Kanthos

B and F. I would mainly want to code, but I wouldn't want to be totally isolated from the design either, just told what to do. Really, unless you're coding to a strict specification, a programmer *is* a designer, and not just from a software architectural perspective.

I'd argue that makes them a bad instructor (at least as it relates to preparedness). Not having a schedule with either a list of materials (i.e. "For this assignment, you'll be using pastels", and the student can obviously read between the lines and figure out how much to get) or a specific list of things to buy tells me that the prof didn't put enough thought into the course ahead of time but expects me to do so in order to avoid deadlines (start assignments well before they're due, etc.)

If you can't afford to be in school, including all the extras, and can't/won't get a loan, there may be problems with government funding and available scholarship money, but other than that, you shouldn't be there if you can't pay, which means paying for all the extras. A prudent school would roll all that into tuition, so that supplies and software would be covered, within reason (i.e. "You get these art supplies which should be enough; if you want/need more, you're on your own"). That said, I only knew one competent university administrative type out of the many I dealt with over 7 years of school. While I still maintain that if you can't afford it, you shouldn't be there, it *is* a problem to expect that students have no cash flow issues and can easily spend $200 within two days and without warning. If profs had a course outline that clearly spelled out your expected expenses over the term, or, like I suggested, somehow charged you up front for supplies, that's one thing, but hitting people with unexpected charges is only a sign of a poor prof (or at least one who lives comfortably enough to be completely out of touch with the finances of the average student).

Stands but has no substance. Having the best and greatest tools isn't even necessary for learning, IMO, with Photoshop being, perhaps, the only exception because nothing else is really in its league. I learned to program in DOS on a crappy 486-25 MHz and later a 66 MHz in the days when Pentiums were hitting a few hundred MHz. I picked up some assembly language skills and learned a lot about optimization that I wouldn't have learned on a faster machine. Not having the latest tools was no problem. For arguments about Photoshop, Finale/Sibelius, and other such tools being required for education but also expensive...so? Isn't that the cost of being in your chosen program? I wouldn't expect to be a science student without either having to pay lab fees for some courses or having those rolled into my tuition. I wouldn't expect to be an electrical or computer engineer and get handed free circuit boards and resistors all the time. I'd expect that if I'm a computer science student, I'll either need my own computer to a greater extent than most others would, or be prepared to spend my time in the lab (if that's even possible). It's *my* responsibility to determine the costs of my program before I enroll; if I can't meet them, I should get a loan and/or spend less money on less important things like state-of-the-art cell phones, iPods, gaming PCs, video games, alcohol, eating out all the time, etc. Not to mention that software is very often available at academic prices, if not from your school directly than from other retailers. I'm not morally entitled to rip off software developers simply because I meet the (likely low) admission criteria to get into school. It all comes back to those who pirate not have the moral character to recognize that what they're doing is wrong (or, at least, to care), and the overwhelming sense of entitlement that is far too prevalent in today's society. If by explaining, you mean making laughable attempts to justify illegal behaviour without morals or logic, then yes, yes you are (you in a general sense; you're obviously not the only person here taking your position). Not to mention that there are free or cheap ways to keep labs constantly open, such as putting a security pad on the door and changing the code every term, or having a network admin competent enough to only allow specific users to log into the computers in a lab.

Fair enough; what if they weren't sold with such a stipulation? I'd argue I'd be well within my rights to sell or share them, and too bad for the original manufacturers. Getting back to games, I have no objection to not being able to trade a PC game because of the high potential for making a copy (although, for that matter, I could do just that with PSP games), but I'd argue that the right of first sale trumps anything else at this point, and if game manufacturers lose out, so be it. Like any other industry, it should be that in order to have a successful product, it should either be quality or low in price. The fact that too many games are neither is a big reason why so many games get traded in. I personally will gladly hang onto a game that I've enjoyed and will play it again, but if you put out something that doesn't interest me and has no replay value to me, I'm not going to keep it with the misguided ideal that I'm somehow supporting a company - if their product isn't good, I don't *want* to support them.

It is in every location I've been to in Canada over the past 4 years (6-8 locations in a 2-hour radius). Maybe it's different in the US or even outside of Ontario, I don't know. With digital distribution, you might have a point because that starts to cross the line into there being nothing physical (although, I'd argue, the license key counts in that regard). As for movies though, you're buying the right to sit in a specified theatre at a specified time to see a specified movie. Once that time is over, having the physical ticket is meaningless. Before (or even during) that time, what's wrong with selling your ticket to a willing buyer (scalper issues aside?) The theatre doesn't even really care whether you sit in the seat and watch the movie or not as long as you've bought the ticket.

