Moseph

I'm in Missouri, but all the way across the state in St. Louis.

Also, analog tape simulators often have wow and flutter controls that can give you this sort of effect.

Use EQ to remove the high and low end.

That was with EWQL Choirs when it first came out, and that restriction has been lifted.

Build bigger melodies by splicing together bits of the original melody in the wrong order, at the wrong pitch level, with the wrong durations, etc. (Naturally, getting too liberal with this will get you shot down by the judges' panel if you're looking to actually sub the mix.)

I've never done VST coding so I may be way off with this, but would it be possible, instead of rewriting din as a VST, to write some sort of VST wrapper for the ported Windows .exe so you could keep the respective licenses separate? I guess this would still require going into the source code to figure out how it works, though.

Here's an old Reddit thread on porting din. Apparently someone did port it and claimed it was easy to do, but the port doesn't seem to be hosted anywhere.

The price is actually lower than I expected it to be. 8Dio also has a solo violin library (phrase-based, I think) coming out at some point in the future.

You can have cheap or you can have SSD, but not both.

Digital Performer is going to be PC compatible starting with version 8 later this year. It's been a while since I've used it, but my recollection is that it was pretty good for MIDI programming. I'm keeping an eye on it with the intention of possibly switching to it from Sonar.

Yeah, Dan does massive orchestral arrangements professionally, hence the 16GB RAM and 8 drives. The system he needs is far, far beyond anything you'd need at this point. For comparison, my system has 8GB RAM and two drives (1 OS/general, 1 sample), and I can load everything in Vienna Symphonic SE Plus with room left over for pretty much any of the other libraries I use. I haven't hit a performance wall yet (though I also haven't tried EWQL Choirs on top of VSL yet). There have been experiments with CUDA for audio purposes, but no serious applications of it as far as I know. Video cards are useless for audio performance as things currently stand. The benefits of an audio interface are that the recording capabilities are much better than integrated audio (only an issue if you plan to record), its drivers may work better with a DAW, it may have MIDI in/out (an issue if you need to use MIDI hardware), and the audio output may be better (I noticed an increase in clarity when I switched from my laptop's integrated audio to an external interface). The value of the processor is subjective and depends on how much power you need for your projects. If you only do small, less complicated things, then an expensive processor is overkill unless you're trying to plan for future compatibility. Since I don't know exactly how you'll be using your computer, I can't offer an opinion on whether you'd be better off spending money on a soundcard or a processor.

The Greeks are the earliest civilization from which we have much concrete data about specific musical practices, and they were all over the vocal music thing.

Like Kanthos said, you should be able to get something similar on any keyboard with a General MIDI soundbank and the ability to layer two sounds together (which is most of them). On the random keyboard sitting next to me (Casio WK-1200) I can get pretty close to the sound by layering Voice Oohs (General MIDI patch 54) and Breath Noise (General MIDI patch 122), and this should hold true for any General MIDI soundbank. You shouldn't even need a keyboard -- there are plenty of VSTs that have General MIDI sounds. There's also heavy reverb on the whole thing.

Music has always been terrible. Music was terrible back when Mozart was alive. We remember the decent stuff and forget the much more abundant terrible stuff, so it always seems like the present is worse than the past.

GPU isn't important at all. You could probably get by with an i3 if you want to save money. Is 16GB RAM for $55 a typo? If you can get it that cheap, there's no reason not to go for it, but you could also cut your RAM to 8GB with no problem. An audio interface would be a good investment especially if you want to do any recording, but you can probably get by with onboard sound. I've never used one so I don't know how performance is, but a 32GB SSD is too small to make a good sample drive. If you're using this SSD, I'd put the OS on the SSD and the samples on a larger disk drive. Have you budgeted for the cost of the OS, or do you already have that?

Works fine for me. (Firefox 9.0.1, Windows 7) I do get the problem with IE on the same machine, though.

You can do this to some extent, since you can delete notes and move them around. But the software won't do it for you because it can't distinguish between instruments (unless there have been major advances since I used the software). It's a matter of figuring out for yourself which notes belong to which instruments and then deleting the notes that you don't want.

They should let Progressive make a Sonic game. It might turn out better than a lot of Sonic Team's efforts.

I used it in beta, and it was awesome. I'm pretty sure you can do wav to midi, but I never tried it. It definitely won't separate instruments for you, though. At very least, you could make a midi by hand by looking at the pitch readout. Do keep in mind that you sometimes have to do a bit of tweaking to get the results that you want, so even if you're okay with all the instruments being mashed into one track, it may not be as simple as pressing a button even to get it to that point.

Has anybody here tried a trackball, and is it good for detail work like audio editing and MIDI note dragging?

Okay, now I want to see Das Rheingold as an NES game.

My understanding of the issue is that for some headphones you just may not get enough power without a headphone amp of some sort so the output levels may be way low. It's noticeable, for example, on the AKG K702 (which I use) -- I'm running out of a USB interface, and I sometimes have to bump levels up in my DAW because I already have the headphone monitor level on the hardware all the way up. I don't use these headphones with a portable MP3 player for this same reason. tl;dr -- Unless the headphones aren't as loud as you want them to be, you don't have to worry about it.

Have you looked into techniques for reducing amp/guitar noise such as shielding the guitar's wiring, staying away from sources of electrical interference like CRT monitors, using a guitar with humbuckers instead of single-coil pickups, etc.?

I've heard (professional) mixes where there's noticeable mic hiss/room tone when the vocal track starts. Background noise is just something you have to deal with the best you can, and the situation is never going to be perfect, especially when you're dealing with a guitar amp. My approach would be to handle the mix not so that the noise is never there (since that probably won't be possible) but so that the entry and exit of the noise isn't obvious or distracting. When the instrument enters, this probably means trimming the clip right at the entry so that the noise enters exactly with the guitar. If that's still too noticeable, you could try having the noise enter in a previous busier section of the mix or giving the noise a slow fade in. At the end of the guitar section, you'll probably either want to fade the noise out slowly instead of using a hard cut or fade the tail of the guitar's sustain out before the noise becomes too obvious. Possibly a compromise between the two.