Dafydd

... If you don't have a real studio, I doubt it matters much...

I'm sure that one will do the job. Might even keep the fan noise out better than mine does. This is one of the mics I considered, but for whatever reason I thought it was at least $1,000. Don't know where I thought I'd read that... I say go with it, if for no other reason, we'll all get a comparison.

The Youtube frames are driving me insane. Even when you've unchecked "automatically parse links" the forum insists on making these frames from youtube links. Over at the TWcenter.net forums, which are also VBulletin based, there's a tag you can wrap around youtube links if you want to create frames from them, otherwise the link will remain a link. Having automatic youtube frames for all youtube links is like enforcing all image links to be displayed as images. I assume this issue is already being worked on (although I didn't look very hard to find any info on how far work has come), but if you need help, maybe you could ask the people at TWcenter or I could do it for you.

I met the developers at Starbreeze, Avalanche and jDome this weekend at the Swedish game awards finals... but I doubt I'll ever work at either company. EDIT: Curse the automatic youtube miniframes!!

I know you will.

Eheheh What a load of work! Anyway, I'm going on a 2-month vacation in 2 weeks and won't be able to check back in here very often at all during that time. I wonder when this will all be over... EDIT: By the way, anything in San Francisco you can recommend seeing? Other than the obvious tourist sites, I mean...

I think that goes with pretty much all the devices in Reason, the all seem to have so many secrets... Is there a way to do this in reverse, so that if the signal exceeds a certain level, it's completely muted, and then when the signal is low enough, it's unmuted again? So, basically, an inverted gate? This should be possible using the noise gate and some setup of compressors and side chaining but if there's an easier way... EDIT: Clarified the above as a response to the post below.

Awesome! Thank you very much, I've been looking for this for a long time. Noise gate, huh? How adequate... Some people are just better than others, I guess. I have no idea how this thing works or why it's set to the "reverse" algorithm, but it's really cool nevertheless...

So, I know how to use a compressor to make something not play louder than a certain level, I know about sidechaining and all that stuff. Now I want the inverse kind of compressor - the kind that makes a track completely silent if its volume is less than a set level. So, if the signal is below the threshold, it will be silent, but if it's above, it will be audible. How would I go about doing this in Reason?

Hard to say unless I listen to it. And yeah, don't get the Samson one if you're in a noisy room. Even a refridgerator seems to be too much for it. Samson has a cheaper, dynamic variant that should fit you better, but there's no real reason to believe the sound will be any better than with your Behringer one (not needing a mixer table would be nice, but since you already have one...). I've had others tell me that Behringer stuff is crap, but I can't really tell what's good and what isn't. I can tell when there's noise, but all that talk about "fullness of tone" is lost on me. You can fix stuff like that with post production anyway. Noise is a bit more tricky. As far as I can tell, if I used the C01U in a studio, there wouldn't be any noise at all. Can't say that about my old AKG karaoke piece of shit. Maybe I should have gotten one of these intead... the C01U has a pattern that covers both the front and and the back (though less at the back), it might help being able to record from only one direction. My problem right now is my PSU though - it's running its fan at top speed constantly. Must have been built before auto fan speed was invented...

Fullness of the tone? Sound quality? Dude, it's a mic. Every mic sounds different. To compare this mic to a mic jack one you'd need to take this USB mic, record something, rebuild it into a mic jack mic and record something again, then compare the recordings. The sound quality and fullness of the tone is all up to the mic, not how you connect it. For me, since I don't have a pre-amp, using a USB mic is a lot better because I don't have to worry about what my soundcard does to the mic's signal.

Uh... well. You don't need a pre-amp, because the thing gets its power through the USB port. You can use any sound card you want, it makes no difference whatsoever (hell, you don't even need a sound card, but it'd be nice to have one if you want to know what the recording you just made sounds like). The noise level stays the same with any computer, and from what I can tell, it's very low, the only noise I'm getting (which is loud, but that's not the mic's fault) seems to be coming from my own computer. I'm going to try this thing with a silent computer and make a recording of that and let you be the judge. To get something that sounds this good with a mic jack, you'd need to spend some more buck on other stuff that you don't need now that it's plugged into the USB. On the downside, you can't use the thing with anything but a computer, and it's not very useful for live performances.

Well, good! At least you're all set until Christmas, which is when people are supposedly more generous than other times of the year, so that would be a good time to run this thing again.

