Moseph

If you have a multimeter you could pull the thing apart and test the jack to see if there's a bad connection somewhere.

It's not worth recording in a professional studio, IMO, unless you have professional performers to play the stuff (or at least people good enough not to waste too much time trying to get things right). That would be an additional cost on top of the studio itself. I don't know what your studio budget is (several hundred? several thousand?), but if you want better virtual instruments, you'll be better off buying them yourself if you can afford it, because then you can continue to use them. For professional mixing and mastering, you may not have to go to a studio at all. I believe Zircon offers mastering services, at least, and I'm sure there are others around who might, too.

Since both dannthr and kevinpenkin have brought this up, I think it's worth emphasizing: because of the limitations of ensemble patches, you cannot use Orchestral Essentials/Symphobia to learn "proper" orchestration. If your goal is to approach orchestral writing as a student who is trying to learn as much about the orchestra as possible, you absolutely should not get Orchestral Essentials/Symphobia as your only orchestral library. Alternately, if your goal is either to write orchestra music extremely quickly, augment another orchestral library, or write orchestra music without having to learn "proper" orchestration, then Orchestral Essentials/Symphobia may be a good choice.

For libraries such as EWQL, you get solo patches with a lot of articulations for each orchestral instrument. When you arrange, you could, depending on how dense your orchestration is, be dealing with 20+ individual patches at a time. Labor-intensive? Yes, but you get an enormous amount of control over what the orchestra is playing. If you, say, wanted to to realize Strauss's Also Sprach Zarathustra, you could program the piece with Strauss's original notes and orchestration, no problem. Orchestral Essentials mostly doesn't use solo patches. What you get are ensemble patches that include all of the instruments in a given section (strings, brass, or woodwinds). What plays for any given note you press depends on what instruments live in that range. For example, with the woodwinds, if you play really high, you'd get flutes (and maybe piccolo), in the middle, you'd probably get clarinet and oboe, and low, you'd get bassoon (and maybe bass clarinet). Since the instruments in ensemble patches don't play outside their own ranges, GallenWolf's concerns about difficulty writing four-part harmony probably wouldn't be much of an issue (i.e. you will never get a full ensemble sound from any given note, so multiple notes in different ranges won't duplicate the entire ensemble). His point about double/triple/quad winds is entirely correct, though -- you just don't have the control over individual instruments that you would need in order to do that, which brings us to my next point. The issue with ensemble patches that makes me say you wouldn't be able to get an arrangement like that one EWQL demo is that your precision in selecting specific instruments in an arrangement only goes as far as what you can get by working in a specific range of the ensemble patch (or whatever limited solo patches you have). If you want an oboe solo, you have to take whatever lives in the oboe range of the woodwind ensemble patch, which probably includes clarinets, and you may not get the extreme upper range of the oboe since that may not mix well with the flute that lives up there. Your choice of articulations is also extremely limited. For woodwinds and brass ensembles, you only get long, short, and special effects articulations. The string ensemble adds pizzicato and tremolo to those. If you tried to do Also Sprach Zarathustra with Orchestral Essentials, it would probably still sound good, but you would't be able to exactly duplicate Strauss's orchestration because you don't have instrument-level control over the entire orchestra. The whole point of ensemble patches, though, is that you're not supposed to be thinking too hard about what exact instruments are playing. They're set up so that you can create something that sounds good extremely quickly, and the trade-off for this is that you don't get much control over the details of the orchestration. Whether this approach appeals to you over the slower, more detail-oriented approach of libraries like EWQL SO is something you should consider when deciding which to buy. If you haven't already stumbled across it, the most detailed review I've seen of Orchestral Essentials is here: http://www.scorecastonline.com/2012/04/23/review-projectsam-orchestral-essentials/ EDIT: Yeah, the reasons I bought VSL SE rather than EWQL SO were that 1) VSL has true legato, 2) VSL is dry-sampled, and 3) I like VSL's sampler a little better than EWQL's PLAY sampler. The only thing I've found in VSL SE that I don't like is that it's a little light on velocity layers. I think velocity layering is the big area where they stripped the instruments down for SE from their full non-SE counterparts.

