Kanthos

The soundcard won't make much of a difference unless you're using a MIDI keyboard or recording live, in which case a proper audio interface or higher-quality soundcard that supports ASIO will have a lower latency. Beyond that, it's the quality of your speakers/headphones more than the quality of your soundcard that make a difference.

You're playing the keyboard when the active pattern is one that has a VST/Soundfont/FL Studio plugin with some type of sound samples loaded, if necessary?

Tetris DS: Yes. Tetris games are always fun if you like fast-moving puzzle games, and having multiple modes of gameplay makes this one worth getting. Star Fox Command: No. The combat itself is pretty fun, although some levels are rediculous (i.e. the superweapon boss that you have to knock into the lava); the tactical side of it seems kind of tacked on. It's also a *horrible* game to play in a moving vehicle, as you can waste 30 minutes of playing by hitting a bump when you're trying to do a missile (you have to follow a missile and move quite precisely through a series of boxes; if you miss one before you destroy it, you fail; this is quite unforgiving). This wasn't strictly bad, but not worth the money I spent on it. Bomberman Land Touch: Yes. Quite a fun game; mini-games with a plot is a good idea, and going around to collect all kinds of things is fun. The only annoying thing about this is that a few minigames require you to blow into the mic; not bad, necessarily, but not something you want to do on the subway Plus you get classic bomberman play in multiplayer. I haven't seen any other minigame collections for the DS besides the stuff that they give you with Mario 64 and New Super Mario Bros, and this is way better.

Uninstall the latest one first, and there shouldn't be any problem, other than annoying warnings to upgrade. If you've purchased songs from the iTunes store, you might want to deauthorize your copy of iTunes before you uninstall. You have a limit of 5 authorizations you can make, although you can deauthorize whenever you like to keep the number of authorizations you use small. However, the authorization information is tied to the *registry*, not to the machine, so if you reinstall Windows, for example, without deauthorizing, you have an authorization you can never get back. I doubt you'd have this problem just uninstalling iTunes, but deauthorize first just to be safe.

If budget isn't an option, you might want to consider Battery; it'll give you some good options for rock kits, orchestral kits, world percussion, electronic kits, and pretty much everything you can think of.

Another option in FL Studio is to change the channel of individual notes, so you could play all the notes in on a single pattern (to make the initial input easier; I'd rather play and notate an entire phrase at once and deal with articulations later) and then select some of the notes and change their MIDI channel. A third option is to do something similar, but if you'd rather have different articulations on different channels, you can record the MIDI data on one pattern and duplicate the pattern, then erase all notes of articulation A from pattern B and all notes of articulation B from pattern A. Incidentally, this last method is what I recommend if you're recording a drum track and splitting the drums into one track per drum type, because it'll be easiest to erase unwanted notes from the channel when you can tell they're unwanted by their pitch instead of by their position and function in a phrase.

No problem. Sometimes it's the simple things that work Glad it's working properly now.

A 64-bit OS gives you no advantage for music production at this time. No one's writing 64-bit versions of VSTs and so on yet, and as far as I know, there's no other significant advantage of a 64-bit OS.

I didn't check other pages. After all, it is your site. I suspect though that you have the same problem (not following your p with a /p) all over the place, and it's only the fact that Firefox assumes the form is outside the paragraph and IE doesn't that it breaks on that page in Firefox.

Hmm...Are you expecting FL Studio to recognize audio input live by default (as in, you play it and FL Studio does something)? The only thing I can think of is that FL Studio isn't in record mode, so regardless of the audio input it's getting, it's not going to do anything with it. Other than that, I don't know what it could be.

Pfft, showoff Congrats!

Good luck finding that game, but if you get a copy, it's great. I second Etrian Odyssey and also suggest Planet Puzzle League and Clubhouse Games.

Well, depending on your patience and the kind of music you want to make, the computer you have now might be alright. How good is it? All I was trying to say is that you can get better performance on the same machine with XP, but if you can't use it for some reason, Vista will work.

It should work on Vista. However, why you want to be using Vista for music at this point is beyond me. Get a new laptop, replace Vista with XP 32-bit. Also: this lists Vista as one of the target OSes for FL Studio.

