Kanthos

I'm not an FL user, sorry; I can only answer questions from the keyboard side of things.

Darn it, I looked up the manual and MIDI guide, but not at the data list. What do you mean by "sending no data"? Nothing from FL Studio seems to be received by the keyboard?

Yes, you're doing it wrong. Bank change messages are two separate controller messages. I looked at the MIDI implementation manual for your keyboard for you, and it's not entirely clear. It seems like you only need to send a CC #0 OR a CC #32 to the keyboard (with the value being the bank number you want to switch to) and it should respond. There's an easy way to double-check that though. Download a program called MIDI-Ox. One of the things it does is monitor and print out all incoming MIDI messages. Set it up so that it's monitoring input from your keyboard. Then, change banks manually on your keyboard. Most likely, the keyboard will send the bank and program change messages through to your computer, which will also tell you what bank change to send *to* the keyboard.

Do you have a manual for the keyboard? I'd bet that you need to send a specific bank change message to the keyboard, and that a generic program change without a bank change is interpreted as changing into the GM bank, probably done on purpose to make MIDI files play back with the correct (though admittedly not the best quality) instruments.

The "Pay What You want" event only lasts until the end of October. They really want you to determine what's reasonable, but I'd base that off what they normally charge for an upgrade. They don't show it online at the moment because of the deal, but I'm pretty sure that when they'd posted it earlier, the upgrade price for owners of any Reason + Record combo was $99 US.

Game development shops often work in terms of CPU budgets: percentages of time that the CPU of the game system spends doing various tasks. We're well past the point where anyone cares about the CPU load involved in playing a piece of music (the only exception I can think of being music that's part of the scene and needs sound treatment to affect its perceived placement and so on, for example, the radio that's sitting on a table in Portal 2; as you move around the room, that should get quieter. The audio being played would have to go through the audio pipeline to get the right perceived placement, so that would be slower). Basically, once we hit the point where pre-recorded music could be played back, without relying on the sound chips on your computer or console, all limits on music were gone, and all of that is completely independent of graphics processing, plotlines, content, etc. How good the music is depends on the skill of the composing team, and, for the biggest of big-budget triple A titles, whether there are funds to record an orchestra.

I'm going to agree with ambinate, and also point out that many of the opinions you're going to get here have an inherent nostalgia bias. Zerothemaster mentioned the Mega Man series. His comments could be strictly about the changes in scoring style leading to a lack of melody (does 'forgettable' mean 'bad' or 'harder to remember because of the lack of melody? Both? To what degree?). Or, they could be due to the fact that he may have played the earlier Mega Man games first, as a kid, and have fonder memories of them, and the music, because of the games themselves.

I haven't played all that much, though I did get through some of the recent M:TG single-player games on Steam. I don't know if I'd do it every time, but I'm interested.

There are PDF manuals for EWQL that are installed along with the program.

One that's better quality, has more articulations, ensemble patches for the winds, etc.

Some neat stuff here. A few of the tracks reminded me of Secret of Mana, not melodically, necessarily, but in the choice of sounds and the way they were used. Fun mix of synthesized and other sounds too.

I've read the book, and while I still haven't done much to make use of it, the majority of the book is filled with ideas to make virtual orchestration sound as realistic as possible, including chapters on how to mix the orchestra, how to set up a template, and so on. I'd recommend it; it's a nice alternative to starting from scratch with no knowledge and figuring everything out yourself. Don't expect it to be a guide to composing and arranging for an orchestra though; there are better sources for that kind of thing.

