Kanthos

Have any film or game scores in particular that you could recommend, either because they've got a lot to learn from or because they're particularly epic? As much as I'd love to go out and buy everything any of those guys have put out, that's a bit much to do all at once on a small budget

I don't know Japanese in the least; does it actually say GBA there or is that just wishful thinking? (I mean, it should, in theory, handle GBA since the DS obviously could, but still...)

10 FPS may or may not be playable for TF2, but it'd certainly be playable for a turn-based strategy game.

There's a pretty cheap way to get 32-bit plugins working on a 64-bit architecture called jBridge (maybe $20? Can't remember for sure), but even it isn't guaranteed to work. For that matter, some plugins just don't play well with some hosts, so no matter what you do, you might have incompatibilities. Also, some 64-bit hosts have similar technology to jBridge integrated already; Sonar does, for one.

Lol, this is Civ, not Crysis. Also, stating whether you posted the minimum or recommended specs makes a difference: recommended generally means "To get the best experience, use at least this much". Most games are very playable with the minimum reqs, with the only real sacrifice being graphical quality. The minimum reqs: OS: Windows® XP SP3/ Windows® Vista SP2/ Windows® 7 Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 GHz or AMD Athlon X2 64 2.0 GHz Memory: 2GB RAM Graphics:256 MB ATI HD2600 XT or better, 256 MB nVidia 7900 GS or better, or Core i3 or better integrated graphics DirectX®: DirectX® version 9.0c Hard Drive: 8 GB Free Sound: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card

Thanks! No idea how I missed this thread until now.

RAM is still an issue; the 9.5 upgrade still will make use of RA but will do so for better performance, not for strictly having audio data in memory. Also, that has no bearing on VSTs and how those are loaded into memory, and unlike audio, VSTs can't be streamed from disk. So if you're hitting memory problems because of your VST-based sample library, no one can help you other than the makers of that particular plugin.

And using one instance and taking advantage of multiple outputs won't really save you that much memory in comparison to the size of the samples either.

Oops, I did indeed mean Mainstage.

They wouldn't necessarily be sample sets. Some decent synths can take up 50 MB or more of RAM; use 20 of those and they add up quickly. Decent sample sets tend to be larger anyway; my electric pianos are each around 50-100 MB. You'd avoid the VST because a) Just because you have it, doesn't mean you *should* use it (i.e. use what's best for the project, even if it's free or cheaper, and don't use everything just because) and Who wants to put tens of hours into a project and have a misbehaved plugin prevent the project from loading? I'd rather acknowledge that my host has issues with a particular plugin and leave it at that.

To organize stuff *across plugins*, yes. Each NI plugin in Komplete 7 has its own set of Kore Sounds. Within each plugin, there's a search mechanism to let you search by name, by attribute (search, for example, for a Bright, Warm Synth Lead), or both. Earlier versions of NI instruments used their own preset formats, but when Kore came out, they eventually reworked everything to use a standard format. Without Kore, you can start, say, FM8 and search for your bright, warm synth lead. Maybe you'll find one you want, maybe not. The catch is that you had to choose FM8, and that it might not suit your needs, and it can't include sounds from other plugins, obviously. Maybe on some project you came up with the perfect lead that was made up of patches from FM8 and Massive; that sound doesn't live anywhere other than in the project you used it in (unless your DAW/host has a way of capturing plugin presets across multiple channels and combining them as one). With Kore, you can search for those same attributes across all NI instruments plus any other plugins that you import presets for. The workflow, presumably, is that your projects will use Kore instances and within Kore, you'll find the sounds you want, and not have to care about which specific plugin it came from. I'd say that the Kore way of doing things is definitely worthwhile, but can also be more tedious and requires a fairly high initial investment if you use plugins besides what NI offers or if you have plugins in a format other than VST (pretty sure Kore only understands VSTs). Edit: Oh, there's no sampling involved either. Kore is just organizing the presets that your plugins come with, and when you load a Kore sound, it transparently loads the VST(s) needed to play back that preset.

