Kanthos

The Kronos was only announced in January 2011, so I'm betting you were playing a different Korg model. The action on their lower-end keyboards (TR was the little brother of the Triton, M50 was the lower-end M3, and now Krome is the lower-end Kronos) have always been pretty meh, but the M3 and Kronos, even the semi-weighted versions, feel a lot better. I've currently got a Roland V-Combo VR-700 (crap keyboard, but I like the semi-weighted feel and the B3 section with drawbars) and a Korg M3 Module with a memory upgrade and the EXB-Radias (the Radias synth on a card that fits into the M3 module, so you can get synth voices in your combis).

If you're going to upgrade, why not a Korg Kronos? My preference is for Korg over Yamaha and Roland, but bias aside, it's a keyboard that's far ahead of the Motif or Fantom. While the Motif and Fantom (and earlier Korgs, except the OASYS) only play back samples, the Kronos has six or seven synths built in plus a drawbar organ engine (eg it's not sampled and you can set the drawbars, percussion, and everything else that's on a B3, exactly the way you want), plus some really high-quality sampled pianos and EPs. Think of it as a keyboard that's as good as the Motif or Fantom PLUS several synthesizers rolled into one.

I have a Logitech G500 and I love it. They've discontinued it (though I've still seen a few in stores a few weeks ago), and replaced it with the G500s; I've only used the older model so I can't comment on the newer one, but the older one feels good for my hand, has the customizable weights (I like the extra weight), and it does have a few extra buttons.

I went in at $50, and I'm definitely up for playing with an upstanding gentleman such as yourself

Hex MMO TCG, from the company who's made other TCGs like the World of Warcraft TCG. It's basically Magic: The Gathering online with RPG components, dungeons, equipment and socketed gems to modify cards, and so on. They've got a week left to go and they've got more than 4x their goal, so it's happening.

Happens all the time when dealing with technology. A legitimate change in one piece of technology exposes an issue with something else. Something may appear to work correctly, but that can either mean that it is actually working correctly or that you just haven't encountered the problem yet.

There's no plugin that I'm aware of that is a synthesizer that also gives you tutorials. Granted, it doesn't have documentation (in English, at least), but it's such a basic synth that anyone who has even a working understanding of subtractive synthesis should have no problem using it. You should find some tutorials (of Synth1 or any other subtractive synth; there will be some differences, of course, but subractive synths are all relatively similar), or open up Synth1 and initialize the patch and play around to get an idea of what everything does. Synth1 is a great synth to use for someone starting to learn synthesis, so if you find it confusing, the problem is in how much you know and how much you want to experiment, not with the synth itself.

It's possible that Jeremy Soule synthesized it, though I doubt it, since his soundtracks aren't generally known for synth sounds or processing tricks, and there's all kinds of ethnic instruments all over the Guild Wars: Factions and GW: Nightfall soundtracks, so I'm thinking it's something fairly unique. Most of what that instrument plays sounds metallic and unpitched; possibly he's combining something percussive with something stringed, though it does sound like one part played by one player.

I've got an instrument I can't identify, from this track from the Guild Wars: Nightfall soundtrack. It's the instrument that's playing right at the start, the low twangy metallic-sounding thing that's mainly (only?) playing two notes an octave apart. I'm not sure whether it'd be classed as percussion or a string instrument, but I love the sound.

1) Ludwig von Koopa 2) Psyduck 3) Alucard

Take a look at the footage of LTTP 2 here. Notice that the controls being used are dpad+buttons, not stylus. Commence rejoicing!

Heh, he's been occasionally mentioning and playing tracks from OCRemix since he used to do a WoW podcast in the days before Burning Crusade was released

Congrats! Kids are fun!

I would kill for a Little Phatty...Nice gear!

Unless he had Keyboard Cat accompanying him or the cat was using its tail to hit things percussively or something, it still was a capella, just not all the voices were human

Quite late, but happy birthday

There's a bundle on sale right now for BioShock and BioShock 2 at GameFly. Both games together cost $4.99, and you can knock off another dollar using this 20% off coupon code, GFDAPR20.

If I'm at home, I'll use my AKG K141 headphones or a 12-year-old set of Altec Lansing 2.1 speakers. At work, I use a cheap pair of headphones, Sony I think, I can't remember. Playing live, I use Shure SE-215 in-ear monitors.

It's an Apito Whistle: demo . It's used in Brazilian samba and batucada music.

Which games are they talking about?

Yeah, speaking from experience as a game dev (a 4-month co-op term), the XBox was the easiest to develop for, especially for cross-platform games because there wasn't much difference between XBox and PC thanks to both using DirectX. NGC was a pain because its specs were so much worse, so a lot of things had to be scaled back (textures and cpu usage were the big things in our shop). PS2 was almost as easy as XBox to develop for, but only because other teams wrote in-house tools and libraries so that much of the complexity of particular hardware was hidden from the actual game developers. It definitely had the reputation of being a more complex system to code for at the hardware level, though.

WAVs are uncompressed files, so yes, it will be much bigger than a corresponding MP3.

If you're an iTunes user, you can make a smart playlist with "Has Artwork" set to false, to make a list of all songs without artwork, and you can use the columns to sort within that playlist. Similarly, "Has Artwork" set to true will give you all songs with artwork.

Happy birthday!

Running samples from a USB drive isn't entirely out of the question. It can work if used for a small amount of samples, though obviously, you wouldn't want to use one for a full orchestral piece or anything. But yes, you can't get at the samples directly from the drive NI sends you.