To be fair, I tend to buy games new if possible, mainly because I either buy PC games and can't get them used or because I tend not to play DS and PSP games that are as mainstream, and are thus harder to get if they're not bought within the few months after release.

Oh, that's definitely part of it (though I'd broaden it to say that many people are cheapskates and don't want to buy something they can't return or trade in unless they know it will be quality). The difference between buying a used game and pirating a game is that there's the exchange of something (game media, or, at least, a license key if the game is freely downloadable but requires a key to play) for money. If I trade a game, I'm relinquishing ownership over that registration key or the game media to someone else, meaning that no one else can use that media (I have it in my possession) or that registration code (it's tied to my account). (Obviously, things can break down a little bit when dealing with registration codes; I'm assuming something like Native Instruments' model here, where I need the code added to my account in order for the product to be registered. If I want to sell the product, I must have the code removed from my account so it can be added to theirs; no key can be added to multiple accounts). To put it another way, could EB Games complain that I have a few games for sale listed here and on craigslist? Because if I wasn't trying to trade/sell independently, I'd be taking the game to them to sell used, so EBGames is losing money. Again, very different from piracy because however I sell my game, I am relinquishing the rights to use it and relinquishing the physical media or registration code. As to copies of a game floating around between a group of friends, number of people who use it is irrelevant. I could buy a car and loan it to my circle of friends whenever they liked, or I could buy it and keep it for myself and drive it into the ground, or I could sell it used. In all cases, the manufacturer doesn't see a cent past the initial purchase. I'd argue that (most) people don't beat the need for entertainment either. Our generation is one that grew up as gamers and will likely continue that most of our lives, finances permitting. So if I beat Final Fantasy and sell it to a friend, I now don't have that game to play and am going to play something else. Also, how would renting help the developer more? If I rent, the money goes to Blockbuster, not to the developer. Blockbuster has paid for the game once, just as someone has paid for the game once in order for it to end up on the used shelf at EB Games. The developer doesn't see a cent of the rental money. Native Jovian: about license keys, EB Games used to have a policy where they wouldn't take any game that required you to "consume" a license key in order to play it (or even in order to play part of it; I couldn't trade in Warcraft III because, although the registration code wasn't tied to anything since I never played online, the assumption had to be made that I'd used it and so someone else purchasing the game would not have the key, and thus would not get full value out of the package). Their policy now is not to take PC games at all, perhaps because of piracy concerns (buy game, rip game, return game, give to friends, torrent).

I fully agree with analoq's statement about a lack of morals and a sense of entitlement. Trying as a demo is one thing, although, IMO, I believe any reputable software company should release quality demos, and as for demos of a new CD, those aren't hard to find legally (and by demo of a CD, I mean clips of each song). But the "I wouldn't buy it anyway" argument is just stupid. If you aren't willing to pay for it, you shouldn't have it. You *are not* entitled to it simply by virtue of having a computer connected to the Internet. Plus the "I wouldn't buy it" argument is very self-serving: there's a chance you might change your mind and buy it if you didn't already have it pirated (the chance that you'll pay for it anyway *after* you've pirated it is very different). The company is well within their rights to ask whatever price they want for the software. You as a consumer are well within your rights to refuse to pay their asking price and not purchase the software. You may not feel the app is fairly priced; the company who made it probably has priced it fairly, given the research and development that went into producing it. The money you would spend on this, were you to buy it, would help them either improve their software or create other software. Is it too expensive for you? Definitely. Welcome to capitalism, where those with money are able to afford more expensive things. Companies shouldn't limit the selling of used games, IMO, and I won't buy from those who do. I can sell my car to a friend if I like, and Honda won't see an extra cent from the transaction. The problem with the games market is that there's a flood of a crap. There are too many games out there that don't have good replay value or are just plain bad. If it wasn't for the used market, consumers would be much more picky about what they bought, driving initial sales down anyway. Used sales are the price developers pay for releasing buggy games, incomplete games, games that are unoriginal, games that are much too easy for the target market, and games that provide no incentive for someone to replay them. Yes, there are new copies of games that get sent back. If game X is released to a store that has 100 copies initially, sells 50, gets 25 back as used and sells them again, the message to the game company should be that 50 out of 100 people at the store liked the game enough to keep it (25 initial, 25 who bought used). It's then either a mistake of the store for ordering 100 copies or of the publisher for thinking that they could sell 100 copies. For that matter, I even had zircon send me a small set of the samples from Battery (portions of two kits) just because my media was defective. I have the license (obviously; I couldn't run Battery past the initial demo period without it being authorized); I just couldn't install everything and Native Instruments only makes the programs, not the samples, available for download on their website.