The Kore Player is basically a VST with a small preset library and potential to expand it by buying Kore Soundpacks from NI. It's really not good for anything else, and has virtually no editing potential. If you're looking for a few more sounds and don't have other NI products, by all means download it. The Kore Controller that comes, optionally, with the full Kore 2 (there is a software-only version) is actually quite useful; NI released a patch almost a year ago that lets you configure it to be used as a generic MIDI interface, so you can use it outside of Kore if you like. And, of course, you can control virtually everything within Kore using it. One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet about Kore is that it can import presets from non-NI plugins, though there are some limitations. Kore will only go through banks of presets that the plugin has loaded (so if your plugin loads a bank of 128 presets at a time but has its own way to load other banks from disk, you import presets for a bank, load the next, import, load, etc.) This doesn't work if the plugin expects the host to provide the interface for loading presets - Kore doesn't do so, and when I asked NI support about it, I was told they had no plans to add that feature. So, it can sort of load presets from other plugins; your mileage will vary. And, of course, you'll have to tag those presets on your own if you want them to be searchable in Kore's database, which'll be tedious. I used Kore 2 for a while as the host for my live keyboard setup, and, honestly, it was pretty bad. I'd set it up so that I loaded single instances of a bunch of VSTs and was using Kore to filter, send program changes, and such. It had some issues with saving states correctly - I used 13 MIDI channels fed into Kontakt for an orchestra where I could use individual channels to let me customize which instruments I had playing, and Kore screwed that up in some of my live presets (live presets are different from the Kore Sounds that you'll make and that all NI plugins use for their preset format now; those are handled much better). The worst was when I made a minor tweak in rehearsal the first time I tried to use Kore live, tried to save my Kore performance, and had Kore crash and corrupt the savefile, making me have to redo it all in the 30 minutes between rehearsal and the performance. In short, don't use Kore as a standalone host for live use. There are better tools out there: Brainspawn Forte (I have a copy of it I'm trying to sell) and Cantabile for Windows, and I hear that Apple's Bandstand (part of Logic or Logic Pro or something) is quite good as well for Mac users. However, I do still use Kore in my live setup. I use Cantabile as my host and have two Kontakt instances and one Kore instance loaded. This time around, I make a Kore Sound for each song we do in Kore (using MIDI channels within the Kore Sound so that I can still use different sounds within a song), and let Cantabile handle the rest of the details. All I have to do in Kore is drag out all the sounds for the songs that we'll be playing on a given night and quickly set up performance presets by muting all but one of the sounds. This seems to work much better.

I'm in too, though it'll have to be next week or later; I have a major gig this weekend and just got the setlist today, so I'll be glued to my keyboard arranging the songs we're doing until Sunday.

I'd imagine he might want to get back, unless he's too heavily involved in other projects, but would the band want to kick out their replacement drummer to get Portnoy back in? Would he be willing to commit to the intense schedule that the rest of the band seems to want, even after a hiatus? Hard to say.

I'd bet Charlie Zeleny as well. He's done a lot with Jordan Rudess. Or maybe Rod Morgenstein.

The Yamaha is doing the right thing. As I just explained with notes, MIDI data isn't continuous, like audio. No MIDI controller does anything continuously with a sustain pedal either. The sequence of MIDI events you generate by pressing a note, sustaining, releasing the note, and playing it again looks something like this, and note that other than the near-instantaneous MIDI events, the controller isn't sending out anything else. I guarantee that the Note On and Note Off events are generated by the keys and are independent by any events generated by the pedals. A Note Off is a Note Off; your Yamaha is doing the right thing. Note On (Note = C4, Velocity = 64) Controller (Controller number = 64, which is sustain, value = 127) Note Off (Note = C4) Note On (Note = C4, Velocity = 127) There is no MIDI message to indicate that a note is still being pressed (technically, there's aftertouch, but it has no bearing on what you're doing here and your keyboard may not support it anyway, and I'm not going to confuse the issue by explaining it in detail). It is always up to whoever is receiving the MIDI data (EWQL here, with FL Studio recording it and routing the data to EWQL) to use the sustain pedal in whatever way is effective for that instrument. Some synths need not respond to sustain! If so, it wouldn't be right to have the controller triggering a second note before ending the first one, as a synth like that would have *no way* to deal with that musically. But what it is doing is when I hold the sustain pedel and consistently hit the same note, in the piano roll, it stops, then starts the note again.

Depends. How many cases of piracy would actually cost them money? In other words, how often does someone say "I really like this game, and I'd go to the store and buy it except I'll pirate it instead" as opposed to "I'd never spend money on this game, but as a free download, I'll play it anyway"? Every piracy does not automatically equate to a lost sale.