Here's your problem. You don't close your p tags. You have a p class="text" at the top of your page content, but you don't ever have a /p tag. Firefox is behaving as if there was a /p tag right before the Paypal thing (which, in the code, is really an HTML form), and IE isn't. The easiest way to fix it is to add another p class="text" after the paypal stuff; a better way is to also add /p's at the end of your paragraphs. The best way is to forget paragraphs altogether; change the p.text tag in your stylesheet to just .text, get rid of the p class="text" you have and replace it with span class="text" and a /span after your track listing. EDIT: Insert < and > tags where appropriate; I didn't want to put that entire thing in a [ CODE ] block and VBulletin won't show the HTML tags at all if I write them properly.

I'm assuming you're using FL Studio 6 or 7; I'm not familiar with anything older than those two. When you're looking at the MIDI setup page, there's a few tabs on the left in that window. One should be Audio or something like that. Double-check the settings there, but there probably shouldn't be anything you have to do in FL Studio to get it to accept audio (besides remembering to switch on record mode You should also make sure that your mic or line in channel, whichever you use, isn't muted. That'll show up in your Volume control in the Windows system tray. You might have to go into properties on the volume window and make sure mic or line in is checked off so they'll show on the main volume window, then make sure that neither is muted and that the levels are set high enough for the sound to be picked up.

You have a lot of good ideas for the individual themes. The problem is that this doesn't feel at all like a cohesive piece. It feels more like you made a bunch of different songs, cut out pieces of each, and pasted them together. To pull off a medley effectively, you need two things: good transitions from one piece to the next as opposed to finishing off one and going straight into the next, and some stylistic similarities from one piece to the next. The fact that you're using similar instruments or that it's the same person playing just isn't going to cut it. The other thing medleys don't really afford is the opportunity to really develop any of the themes; it's *very* hard to avoid a medley becoming little more than a MIDI rip. Some of your tracks do have a bit more in them than the originals, but not nearly enough to make it as an OCRemix, I'd guess. Two tiny musical things with what you have: On Wind Scene (the 600 AD song), the acoustic guitar melody sounds great except that you end the first phrase abruptly and use a few too many staccatos throughout the melody. It's a slow, mellow song and you're playing it in a slow, mellow style, so play it more legato. If you must use staccatos, remember that staccatos in slow music are different than in fast music. The other thing is the parallel octaves (notes an octave apart moving in the same direction) at the start of the victory theme, where the bass is doubling the guitar and there's no other notes. It sounds too sparse; if you want bass to have melody, harmonize a third up or down on guitar. From a production standpoint, your guitar and bass sounds are well done and sound realistic (I figure the guitar was recorded, not sure about the bass); the drums *really* need to sound close to the same level. A bit more punch to the snare and kick, a bit more sizzle on the cymbals, even try and do a few more fills and a bit less standard rock beats. Did you do much/any processing on the drums? You could also widen the overall panning a bit; it sounds a tad pushed towards the middle to me. I know there is some panning; the drums, for example, are spread out, but it feels to me like there's a little bit more of the sonic space that isn't used as much, without explicitly panning anything hard left or hard right. Just my thoughts, take them for what they're worth.

I picked up a copy of Planet Puzzle League last night. Much much better than Meteos. My wife has it today, since she's trying it out to see if she wants a copy too, but I'm quite impressed with it from the 45 minutes I was able to play for.

Mega Man ZX: Haven't finished it yet, but I agree that the weak points are extremely annoying, especially since I don't yet know how to determine a boss's weak point without looking it up or just guessing. It's fun, and for a mega man fan, it being the only "classic" mega man on the DS, it's enjoyable, but definitely not a must-have. Hopefully ZX Advent out this fall will be better. Sonic Rush: No, for the same reasons given. It's not bad, but I just enjoyed the classic sonic games, particularly sonic 2 and 3, a lot more. Those are must-haves, not this.

