Kanthos

I'd suggest getting some of the other gear and playing around significantly in the demo versions first, or if you can bribe some of your local OCRemix friends into giving you some time on their rigs, try that. Try recording things, playing on a keyboard if you get one right away, and making music point-and-click style. Everyone has their own preference depending on how they look at music and what background they already have, and it's worth the time to figure out which one suits you best.

True, it does depend on the machine. I've had it installed on two different machines though (I used to have a desktop which died, so I bought my laptop) and had no issues. I wasn't talking about deactivating the account here, just pulling all my *other* synths from the account, leaving it with only EWQLSO, and giving someone the account, changing my personal information. At any rate, I'm not looking to screw someone over, and if they are unable to register, I'll be happy to give a refund.

It seems ok, and is a good reproduction of the original ARP 2600. I chose this version over the Arturia one since the Arturia version wouldn't run on my machine. I didn't mention it above, but my reason for selling is that it's not really friendly for a live situation. I want to have all the presets I like loaded and switchable by MIDI PC events, and the TimewARP doesn't handle that well. They have a demo on their site though; by all means try it. You're much more of a synth expert than I am; I was mainly interested in it as a way of recreating some classic Weather Report sounds.

I have, but my intention was to give the buyer my NI account (obviously with all other software, which is all NI and can be transferred, removed from the account), so it would still be usable.

I'm pretty sure they are; I never remember having to specify a PC or Mac for any of the NI products I bought. I'll confirm that for you when I get home tonight. Worst case is you could probably download the latest Kontakt installer from NI's site to get the plugin and install the library manually by copying the CD contents and then telling Kontakt where the files are.

Bump again, as I've dropped the prices a bit.

Ok, you guys win. My PSP is unmodded right now, so I obviously haven't tried anything on a memory stick.

Monitors are speakers that attempt to have as flat a response curve as possible, unlike consumer speakers who, through poor construction, small size, and/or a conscious decision by the manufacturer, color the sound. When you're mixing, you have to remember that not everyone will listen on your gear, and with proper monitors and enough skill, you can make your mix more balanced and tailor the sound the way you want it. Think of it this way: say you want a fairly loud (compared to the rest of the mix) bass part in your song. If you mix on speakers (not monitors) that add too much bass, you'll end up with less bass than you'd like, since you're mixing to your speakers, so someone with speakers that don't over-emphasize the bass will hear less bass than you heard. On the other hand, say you mix on speakers that under-emphasize the bass. Someone with speakers that emphasize the bass will find it much too loud. Mixing on good monitors or a good pair of headphones with as flat a response as possible will let you come up with the perfect balance, so the effects of a given listener's speakers or headphones will be lessened. Also, I agree with Fishy's comments on reason. I've never used it, but when I first picked a DAW (I started on FL and when it didn't work quite the way I wanted it to, I gave it to my brother and switched to Cubase), I ignored Reason simply because it won't load VST plugins and I didn't see the point in having a tool that wasn't compatible with the most common plugin format. Yes, you can host Reason inside another DAW to do that, but it shouldn't be that difficult, and doing so uses up more CPU and RAM.

Happy birthday!

Yay being late. Happy birthday and thanks for the suggestion you PMed me. Keep judging and being generally awesome, and eat your cheerios!

Bump to mention that I'm dropping the reserve period. Buy it and I'll get it to you as soon as I can call NI to remove the license from my account. I'm also going to have these up on craigslist as soon as possible.

Ok, if you're singing, an SM-58 is definitely the way to go. Unless you have access to a good piano and know enough about recording to really make it work well, you'll probably use a software plugin to render your piano sounds, and you could probably plug your guitar in and record directly. There are some good guitar effects plugin packages that are cheap or free too if you want to go that route. You'll probably want the following: Mic - SM-58 Audio Interface - Something with both mic and guitar inputs. Firewire if you have it on your machine; USB will work fine too. I use an Edirol UA-25 that I got relatively cheaply on eBay and I'm happy with it. Software - You're not a good pianist yet, from the sounds of it, so while you should definitely work on those skills, you'll want to be able to enter and edit notes by hand. FL Studio is generally the best DAW to do that. Other plugins - Depends what you want, really, and how much you want to spend. I'm selling a bunch right now and have a thread on that, or you can get free stuff, both synths and soundfonts. Depending on your styles, you'll probably want some orchestral stuff, piano, drums and percussion, bass, or a synth or two. Name some specific needs here and we can recommend some things in particular. Keyboard - If you have the cash and think you'll eventually use most of the features, even if you won't now, I highly recommend the M-Audio Axiom 61. I've had mine for a couple years, and it's great. I don't use most of the knobs and buttons myself, but I do like the capabilities and as a pianist, found the touch to be a reasonable compromise between a real piano and a keyboard. This is something you could put off for a while though, until you've progressed a bit as a pianist. There's no real reason to buy everything at once, and there's nothing wrong with adding to your studio later.

Not in this case. It's really intended to be used for live performance as opposed to processing MIDI data on a large number of MIDI channels at once. The device is monotimbral (with the "exception" to that being that I can run upper and lower organ manuals with different drawbar settings). Playing back MIDI data on one channel (two if you count the second organ) is one thing, but I'd be forced to freeze tracks if I wanted it to play back multiple sounds at the same time. For the average synth, I wouldn't like that, but given that this isn't really a synth (it's got a great B3 emulation and has samples of other classic keyboards and grand pianos plus effects), it's not that surprising. Most people who buy it would go for one of the keyboard versions; in my case, I'm hoping to save money and keep using the perfectly good controllers that I already have. I'm using Kore as a DAW, since I mainly play live, but I know Cubase could do this kind of thing as well for when I wanted to record the MIDI and use the Electro rack to play it back. If I'm playing with all my own gear, that routing should be possible; both my controllers work via USB. I'd have to use one of the keyboard's MIDI out ports for my PodXT (guitar effects box; the only MIDI I send to it is a program change message, so I really don't care much about efficiency here), and run the rack off my audio interface's MIDI ports. When I play at church, they have a keyboard there already that I use as a controller. Since it doesn't have USB, I've been running it through the one keyboard I'll bring with me (which does have USB). Adding a rack to the mix would force the keyboard with USB to act as a two-way hub, which I take it you both are suggesting is best avoided by getting a USB-powered MIDI interface.