Uh, isn't that how it's supposed to behave? I'm not aware of any keyboard or VST that would let you trigger the same note with the same sound twice at different velocities, sustain or otherwise. If you're a pianist playing a real piano, for example, how can you make the instrument behave that, say, Middle C is sustained and then hit another Middle C and hear both notes at different volumes? It's not possible on a physical instrument, and I really doubt it's possible here too; any remotely good MIDI device or VST would cut off the first note when the second identical note plays. I'm certain that it behaved that way for you before your formatting and you're just remembering it wrong.

Studies done by whom? Anything done by the RIAA or any other interested party is inherently biased and should be dismissed out of hand (as should anything done by, say The Pirate Bay). Also, the stats you don't mention are more important than the one you do. What category/categories defines the other 75% of people? Are you trying to say that 75% of people never pay for music anymore? That 75% of people either get music illegally/for free or don't acquire music through any means? It's not very clear from what you've posted. Also, I'm not suggesting for a moment that illegal activities are good, but the music industry does comparatively little for artists and is using the legality of downloads as a smokescreen to cover up for the fact that it hasn't kept pace with increasing demands for services by the artists and more favourable deals for the artists. In any industry, if you don't provide a good product, you go under. The music industry is large enough and entrenched enough to have survived thus far, but unless it drastically adapts to today's landscape, it WILL fall. Downloads will not bring it down; they just hasten its destruction. My issue with DRM, copy protection, limits on how many times I can install software, restrictions through firmware or otherwise on what I can do with hardware I have purchased is this: it assumes I am a criminal. I am penalized for wanting or needing to install my software multiple times on my own machine, if I reformat or buy a new computer, formatting the old one in the process. I'm penalized for wanting to move my music between devices that I own, without ever handing the audio files over to someone else. I don't appreciate being screwed by companies because I *might* do something wrong. And the argument that it cuts down on piracy is garbage; how often are copy protection systems hacked?

I don't believe it was; it's not in the official soundtrack anyway. I also just checked the MP3 files included with the game itself (both Morrowind and Oblivion leave their in-game music on disk in MP3 format). The audio is included as part of a .bik movie, so if you have the right codec or a player for that, you could extract it yourself that way.

Yes, many thanks to Brad, who is awesome! I won't bother going over everything in detail right now, knowing that Brad's going to purge it, soon and start fresh, but here's a craigslist post of mine with a number of items I'm selling at the moment. The post has more details for what formats things are in, and so on, and has links to product websites and such. The only difference from the post would be payment. I'll take a cheque from an OCR member (though you'd obviously have to mail it to me first), and for anything that has physical media, I'd obviously have to ship it to you. I'll ship for free unless otherwise mentioned. Ableton Live Suite 8, Boxed Version: $600 MOTU Micro Express MIDI Hub: $75 (plus shipping; if you want it, I'll ask the post office for an estimate to ship to your area) Native Instruments Pro-53: $100 Zebra 2: $125 Sonic Projects OP-X: $75 Lennar Digital Sylenth1: $100 TruePianos: $90 Arturia Prophet V: $125 Applied Acoustics' Ultra Analog VA-1: $100 Applied Acoustics' Lounge Lizard: $100 Brainspawn Forte: $50 I'm willing to negotiate a bit on prices, so if you're interested in something, PM me and we'll talk.

It wasn't a verb anyway *have*

I used to have an Axiom 61 and loved it. As far as a MIDI controller goes, I've never seen a keyboard with better action. It wasn't the absolute easiest thing to program, but if you're using it mainly for arranging and mixing instead of live performance where you might want various knobs to do different things at different times, it does the job really well. Not familiar though with the Axiom Pro differences though, so I don't know if it's worth the extra money.

Congrats and have fun with it!

Hi Brad, Please remove all of these; they're all under For Sale, :::computer/music electronic stuff::: Line6 PodXT with FX Junkie expansion pack: $200 + s/h [kanthos] WayOutWare timewARP 2600 (installable multiple times on one computer): $40 [kanthos] Edirol UA-25 Audio Interface: $150 (inc. shipping) [Kanthos] Voucher for one of Guitar Rig 4, FM8, Massive, Absynth 5: $125 [Kanthos]