If you've got all kinds of other crap loaded, no. It could be a large soundfont too. Audio work on your computer is best done with as little loaded into memory as possible; some people have a separate Windows user just for audio that doesn't load anything beyond necessary drivers.

You seriously haven't posted that link here yet? I was sure you had. I give it out at least once a week on one of the keyboard forums I frequent.

Fair enough (did I say I'm not an FL user anymore?). My way will work too, but if you want to stay with FL long-term, the layer method generalizes with any plugins you like, while using layers inside a plugin is obviously plugin-specific.

And I stand by my statement. You said you wanted to do drums *live* in your last post (something you didn't mention previously), and you'll notice I said live playing was a good reason for using multiple simultaneous keyboards, where you want to trigger anything at once. I was trying to really get down to what you needed this for, since a lot of people tend to ask a question about why using X to do Y doesn't work the way they expect, when really using X is not a good way to do it. If you were trying to *record* music at home and do drums and something else at the same time, playing with two keyboards might be *fun* but would not be the *best* way to do it. As for splitting, you can do that, but you'll have to do that inside a plugin (i.e. have a plugin that can play multiple simultaneous sounds, and that can map different key ranges to different sounds). Ideally this plugin would also have multiple outputs so you could add different effects to each sound. Incidentally, using key ranges is also a way that you could use both keyboards. Obviously, FL Studio will limit you to one plugin at a time, but you could assign your lower keyboard to a different range from your upper keyboard.

Wow, that's pretty poor design. Still, like I said, other than live playing or dual-manual organ (incidentally, using MIDI channels properly, you *could* do this in FL Studio with, say, Native Instruments B4-II), I can't think of any good reason why you'd *need* to play two keyboards at once, and I'm curious to know why you want to.

Well, you did say soundfont instrument; if you meant a VST plugin, using the correct name would help you get the right answers Now, you're making it sound like you want to use one VST to produce multiple sounds, which *is* possible if the VST was designed for that, and FL Studio will do that for plugins with multiple outputs. Again, I may be wrong, but you're misusing some terms in some places so it's hard to figure out what you're asking when you don't even seem to be sure. I have to ask, why do you need to play two keyboards at once? I can only think of two possible reasons to ever want to do this: you're using your laptop for live performance and need/want to trigger multiple sounds at once, or you're trying to play dual-manual organ (clearly not the case since you're using your feet for one keyboard; out of curiosity, why? Other than simple triggers or an organ pedalboard with MIDI, using your feet seems a bit gimmicky). You do know that you can record one part at a time, right? As for FL Studio being limiting, I think you're jumping to conclusions. A lot of people here do a lot of good things with it, and have even made money by selling albums written entirely using FL Studio. Also, what you're trying to do isn't hard, in general, but it isn't straightforward if you're a complete beginner or have an aversion to reading the manual. I could be wrong, but when I hear you saying FL Studio is limiting, what that says to me is, "FL Studio doesn't do exactly what I want right out of the box, and it has a learning curve; I should try something easier". If this is true, I guarantee you that you'll find *every* DAW to be "limiting", and you might want to consider doing something else with your time than making music with your computer. There will be a learning curve and it will take work!

I don't know FL Studio well (been a couple years since I've used it), but there are two options. You either need to get one of your MIDI keyboards to transmit on a different MIDI channel (and, of course, make sure that the other instance of the Fruity Soundfont Player is expecting to receive on that channel), or you might be able to have the Fruity Soundfont Player (or its track in FL Studio) receive MIDI from a specific keyboard only. If the latter, you'd set one instance of the Fruity Soundfont Player to receive from one keyboard and the other instance to receive from the keyboard. Reading between the lines a bit though, it seems like you're expecting to have one instance of the soundfont player controlled by two different keyboards playing two different sounds. I'm not sure if that's possible, although I admittedly don't know for sure. Taking a quick look at the SoundFont Player page on FL Studio's website though, it really doesn't look like the thing supports multiple outputs or playing multiple sounds at once.

