the stock market, but it will not die. Expect a major redesign of their flagship product, however.

And that is why I have no Pace-protected plugins on my machine.

Yeh, I know that if it's under around 270 I'll need a jacket.

This is why, despite being a longtime proponent of base-10 measurement conventions, I still prefer Fahrenheit over Celsius when it comes to temperature. 0 to 100 in Fahrenheit covers the majority of daily human experience. 0 to 100 in Celsius covers a span from a typical winter day in northern latitudes to boiling water.

The scariest part of this whole episode is how much worse it could have been had the problem been introduced by malicious disruptors, rather than a simple mistake that was diagnosed and fixed within 90 minutes (although it'll still be days before the fix will have been applied to all the affected computers). Imagine if this had been a targeted attack on, say, the electrical grid. Or worse, on DAWs (insert iLok joke here).

btw, there is quite a lot of misinformation out on the interwebs about this incident, written by people who wouldn't actually understand it if it was explained to them. Or worse, by people with an axe to grind against Microsoft. (Sorry, Linux and Apple fans, but this vulnerability exists in those ecosystems as well.) Here are two explanations from reliable sources. The first is by Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft engineer who knows Windows literally from the inside out. The other is a bit more geeky but still explained in simplified terms anyone can follow. [EDIT] Craig beat me to this while I was typing...

Here's an article from the always-reliable Tom's Hardware site: https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/windows-31-saves-the-day-during-crowdstrike-outage

IMO the two biggest lessons learned from this incident aren't being talked about. First of all, third-party applications should not run in ring 0 (the kernel). Traditionally, Microsoft didn't allow it. Windows, like all modern operating systems, is designed specifically to prevent this kind of tragedy from even being possible. But the EU forced them to make access to the kernel accessible to third parties. Politicians are not knowledgeable enough to be making decrees regarding tech stuff they don't understand. A crucial piece of the Falcon software is implemented as a pseudo-driver, which gives it Ring 0 permission, and it was flagged as a must-load-on-boot component. Windows treats it as a trusted hardware driver. These types of files (.sys) normally undergo extensive testing before Microsoft will allow them, but CrowdStrike figured out a way around that annoying formality by having the MS-approved .sys file read and execute code from an external script, giving them unfettered kernel access for anything they wanted. It was a corrupt script that led to the null pointer. A frickin' text file. It wasn't a bug in the traditional sense, but a bad design that wouldn't have revealed itself during testing. All enabled by a government ruling. Second, this is what happens when any piece of critical software becomes ubiquitous - it becomes a potential single point of failure for large numbers of systems. We've seen several recent incidents where malware rode on the back of legitimate low-level software that was forcibly installed. I can think of at least two such incidents that also involved security tools, just this year. Remember the SolarWinds incident from a few years back? It was similar in many ways to last week's CrowdStrike situation. As a footnote, I had to smile when I read that while every other airline was paralyzed by the CrowdStrike incident, Southwest Airlines was unaffected. The reason: they're still using Windows 95 and Windows 3.1. Remember that when somebody accuses you of not keeping up with the times. Especially when their rationale is "don't you think about security?"