Here's what's happening. You are, in some places, automating the LFO's frequency so that it cycles at a rate that doesn't line up with the measures and/or beats. When you change the frequency, say, on a downbeat, the sine is still somewhere in the middle of its cycle, so the sine with the new frequency begins at that point in the cycle. It then cycles at the correct rate, but it doesn't start at the zero position because it started in the middle of one of the previous frequency's cycles. This should be fixable by being careful to use only values for the LFO frequency that keep the cycle synced and only changing the frequency at the end of a complete cycle. Probably what you will be using most will be rates that give you eighth-note triplets, eighth-notes, quarter-note triplets, and quarter notes. It should be easier to keep things in sync if you keep your wobble's note values in mind. Some synths/filters may have a setting that resets the LFO's position every time you adjust frequency. An alternate, albeit tedious, way to program the wobble is to automate the sinewave by hand. Some DAWs have automation drawing options that will give you a tempo-synced sine instead of a straight/freehand line. If you go this route, you can just automate the filter directly instead of locking it to the LFO.

Do you have an online account with Cakewalk? If so, they should still have your activation details, in which case you can probably either order a replacement disc, redownload the program, or purchase a discounted upgrade.

I think these examples may give you a pretty good picture of what to expect from each of those libraries. The Orchestral Essentials one sounds good, but it's a big old wash of sound. There's no substantial orchestral arranging, just giant blocks of orchestra noise. You can't write something with this library that will sound, for instance, like the EWQL SO example. The EWQL SO example sounds decent and demonstrates a complexity of arrangement that you can't get with Orchestral Essentials, but it has the characteristically too clean, too present sound that you get in a lot of stuff done with EWQL SO. I think that's a usage issue more than a library issue, but it demonstrates how difficult it is to use an orchestral library convincingly. I don't like Miroslav because the strings sound synthy, though admittedly I'm not as familiar with its sound as EWQL SO. I wouldn't recommend getting Miroslav when you can get EWQL SO Silver for the same price.

Weighted keys feel more like an acoustic piano. If you aren't already more comfortable playing an acoustic piano than a synth-action keyboard, weighted keys may not be worth the extra cost. Kanthos's point, though, is that it's a little easier to judge how hard you're hitting the keys when they're weighted. And at least on cheaper synth-action keyboards, the velocity response may not be terribly accurate. I had an M-Audio MIDI controller where this was a big problem.

This might be what you're looking for, but it's expensive. http://www.epiphan.com/products/frame-grabbers/kvm2usb/?gclid=CLPWlej7u4oCFQImUAodVUsXPg

Yes, Sonar 8 can install as 64-bit. There have been reports on the Cakewalk forums of Sonar 8 not working properly on Windows 7 (8.5 was the first version that officially supported Windows 7), so you might want to do some Googling to see if you're likely to be affected by that. Sonar X2 is coming out this fall, and if you upgrade to X1 now, they'll give you X2 when it comes out. A Studio to Studio upgrade is $99, so if Sonar 8 doesn't work for you, that's how much fixing it will set you back. Regarding the computer, I would recommend a larger non-SSD drive. 240 GB is not a lot of room. Maybe I'm behind on the current chips, but I don't think i7s have Intel HD graphics. I think they actually need a video card. Not sure what's up with the specs in that regard. (EDIT: Eh, never mind -- looks like the newer i7s do in fact have integrated graphics.)

Zoltan is thinking about getting Project SAM Orchestral Essentials, which, with only a 7 GB hard drive footprint, is nowhere near as large as a lot of other orchestra libraries. Zoltan, if you plan to expand your collection of samples and can afford it, I would recommend having a second hard drive to use just for samples. That's something that's really easy to add later, though, so if Orchestral Essentials is the only large library you're going to be using, you should be okay with just one drive.

From a technical standpoint, there's nothing wrong with the way either EWQL SO or VSL SE sounds. They're both well-sampled and pretty broad in scope. A large part of getting a good sound with either of them, though, is knowing how to use the library properly (e.g. using crossfades, careful selection of velocity layers, non-mechanical sequencing, good reverb settings, good orchestra arrangements, etc.). I've heard a lot of really bad stuff written with EWQL SO, but it's not because it's a bad library -- it's because a lot of people just aren't good at using sampled instruments. There are differences in the way EWQL SO and VSL SE sound out of the box, though. EWQL SO was recorded in a performance hall and has actual reverb tails included in the samples, instruments are given default panning positions to match orchestra positioning, and some versions of the library have multiple mic positions available. VSL was recorded in a studio and is extremely dry, so you have to use a high-quality reverb on it to make it sound good. EWQL SO has a large film score quality to its sound by default because of the way it was recorded. VSL SE is, I think, a bit more versatile in this respect, but it takes more tweaking to make it sound right. And I believe the base $350 version of VSL SE doesn't have as many articulations as EWQL SO. As I said, I've never used Symphobia, but I suspect that in practice it's probably more forgiving from the perspective of proper use than either EWQL or VSL. I suspect this because the sampling focuses on entire ensembles, so there's less balancing to do, and the entire library is intended to streamline the process of orchestral writing, so I expect that it sounds pretty good without a lot of delicate adjustments.

