bitflipper

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 Even though W1 has since been superseded in my own toolbox by fancier ($$) limiters, I think this still has a place on individual tracks due to its light weight.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?"

I have only the first two on Craig's list. Hmm, Craig's List. Good name for a website.

That's what I set my hot tub to when I really want to cook. Humans weren't actually meant to live in such heat. I see that Las Vegas broke their all-time record yesterday, 120°. If it gets hotter than that, they'll close the airport because airplanes with normal loads can't get enough lift at such temperatures. Reducing load capacity reduces profits below the threshold of profitability, so they just say "screw it" and go home. Last summer I actually got heatstroke at an afternoon gig. It was only in the 90's. But I thought I was gonna die. I shaved my head the following week. I have an upcoming outdoor gig next week. My band's singer gifted me a fan/mister unit that goes around the neck. It worked quite well during my initial test, during rehearsal inside my garage. We always practice with the doors and windows shut so as not to annoy my neighbors, so I'd guess the temperature was close to 100° in the garage, given that it was 93° outside. Don't know yet how long the battery lasts, but it's charged via USB so I could theoretically plug it into the back of my synthesizer.

And when the rain Beats against my windowpane I'll think of summer days again And dream of you

Oh, I did get it in my eyes. And was still an hour's drive away from the gig with no one along to take the wheel. There was a minimart nearby where I bought a spray can of sunburn treatment and bathed in it before continuing on down the mountainside. Oddly, I remain nostalgic for those days and don't remember them as the horrific mishaps they were.

They had ELEVEN albums? Here I considered myself a fan, but had no idea they had been so prolific.

I had a '73 Dodge Tradesman van in which I ran the heater all summer to keep the engine from overheating. It was especially bad going up mountain passes loaded with gear. Once I made the mistake of stopping at the summit of Snoqualmie Pass to top off the coolant, removed the cap and was rewarded with an Old Faithful of boiling water to the face. That night I kept red stage lights on me to disguise the burns. Ironically, that van's heater was largely ineffective in winter due to a broken flap on a fresh-air vent. That vent was located next to my foot, so on long winter drives I wore double wool socks. One memorable trip was a 16-hour drive through British Columbia in a driving snowstorm. My left shoe was covered in snow and my left foot had no sensation in it. Because that gig began on a Sunday rather than a more typical Monday start, we had to go directly to the venue and play. Such was the life of a touring musician in the 70's, when even an oil change was a major expense. And that was before the price of gas shot up to a dollar per gallon.

I think it's entertaining when the supporting act commandeers the whole show. Usually, it's because promoters ignorantly put together a bill without regard to whether the participating bands complemented one another or were even of comparable skill. Think Jimi Hendrix opening for the Monkees. I witnessed such an embarrassment c. 1971 in a concert that saw Free paired with Colosseum. That package began in Frankfurt, with Free billed as the headliner because they had a current hit single ("All Right Now"). We heard that in Frankfurt Free got booed off the stage with the crowd demanding Colosseum come back up. German audiences do not hold back, be it praise or disapproval. So when I saw them the following week in Munich, Free opened instead - to polite applause. Then Colosseum brought the house down with one of the most powerful displays of god-level musicianship I've ever seen. Free wasn't awful, it was just a bad pairing.

Lol, nothing is more frustrating to a software support person than conversations like this: "I got an error message" "What did it say?" "I don't remember" Error messages don't exist just to annoy users. They are supposed to convey information that will at a minimum identify the general type of error that occurred. Sure, such messages often mean nothing to the user. But they do mean something to the people who can help you.

Back in the day, Seattle's premier rock 'n roll venue wasn't a concert hall but an enormous beer hall called the Aquarius Tavern. On Wednesdays a pitcher of beer cost $1 and admission was also $1. Having a seating capacity of only 1,000, it didn't have the budget to compete with arenas, but they always managed to land the highest quality acts. Sometimes, that would be a national touring act that just needed to fill a week in their calendar. Sometimes, it'd be a local band on their way up in the world. Heart was one such favorite - the best cover bar band ever, and fearless. But sometimes, it'd be a major act on their way down. My most memorable experience there was seeing Badfinger. They were in decline at that point, hadn't had a hit in a while, and clearly felt they were slumming. Everybody in the band was extremely drunk. But they sounded amazing. Best-sounding drums I'd ever heard. Perfectly balanced vocal harmonies. It must have been one of their last performances because, sadly, Pete would be dead not long after.

I saw Grand Funk that same tour. It was a free concert in Hyde Park, the band's European debut. No one in the audience seemed to have any idea who they were, me included. But their performance was so tight and so energetic and their songs so instantly catchy that everybody was immediately on board. I was blown away when the amazing organist got up from the Hammond, strapped on a guitar, and played just as amazingly on that instrument. What I didn't know was that the band had already been very successful in America and had accrued lots of stage time to polish their set. They were primed and ready to storm Europe, and the Brits welcomed them enthusiastically. I never saw them in Germany, but I imagine they were a hit there, too. Germans love high-energy rock 'n roll and would applaud with their feet, in unison, which made me fear for the architectural integrity of the venue.