Wow, I didn't realize I still had anything on here. Please remove the following (all under :::computer/music electronic stuff:: Sylenth1: $125, which includes a €30 (about $40 US) license transfer fee that I'll cover Native Instruments Pro-53: $100 [kanthos] (2/11) Applied Acoustics' Ultra Analog VA-1: $100 [kanthos] (2/11) Applied Acoustics' Lounge Lizard: $100 [kanthos] (2/11) And please add: :::computer/music electronic stuff::: Native Instruments Alicia's Keys: $60, inc. shipping [kanthos] (9/11) Native Instruments Scarbee Vintage Keys: $90, inc. shipping [kanthos] Details: I have the original case for Alicia's Keys; I do not for Scarbee Vintage Keys. Each is shipped on a single DVD. You'll need Kontakt or the free Kontakt Player to use them. If you want them both, I'll take $130 for them. If you don't know what they are: Alicia's Keys; Scarbee Vintage Keys

Edit -> Add Track, according to google. That's the kind of thing that could be solved in a couple minutes by looking at the help or manual, or even opening up each menu and reading them. I don't know how many Magix users there are here (probably not so many), so you might be better off looking at the documentation or googling in the future, especially for basic stuff like this.

I don't know about version 14, but a quick google search says that version 17 has 64 tracks. Time to upgrade?

What do you mean by batchable?

Because the core product and effects are aimed mainly at guitarists?

Guitar Rig is becoming a general-purpose effects rack with all the extra stuff; it doesn't have to be used for guitar effects.

Sell FM8 too, it's also in Komplete 8. What does Cubase have to do with FM8?

Someone doesn't know how to use a search engine, do they? Also, doesn't Absynth have comb filters, and isn't it usable as an effects plugin as well as an instrument?

All but one game that I own for the PSP now is digital-only. This is a simple problem to solve: tie the games to an account so that the account-holder can redownload the games whenever they please (just like the PSP store does now), and don't allow anyone to change their password without re-entering the old password first, so that if someone steals your Vita, they can't lock you out of your account unless they also know your password.

For reverb, you'll have more control by applying reverb to each individual instrument or, more likely for strings, for each individual section. That might take too much CPU, especially if you're using convolution reverbs, so a reverb bus would do the job. If you're trying to sound like an orchestra, panning each instrument appropriately is probably more important than individual reverbs anyway.

What genres of music do you hope to create? If you mainly want to make orchestral music, I'd probably go with CCC. Komplete 8 offers very little that will be good quality, though I prefer winds from the Kontakt library (they're adapted from the Vienna Symphonic Library special edition suite, I think) over EWQL Symphonic Orchestra's winds. Basically though, both Kontakt's stock orchestral sounds and EWQLSO are general libraries; EWQLSO is probably better overall, but you might be better off spreading your money around to get, for example, LA Scoring Strings or Symphobia and some VSL Special Edition winds and Project SAM Orchestral Brass. Then again, you'll need a full version of Kontakt for some of those. The other thing to consider is that for other third-party libraries, you may need a full version of Kontakt; it's not *that* much more to just get Komplete. If you're set on doing only orchestral, I'd rethink getting either package, but if you want a general set of instruments, I'd go with Komplete, and maybe spring for Alicia's Keys. Both suites have their tradeoffs, but Komplete is easily the winner if you want decent synth sounds, especially if you have no other synths. In the CCC, everything is sampled. I'd also rate Komplete higher for their B3 and electric piano sounds; I'm still on Komplete 6 and I liked the Scarbee Vintage Keys package enough to buy it separately and use it in my live keyboard rig. Plus, the Vintage Organ package is sampled, but covers the full range of B3 drawbar positions (plus a few other vintage organ types and variations); it's a worthy successor to NI's old B4-II instrument. One last consideration is how good a computer you have. Kontakt has always been regarded as the better sampler, and while I haven't paid attention to how well EastWest's PLAY 3 engine has been performing (it was released within the last couple months as a free upgrade to anyone using any PLAY instruments), PLAY 2 was generally regarded as having much worse performance. Even if PLAY 3 provides a slight advantage, even to Kontakt 5 which will be released at the end of September along with Komplete 8, I'd be shocked if NI didn't regain their edge quickly. Plus, no one other than EWQL is making sample libraries on the PLAY engine.

Ah, I followed a different link to the video directly, which didn't mention either name. Still sucks that it's "Sam and his violinist friend" though.

Fabulous track, but I have two questions. 1) Who was the violinist? and 2) Why didn't IGN give credit to the artists anywhere obvious?