Oh, interesting, I wasn't aware that this existed. Looks like it's selections from their other libraries including Symphobia, so it might be an option if Symphobia looks attractive aside from its price.

Besides EWQL Symphonic Orchestra, another well-regarded all-in-one orchestral library is the Vienna Symphonic library, a version of which is available for ~$350 (VSL Special Edition Vol. 1). I use SE Vol. 1 with the Vol. 1 Plus expansion (added articulations) and love it (this ReMix is almost entirely VSL). SE Vol. 1 bundled with the Plus expansion is ~$750. I haven't used it, but I think Symphobia focuses on pre-blended sections that make it really easy to get a powerful orchestra sound with minimal arrangement but prevent you from doing detailed instrument-by-instrument arranging. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on what sort of music you intend to write. My guess is that it would work really well for orchestral heavy metal.

Double it with a second similar synth and hard pan them left and right, perhaps?

Yeah, if you're searching This Mac, network drives aren't getting searched. Been a while since I used a Mac, but there should be an option to search shared drives, assuming the library hasn't set it to disallow that or something (see http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/how-to-search-your-mac-with-mac-spotlight.html). EDIT: D'oh. Just noticed that you did search on shared drives, so disregard the above.

An interesting thing about Bayou Boogie is that the percussion intro is basically the same as the percussion intro to the Phil Collins song "In the Air Tonight."

Do you know if the computer accesses programs from a network drive? It may be that Garageband is installed locally on the machine but is actually running from and saving to a network drive. If this is the case, looking at the local drive(s) would only turn up the local folder that isn't actually being used. Are there other drives listed in the finder that a search doesn't look at by default, and can you search them individually?

My guess would be that the library has that part of the hard drive set as read-only or something to prevent users from screwing things up, though I would think that Garageband would give an error message if it were unable to save the file. Can you load the patches you saved from within an entirely new project, or can you only use them within the project you created them in? If you can't open them from a new project, that probably means the patch files are't actually getting saved.

It may be that the library has something set on the computers that interferes with saving files to disk or automatically saves user files in some other location. Can you open the patches in Garage Band and then save them directly to the flash drive?

Not sure what you're looking at, but Kontakt costs $400 (or $200 if you get it during one of NI's half-off sales). EDIT: Derp. Oh, the version of Shreddage for Kontakt. Yeah, $70.

Okay, that sounds to me like it's not a general interference issue, then. If it were, I'd expect there to be hum any time the adapter is active. (This assumes that the adapter still does its adapting while disconnected from the computer -- I'm not certain how it works.) That's also consistent with there still being hum when the guitar is unplugged. I think the powered USB hub is probably your best bet. Maybe see if you can find one somewhere that will take returns if it doesn't fix the problem. Or ask around and see if any of your friends happen to have one you can borrow -- it's a fairly common accessory for laptop owners.

One other question. You say the hum goes away when you unplug the computer's power cord -- are you unplugging the power adapter from the wall with the adapter still plugged into the computer, or are you unplugging the power adapter from the computer with the adapter still plugged into the wall? Also, how is the power adapter constructed? Is it built into the computer, or is it a separate unit? What I'm getting at is this: Is it the power adapter being plugged into the wall that's causing the hum, or is it the power adapter being plugged into the wall and connected to the computer that's causing it? If you can, try plugging the adapter into the wall but leaving it disconnected from the computer and see if the hum occurs. This may help determine whether the adapter is causing general electrical interference or whether it's an issue with the power feed that the adapter is supplying. EDIT: While we're at it, with regard to the hum still being there when the guitar is unplugged: Is the cable for the guitar still plugged into the audio interface, or are all the input cables disconnected from the interface?

You know what would be awesome? A 2-player mod in which player 2 controls the Slender Man.

Something like this.