To expand on what Overcoat says, you have two options of how you can use the keyboard in conjunction with a PC. You can do both if you like, just not really at the same time. Sorry if this is too low-level; not trying to insult you here, just don't know what you know and it's easier to say everything than come back several times explaining things you didn't understand the first time. 1) You want to use the audio output from your keyboard and record it in FL Studio. You'll need some way of making a connection from the 1/4" output jack of your keyboard into your PC. One way to do this is get an 1/8" to 1/8" male to male cable (male meaning it has a pin, not a hole; for example, headphones have an 1/8" male connector and your iPod/CD player's headphone input is a 1/8" female connector). You'd also need a 1/8" female to 1/4" male adapter to stick on one end of the cable so you can connect to your keyboard. Then, attach the 1/4" end to your keyboard and 1/8" end to the line in on your soundcard on your PC. Note that you don't want to use the microphone input if you have both a mic and line in, as the two inputs will expect the sound to be at different levels. Then, make sure FL Studio is set up to use your sound card as an input and record on a pattern (not entirely sure how to do this; I switched from FL Studio to Cubase and never recorded audio in FL Studio while I used it). This should work, but the quality won't be all that good. A much better option is to get a proper audio interface which will both act as a sound card with a much lower latency than you'll get on any standard sound card, and provide several inputs for you to record audio on a 1/4" or XLR (microphone connection, usually 3 pin) connection, as well as MIDI, depending on the model. In that case, your setup will probably be 1/4" male to male from the keyboard into the audio interface, and whatever from the audio interface to your PC. USB is the common standard for this, but Firewire exists. Your PC likely has USB ports but may not have Firewire, so check this out before you buy an interface. If you go this route, ask around and some of us can recommend an interface that will do what you want. Latency is the time the sound card spends processing the audio data before it plays it back. For straight playback, this is irrelevant, but for recording (whether audio or MIDI) while playing back stuff you've already recorded, it's essential to have a really low latency. I can't work with anything under 10 ms (one hundredth of a second) personally, but this depends somewhat on your style of music and a lot on you; it's a very human factor. Anyway, a standard sound card is much more likely to have a higher latency, so if you don't want the notes you play on your keyboard to be output by your sound card after a significant delay, getting a good audio interface is essential. 2) You want to use your keyboard as a MIDI controller: you play notes and send MIDI data (which note you play, when you play it, how hard you press the key, etc, but no actual sound) to FL Studio. FL Studio uses some kind of VST or soundfont to interpret the MIDI data and generate audio, which may be sampled (your notes trigger pre-recorded data) or synthesized (audio is created based on your notes and other parameters set in software). If you want to do this, you need to run a MIDI cable from the MIDI out on your keyboard to the MIDI in on your PC. Don't have a MIDI in? You'll need a new sound card or audio interface that has a MIDI in connection. Once you have everything connected, open the MIDI panel on FL Studio (F11?) and make sure that it's recognizing your sound card or audio interface as a MIDI Input device. Then, take a pattern and use a VST or load the Fruity Soundfont Player or some other FL Studio plugin, make sure your VST/plugin/soundfont player has some sounds loaded if necessary, and start playing on the keyboard; you should hear audio generated by the plugin.

I saw this when looking at your site a while ago. Absolutely hilarious. Hope you got a good mark on it too

My wife has Bust-A-Move, and I prefer it with the stylus actually. No Wifi is a disappointment, but we play locally once in a while.

Still sitting on the fence between getting Planet Puzzle League and sticking with my wife's copy of Meteos (or getting my own so I don't have to put up with the Disney version. She only got it because it was a trade-in copy and was cheap). Drack, why do you like Meteos better? Bahamut, which do you recommend and why?

Ok, got some editing done last night. Please give me feedback/comments about anything and everything. Some notes: 1) All percussion and drums will change. I know the drum part is uniform all the way through; I did that just so I'd have some rhythmic thing to work off as I did the piano and bass. There will be three different drum patterns, all of which will be similar and won't use the off-beat 3/2 pattern I mentioned in the last post. I won't use the sixteenth-note hi-hat pattern that I currently have either. Stay tuned for better drums and percussion. 2) The synth lead will be replaced mainly with vibes played by DrumUltimA; the first solo (8 bars in E major before the keychange) will be sax, played by me. I'll also have some sax licks throughout, but want the melody recorded first. The version of Lulu's Theme played by the synth in the first 8 bars will be sax as well. Lastly, on the verse and chorus after the solos, the sax will be playing the melody behind the vibes on the verse and playing a harmony line with the vibes on the chorus. 3) The 4 bars of silence coming out of the solo (when changing keys from G back to E) will be filled in with a percussion break. 4) The rhythm when Lulu's theme is quoted at the end of the chorus is slightly off. I'll fix that tonight. Last night at 1 AM, I wasn't sure how I wanted to fix it, and this morning when I was less tired, I realized that all I needed to do was change the rhythm of the piano and bass part slightly to make it mesh well with the melody.

I had the same problem in FL Studio 6, but it stopped happening when I switched to FL Studio 7.