Depending on what's been removed, yeah, a simpler version of XP might be interesting, unless it's missing something important. I don't think the .NET framework, Reason or most of my old games will run on Linux, that's why I'd want to run XP, but if Embedded or Naked XP has the same problems, I'm not too keen on that either. I'm aiming for the same functionality as a regular PC but sacrificing power for mobility. EDIT: I tried to find info about Naked XP but all I found was links to warez torrents, nothing else, not on wikipedia or anywhere else. I'm assuming it's a less-than-legit version...

Cool. I won't have much hard drive space left though... hehe.

Seriously, I want to know. How much money was donated in total? For how long will this rally let DJP to run the site without biting his nails over funding? Did we help at all?

I'm a half-inch taller than you, so the comment about the keyboard was very informative. The question about the fan was mostly noise concerned, so if the thing is silent, I guess I don't care much about whether it has a fan or not (though moving parts usually end up breaking sooner than non-moving ones). I'm not that well versed in Linux, I don't have anything against it but I'd like to use an OS that I can run my usual programs on. If you get the Linux version, can you still buy a copy of XP and install it on the thingy somehow?

The mic came with an excellent little tripod that was not part of the deluxe package, it came in the same box with the mic. You should be fine with that. Since I got the deluxe package, I got a pop screen for it, but I can try getting up close to the mic and show you what it sounds like without the pop screen. Can't say whether a windscreen will actually help though, those are best used to keep wind out, and unless you're going to use the thing outdoors, it might not help you a lot. EDIT: If I'm close enough to the mic to cause pops, I'm also close enough to make it overload and distort. You don't need to be that close to the mic, it picks up your voice just fine anyway. Unless you're going to use the mic outdoors, you don't need a windscreen as far as I can tell. I don't know how good that windscreen is at popstopping, but the one I've used doesn't help at all, it just stops wind. Your money is better spent on a pop screen (if you need to be close for whatever reason) or a shock mount (I noticed the vibrations from my computer caused a low buzz when I put the mic directly on my desk).

Does anyone have one? Has anyone here tried one? I'm interested in getting a small, portable, cheap, functional and silent laptop that runs windows XP (play games, watch movies, make music, do anything you'd normally do in XP but with lower performance than a normal machine). Now... I'm wondering whether I should wait. Is it possible that these computers will be made entirely fanless in the near future? Will the change to an Atom processor improve things considerably? Is there anything else I should think about when considering getting one, and when deciding whether to get one now or later?

So, I got back to the post office on my bike, only to find the package to be almost as tall as myself. Lol. Also the clerk told me it'd arrived just when I'd left the previous time. *smacks forehead* Sooo... it works well. But holy shit it picks up noise. I need to replace my current computer setup with something more silent, this thing picks up every little thing in the house, it's like recording stuff with my own ears!! Dad's built a super silent computer for mom, I'm gonna ask him what it's made up of and replace some parts on my own computer. The power supply fan is the big bad guy here, I think the cpu and gpu fans are ok, but a more silent case might still be worth looking into. Here's a sample: http://www.ngst.nu/itsworking.mp3 EDIT: Is there no way to get the computer to play back what I'm recording, live? Do I really have to record stuff not knowing what it sounds like and then wait to hear it until after I'm done recording? That's a huge backdraw if it's true. EDIT 2: Ahem. I can get it to play back live in Sonar LE... I guess that's good enough. I thought the latency was fixed at first though, glad to see I could reduce it to 10 ms. Now all I need to do is replace that damned PSU...

So... it's almost here... maybe I'll be able to pick it up right after work, if I'm lucky. According to the postal tracking service, the package weighs a whopping 9 pounds! EDIT: Well, what do you know, I come home, check my mailbox, and sure enough, there's a note there telling me to pick it up at the post office. But when I get there, they tell me the package hasn't arrived yet! Arrghh!

So how much money was actually donated?

Man, wrapping this project up is just about the most unglamorous and anticlimactic thing I've ever done.

5/10? Escariot said hundreds. How do you stop the spambots anyway? Put up a password for accessing the signup page? I guess you could, in addition to authorization, could force whoever signs up to click an activation link in a confirmation e-mail, but then the server would be sending e-mails all over the place anyway. One way would be to stop the server from sending e-mails to people until they're authorized, and to have control panel for activating accounts. Rather than an e-mail sent to the administrator every time someone signs up, the admin could log in once every so often and check if any non-random people signed up and need authorization. Or, the admin could create the accounts. Each of these options require a little bit of programming though... I wonder how OCR does it. This place must be a very popular target for bots of all kinds.

Way too few people have donated, if you look at the list in the first post. Maybe there are more than the ones listed there though. Also, my name is spelled wrong, the first letter is supposed to be capitalized...