Kanthos

Got two already; it'd also be an odd degree that required a course in compiler construction and ones in music production and sound design

I'm a gamer and keyboard player; I've got a 3DS and a good gaming PC (thanks to Prophetik and Steam account (magekanthos). I have a toddler who's almost two (so a toy or something for him would be an option). My wife and I are both somewhat conservative, so anything NSFW is out. For t-shirts and such, I'd be an XL. If someone wants specific suggestions, the only thing I can think of is either an iTunes gift card (bonus if it's for the US store; they have more than our Canadian store), or any good movie soundtracks (I have all the Harry Potter, Star Wars, X-Men, Chris Nolan Batman, Narnia, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lord of the Rings soundtracks already, plus a few random others) or music of any kind. I honestly don't need more stuff, good music aside, so another possibility would be for my Secret Santa to give some money to a charity of their choice, so that someone who can use the money more than I can benefits.

Can't speak for everyone else, but I intend to send mine within a few days after getting the address, as soon as I decide what to send. You can't really time it to arrive right around Christmas, plus some people might be in college and are going home for Christmas or other such things. There's nothing wrong with sending it early. I assume giving some ideas is still apropos?

Right, although I saw something else suggesting they might start that class in February instead. I'd sign up now; it's not costing you anything, you can always cancel, and I don't know if they'd have a limit on number of spots (possibly, just because of the time it would take to mark).

Of course I'm sure. For starters, it's *free*, so the worst thing that can happen is I'm out a few hours of time. Also, I said I'd already done one. The compiler course was taught by someone at Stanford. These are actual university courses (or, sometimes, scaled down versions; the compilers one covered virtually everything I did as an undergrad 7 years ago though) from reputable universities. I can't speak for every course, obviously, but mine had weekly assignments, a longer build-a-simple-compiler-from-scratch assignment, quizzes, a midterm, and final. They give you a certificate for completing a course, but they don't grant you a degree or even progress towards one. It's something to do to learn new things or gain new skills, not for credit. The Sound Design course I linked is taught by a prof from Emory University, and the Production one is from a guy from Berklee College of Music. Definitely not amateurs or something hacked together to make some easy money. So yes, I can give the site, in general, a good recommendation; if I couldn't, I'd have said so in the original post, or just not posted at all

Sure, why not?

There's a website that offers free university-level online courses in a variety of topics. I took a compiler course there over the summer as a review for my job, but I just discovered they have some new music courses. I've signed up for one on Music Production and another on Digital Sound Design; anyone want to take them with me?

It's probably not as easy as a simple search-and-replace. What exactly does "search for strings that represent the player's name" mean, and how do you do it in any kind of automated way? How do you read a sentence, probably without obvious context (odds are the text of the game is a series of strings, all in a block, without obvious indicators of whether two consecutive strings actually go together semantically), and mechanically decide that the pronouns used (or that SOME of the pronouns used) reference Link and not any other character in the game? The only way I could see search and replace working is if he got a full and accurate copy of the script, analyzed it by hand or some other natural-language-processing tool (and if by a tool, checked the results), and generated a list of strings to search for and corresponding replacements to make. There's also the fact that strings in the ROM probably are expected to be of fixed length (the length itself is possibly encoded somewhere; it's not necessarily a given that they'd store raw C strings - one byte per character plus a terminating NULL byte - in the string table). A change from "his" to "hers" could be really tough to deal with because of this; he'd have needed to figure out how the strings were encoded and increase the length by one. I'm sure this wasn't hundreds of hours of work, but it wasn't 30 seconds either. I say this as someone who's taken a masters-level course on natural language processing (so I have at least some idea of what's involved in trying to process text mechanically) and someone who's done an admittedly-minor ROM hack of sorts (my dad's work needed to change a copyright message in a program for which they had the source but no longer had the compiler, so I took the executable and changed the string table for them).

I think it's nice that the father cared enough to attempt to fix the sexism problem, but I don't think treating a male like a female is a good solution. The fault really lies with game developers for not making enough titles with realistic, worthwhile, female protagonists.

That track's actually called Harvest Dawn on the official soundtrack. You'll find a lot of less-energetic, mellow stuff from Jeremy Soule. From Oblivion alone, try out Peace of Akatosh, Dusk at the Market, Sunrise of Flutes, Auriel's Ascension, Glory of Cyrodill, Watchman's Ease, All's Well, and Wings of Kynareth. Plenty more stuff from Morrowind and Skyrim and Guild Wars too.

Not a game remix, but this. Will didn't need lullabies much, but this was the first piece of music he listened to. Also, from the Link's Awakening: Threshold of a Dream project, try Iggy Koopa's "Oceanfront View (House)".

You might be able to get upgrade pricing on either Kontakt or Komplete by having Elements. Log into your NI account and go to the Komplete and Kontakt pages on the store to verify that. You can buy each library individually, if you only want a few (though be sure to price it out so that you don't end up spending more than the package deal. Also, try out Alicia's Keys if you can; it's my favourite of NI's piano samples.