You'll have to describe your setup a bit more. Which keyboards, and what is connected to what? Are the keyboards making the audio themselves or are you using them as MIDI controllers? Are you trying to have one keyboard produce two sounds, each controlled by a different keyboard? You haven't said enough for anyone to really be able to help you.

To everyone saying "go with what you like": that's a given. I've liked the little bit of Reaper that I've done so far; I like Cubase. (Incidentally, I don't like FL Studio's workflow). Choosing between Reaper and Cubase wouldn't be "I'm choosing the one that's so much better in every way", and obviously, if I didn't like the workflow in one, I wouldn't choose it. I'm looking more for things that Reaper does that other software doesn't do as well or doesn't do at all. The only motivation to do so now would be that Cubase 5 has already been announced (and may be in stores already, I don't know), so the longer I wait, the less I could realistically get for selling Cubase 4.

I thought you were in upstate NY, not the UK.

Happy birthday!

I'm mainly a MIDI guy. My workflow is to play in all the parts live instead of pointing and clicking and to do necessary MIDI editing, so I'm not as tied to the piano roll as some might be. Although depending on the instrumentation, I will have some audio as well when I record sound from my keyboards before mixing. Performance is a big plus: my laptop isn't bad but isn't top-of-the-line and upgrading it will be a non-option for many years. The two things I've disliked about Cubase are that it's felt a bit bloated and could perform better and that I had issues reloading projects if a project contained a plugin that had to load a lot of samples - loading a Kontakt multi, for example, could cause Cubase to crash when loading with no apparent workaround. I've lost a couple projects that way, and the workaround for new projects (save the multi with the project and explicitly load it every time), seems silly. Other than that, I'm not really pushing limits with what I do in a DAW, at least, not yet. Definitely need to play more with it though. Any other thoughts?

I've heard a lot of good things about Reaper lately, with some endorsements being pretty significant: zircon has been checking it out (given zircon's FL Studio skills, this seems significant), and sixto said in his guitar thread that if he hadn't already paid for Cubase SX, he'd get Reaper. I currently have the academic version of Cubase 4, and while I'm generally happy with it, I'm considering selling it and switching to Reaper just because I'll end up with some extra money that way that I could put towards something like an audio interface with more inputs. I've played around a bit with Reaper, and will of course do more of that, but I'd like to hear people's opinions. What features, other than cost, make Reaper a good or better choice than other DAWs today?

Well, just mentioning piracy since you will need a license to see the official video tutorials and the number of people who come through here with obviously pirated software is significant. Keep this in mind though as you look for tutorials: you don't really need to be looking at how to remix a song. Instead, you just want to find out how to make music with FL Studio. The only real difference between remixing (in the OCRemix sense, at least) and making your own music is that in the latter case, you're creating all the musical ideas yourself. Other than that, it comes down to figuring out some or all of the following: How to record live instruments How to get sound from software instruments and plugins How to add effects What effects, instruments, plugins, etc. to use

The reason you won't find such a tutorial here is because it's pointless. What you're really asking for is a "How do I make music in FL Studio" tutorial. This is a site on remixing; any general tutorials here should be specific to remixing and not to a particular DAW. What if I wanted to use Cubase, Sonar, Live, etc, and you gave me a mixing tutorial that was completely specific to FL? It'd be almost useless to me, and would make it a lot harder for me to focus on the parts specific to my problem (how to remix). This is what I'd do as a complete beginner. Start with this. It'll give you an overview of the process you'll want to go through, but won't give you any specifics on how to use FL (and it shouldn't). What you should do whenever you see a term that you don't understand in that tutorial is immediately google it (this is what you should do when you see a term anywhere that you don't understand, IMO). Having done so, you'll understand the concept and will need to figure out how to apply it in FL. Well, there are a couple ways to learn FL - online help, buying the FL Studio Bible, through the FL Studio video tutorials (you aren't pirating FL, are you?), or through, once again, google. You'll probably find people here are glad to answer a specific question you might have (moreso if you've already tried to find the answer yourself and can tell us what you've done already), but we probably won't be motivated to give you a full tutorial on how to use a piece of software when such things are available online in other places already. It'd be a waste of my time to type that out. Good luck!

Download the torrents and listen to everything in order. Don't miss out on great music because you don't know the game it came from.