I'm considering buying the rack version of this. The keyboard versions allow a dual-manual mode for the organ using an external MIDI keyboard, with the Electro acting as the upper manual and the external device acting as the lower manual. With the keyboard version, input from the upper manual is generated from the keyboard itself. With the rack version, however, there's no keyboard, so MIDI data for both organ manuals would have to come from external sources and go through the single MIDI input. What could I do to get input to the rack on two MIDI channels from two devices? Using my laptop for synths also adds another wrinkle. What I suspect I could do is this: Keyboard 1 is connected to the laptop via USB. Keyboard 2's MIDI out is connected to keyboard 1's MIDI in (so keyboard 1 receives data from both the laptop and keyboard 2 and sends data both from itself and keyboard 2 to the laptop). Keyboard 1's MIDI out is connected to the rack's MIDI in If I do this, the rack should (if I understand everything correctly) be getting data from the laptop (program changes generated through Native Instruments Kore), keyboard 2 (via keyboard 1), and keyboard 1. Can any MIDI gurus (analoq, maybe?) let me know if I understand everything correctly or if there's something I haven't accounted for?

Fair enough. The point of my post wasn't to say that the PSP version was or wasn't as fast as the PS1, but to point out that the comments about slowdown may be misleading. What I said makes sense. Taking it a bit further, I suspect that it might not even be an issue of sloppy coding, but is possibly due to the fact that the PS1 can, in theory, keep the CD constantly spinning in the drive since it has a continuous power supply, but the PSP tends to stop the CD spinning when it's not needed. Judging by the sounds when loading an animation, this sounds like it's what's happening: the lag is due to the time required to get the UMD spinning from a completely stopped state. Of course, turning off the spin is necessary on a handheld or else the battery life will be worse.

I haven't played the original so I don't have much to compare with, but I'm on chapter 3 of War of the Lions, and it seems to me that the only time you'd see slowdown was the *first* time you used an attack in a given battle. It seems like there's an initial load time to read the information for the animation from the UMD, but once that's done for a given battle, the skill can be used without any slowdown. Seems to me that it's a tradeoff between long initial load times going into a battle and some slowdown during a battle. I haven't found it to be more than a slight annoyance.

Any recommendations will be somewhat irrelevant until we know the following: 1) Do you play any instruments? Which ones? In particular, since you mention a MIDI keyboard, how good a pianist are you? 2) How much do you want to spend? 3) What genre(s) of music do you want to make? 4) What instruments, whether real or virtual, can you see yourself using? 5) What software, if any, do you already have?

My blog is set up exactly the way you want. I use domainsvision.com as a host ($3.95/month if you buy a year at a time), and domainsatcost.ca to register the domain name for something like $12 CDN/yr.

Haha, awesome! I'd laugh if your first big OurStage win was with this.

Congratulations to both of you! As a present, have the code for the OCR Membership Cards! which I may have PMed you about months ago

I own a number of Native Instruments products that I've purchased over the last few years. I want to upgrade to Komplete 5, mainly to get Kontakt 3 and the Pro-53. I qualify for upgrade pricing since I own Kore 2, but NI can't make a better deal given the products I own, so what I'd like to do is sell these products to make the Komplete 5 upgrade more affordable. We just had to buy new appliances, so I don't have money to buy the upgrade at its full price, but if I can sell enough of my current software, it's worth it. EDIT: Everything is now available immediately. If you want it, it's yours. Payment is by PayPal only, and I'll ship items within a business day after receiving payment. There may be some delay with getting the licenses transferred, since I'll have to call Native Instruments in order to do this, but NI has assured me that there's no problem in doing so. Here's my for-sale list with details; I can be flexible on prices, so send me a PM if you're interested. Prices include shipping costs world-wide, other than the FCB1010, which has its own pricing details below. Elektrik Piano: $100 Comes with manual and original media in original cases. Arturia Prophet V: $125 Comes with USB key (needed to run the software), manual and media. Nothing wrong with this; I just don't need two Prophet 5 synths, and Komplete comes with the Pro-53. WayOutWare TimewARP 2600: $125 Comes with media.

I'm selling the following products. See details below. EDIT: No longer going with a reserve. You want it, it's yours right away. Elektrik Piano: $100 Prophet V: $125 TimewARP 2600: $125

Nice clarification. I guess my remix of the King's Quest VI music that the skeletons play in the underworld where I was planning on making a marimba from human bones is out then? And yes, I know that bones aren't organs.

Also, not only should the campus computer store be able to offer discounts but a lot of other retailers can as well, and many software companies offer educational versions that are identical to the normal version in all but price, and for many, the only requirement is that you be a post-secondary student. I saved a few hundred dollars when I bought Cubase 4 just before graduating from my masters in computer science (obviously, no relation to music whatsoever), and most of my software was bought at educational prices.

To add to that, do not buy *any* popular software for the laptop before she starts college. The college computer store will probably be able to offer the titles at an academic discount, and the savings can be pretty big.