Ok, do this. When you get your new computer, download all the installers for your VSTs again, and install ALL your VSTs to the main hard drive on the new computer, whether you use them often or not. There's no advantage to having ANY VSTs on an external hard drive. Then, put your sample libraries on the main hard drive or external hard drive as you see fit. Those can be copied over from your old machine via the external hard drive.

That just confused the issue more, so let's back up a step. You're getting a second computer. When you have it, what do you want to have on each machine?

No, no, no, NO! If you're going to ask a question, please actually read the responses. Like Dannthr said, if you're trying to move the actual PLUGINS, and not the SAMPLES, you should be buying a bigger hard drive. Unless you have a REDICULOUS amount of plugins, most of which are commercial and have some amount of built-in samples (eg. something like Absynth that has a few samples it builds patches from, but isn't a sample library), I doubt you're using much more than 1 GB of hard drive space for plugins. You're not going to get much in the way of space savings, and you're not going to get a speed increase. There is NO REASON to run plugins from an external hard drive. Just because you probably can, that doesn't mean you should. Also, other than simple plugins that consist ONLY of a DLL, you can't use an external hard drive to transfer already-installed plugins to a new machine, because you won't be able to copy the plugin and all associated files and registry settings to the new machine. The new machine won't see the plugin as being installed if all you do is dump a DLL into the VSTPlugins folder; you'll have to get the installer and reinstall it. Here is what you should do. If you're running out of space on your main hard drive, try the following in order: 1) If you have a desktop, install a second internal hard drive and copy some things over to that to save space on your main HD. 2) Find things you can uninstall 3) Move finished projects (especially with audio recordings, probably done in WAV, that will take up a fair bit of space) to an external hard drive or back them up to DVD, and remove from your computer. 4) Move some/all sample libraries to an external hard drive. 5) If you're still out of space, or if you can't do any of the above, buy a bigger hard drive, back up everything useful on your main drive (eg. don't back up plugins or programs that need to be reinstalled; don't back up sample libraries that you can reinstall from DVD, etc.) Then, take the old hard drive out of your machine, put the new one in, and reinstall your OS, drivers, software, and plugins. If you're going to ignore good advice from people who know what they're doing and take the time to figure out what you're actually asking (for GOD SAKES, learn to write questions clearly!), then maybe you shouldn't be wasting people's time if you're going to just do your own thing anyway, advice be damned.

?? He's pointing out that you mention partitions in the first post, which I responded to, and then you later said that you didn't ask about partitions.

Do you understand how partitioning works? That question makes no sense. However, for the question in your subject, it depends on your DAW. If your DAW lets you specify multiple folders that it will search for plugins, then sure, there's no reason why you can't point it to a folder on an external hard drive (and, of course, if you can only set one folder, you could just point it to the external hard drive and move all your plugins over). But, unless you have a tiny main hard drive and a massive number of plugins, it's probably not the VSTs (eg. the DLL files) themselves that are taking up the space; it's probably sample libraries. Depending on the sampler or plugin, you can probably locate the samples wherever you want, even if they're not on the same hard drive. Kontakt, for example, isn't restricted to loading samples from any one location; within a single Kontakt instance, you can load samples from multiple libraries spread across multiple hard drives. Performance-wise, you're better off putting a second hard drive into your computer (if it's a tower) than using a USB connection, and a USB hard drive probably won't cut it for large orchestral sample libraries, but for something like the odd instrument from Kontakt, or the Omnisphere library, an external hard drive will work just fine. Basically, it's the amount of data that needs to be streamed (and so, the size of each sampled instrument you want to load) that matters.

Pretty much the best of the 2nd and 3rd-gen console RPGs wrapped into a 3DS game; too bad they're not localizing it.

Agreed; your stuff is amazing. I didn't realize you ever posted here; I recognize your name from demos for various sample libraries (not that I have the skill or time to use them, or the money to buy them, but I can dream, right? ) I liked this version better than the original; the orchestration fits well without taking away from the quiet, mellow quality of the original.

Same. Although, I figure I'll spend more time trying to get my 20-month-old to put his monster costume on than we will actually going to various houses.

Changing of pan? What do you mean by that?

Another vote for anything Jeremy Soule if you like big orchestral soundtracks that can range from the epic to the textural and ethereal. He's also quite good at ethnic orchestral stuff, like Guild Wars: Factions and Guild Wars: Nightfall, and I noticed he also did some of the asian music for the recent Mists of Pandaria expansion to World of Warcraft. If you want something with really defined melodies, this is going back 5 years or so, but Laura Shigihara's soundtrack for Plants Vs. Zombies is brilliant.

Incidentally, if you want tremolo in Ableton Live, use the Autopan plugin and set the phase to 0 degrees. I actually just figured that out this afternoon; I needed both autopan and tremolo in an effects rack I was building for my keyboard rig.

Sounds like some type of wood block hit, a light, fairly high-pitched block, with a bit of reverb and processing to shape it a bit.

Heh, yes. Best pop machine ever.