TubularCorporation

Huh, weird. Sounds like the 2011 Windows experience more than the 2021 Windows experience. Anyway, I stand by my original statement. All computers suck, it's jsut down to whether you're OK with the way your specific computer sucks.

Just saw this photo of some advanced monitor placement and had to share. We can all learn from this.

EDIT: feel free to ignore all of this, I pounded a big cup of coffee right before I started typing. That's too bad. I haven't experienced much like that since the Windows Vista days. The only issue I've had recently was when I finally updated from Windows 7 to 10 this spring, I started to have a network conflict between Touchportal and ReaStream (Reaper's native audio-over-LAN plugin) so it partially broke the audio connection between my main computer and the old Dell I use for livestream encoding (Touchportal andReStream both still worked, but I couldn't use them at the same time anymore), but there was a really old free audio-over-LAN plugin that works fine. Not all PCs are created equal though (and price isn't neessarily a good indicator of quality). I settled on using secondhand commercial Dells about 15 years ago because they're plentiful, dirt cheap and easy to repair (even if they aren't the most upgradeable because the cases are designed to only work with a specific series of Dell motherboards, so you can't do a full system rebuild easily, but any given system's upgrade path is really easy). Consumer Dells are garbage but a cheap, previous-gen Optiplex or Poweredge is usually great. I've got a couple Optiplexes from the early 2000s that are still working fine and are still useful (and were free) for stuff like reading/writing sampler floppies. Theoretically I could update them to Windows 10 but I've never bothered. Other major manufacturers have their equivalent lines (I've heard good things about the HP counterpart to the Optiplex), it just happened that the local university uses Dell so there was a constant stream of free Dells when I lived near it. The server I use for all my audio production goes for about $200 in eBay right now for one with the last motherboard revision and the fastest CPUs (dual 2.5gHz hex core Xeons - not cutting edge but still pretty good a decade later), all six hard drive trays, at least when I was considering replacing mine instead of upgrading the motherboard (a whole new computer would be a little cheaper than the used motherboard and CPUs before you factored in the cost of shipping a rack server; either way it only cost slightly more than a Volca Beats). Some day I'll need to get a whole new system but at that point hopefully the prices will have settled down and I can build one. The upgrade last spring bought me at least 2-3 more years (and it will be a really good second computer for a lot longer than that). What version of Windows did you use? In my experience, XP was great for audio and MIDI, Vista was garbage, 7 was even better than XP for audio but garbage for MIDI, and 10 is better than 7 for audio but also or the first time ever the MIDI jitter on clock coming from a DAW via USB is as low as clock from the Octatrack. Point being, if you got Windows 11 they may have broken everything again.

These are why you use Jack (on MacOS, also) Anyway, it sounds like we have different needs. i need something with a long lifespan that can be repaired, customized and upgraded easily with good backward compatibility, and Macs don't offer any of that in my experience. last time I tried to repair a Mac even a motherboard from the same model wasn't compatible unless it was manufactured in the same quarter! I'm mixing hardware and software that spans about a 20 year period with hardly any issues (my previous interface had too much latency - over 10ms - because the driver hadn't been updated since 2010 - the new interface has 4x the track count but only about 60% of the latency at a given buffer length - and it can run reliably at half the buffer length of the old one, so it's all but imperceptible). I've heard some software runs a lot better on MacOS. I've got no love for Windows but I rely on too much Windows-only plugins and programs to make the jump to Linux. I forgot about M1. I've had good experiences with ARM so far, although I've mainly been using things like Raspberry Pi, so I imagine M1 is probably pretty decent.

I've never noticed a big difference myself. I'm using a computer from about 2010 and I can get I've never messed with aggregate devices because of the potential for clock issues but it's absolutely doable in Windows, with Jack or probably other systems. I just used the money I saved by being able to replace my motherboard and both CPUs with significantly higher performance versions for about $175 instead of buying a whole new computer to get a bigger interface. Anyway, Windows sucks too. And the underlying hardware is the same, it's just that Macs are engineered to make repairs and upgrades a lot harder whereas PCs are (usually) designed to make it easy to upgrade just about everything and plunge yourself into a bottomless pit of device incompatibility. Horses for courses. If you haven't sent the PC back yet, have you installed any cards or RAM in it? If so, try reseating them. The last time I had computer trouble (not counting the keys on laptop keyboards wearing out) was random freezes that I eventually tracked town to the video card getting nudged just a little bit when I installed a capture card next to it. That tiny bit of sideways pressure was enough that it would unpredictably (probably something thermal) stop responding until I rebooted. I thought it was the system freezing but it was probably just the video card freezing up and displaying a still of whatever was in the frame buffer even as the computer itself kept running fine. In college my computer completely stopped booting after I installed a CD burner and it turned out to be a slightly loose connection between the audio output on the burner and the audio input header on my sound card (this was in like 2000 when you still had to physically connect the drive to the sound card for CD audio playback). Couldn't even get BIOS to run until I reseated the cable.

The moral is all computers suck.

I haven't gotten a blue screen in nearly 10 years.

Lime 3 is the one I picked up for a couple bucks that inspired that specific post. They're really all good, though, in exactly the way that "Canadian Italo Disco" implies. EDIT: I just realized the visuals from the livestreams I do with THawkins have featured a lot of heavily processed footage of 80s Vancouver lately, I wonder how much I was unconsciously inspired by this:

Watch the guy playing the djembe in this clip (on the left in the group shots). Everything you need to know is there.

Back in the portastudio kid days we used to sometimes put a floor tom with the bottom head removed in front of an amplifier, put the microphone inside it close to the head to get a little reverb, and then spread some BBs or gravel on the top of the head for fuzz.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS8GTWOSA60

Don't fool yourself, that guy is a mime.

This ancient blog post about Eno selling some gear came up in an unrelated Google search* earlier today, and it contains the line Which got me thinking, in 2021 is Eno really at the opposite end of the credibility spectrum from SAW? No. He isn't. If anything, they're two sides of the same coin. *it was one of the top hits when I was looking for information about DIY hardware DX-7 programmers. Ok.

Got an 8gb Raspberry Pi 4b as a gift and I already have a Hifiberry DAC+ADC and one of those basic USB-MIDI interface cables, so I'm trying to figure out the absolute cheapest way to put together a reasonably usable Zynthian box. Problem is there's also a new batch of replacement Space Echo heads coming soon (probably, they're being tested) and I missed them last time so I really need to save as much as possible so I can get a full set of four heads, which is going to be like $350 once you factor in tax and shipping. I'm not even close. The RE-150 was only $100 still works OK, but I want to get backups for all of the hard to source stuff that's inevitably going to die while it's actually possible so I can keep it going another 40 years. I only paid $100 for it back in 2006 or 7, so if I can get the money together I could throw about a month's rent into backup parts (heads, motor, trap coil) and still have gotten a good deal. It's just a matter of actually getting the money in time.

For a while my user pic was a photo of Marty Feldman photoshopped to look like that cover. It seems to have gone missing, though.

A few from my collection of bad album covers: And the classic:

I feel like if you're going to do part of it at home it might actually be more practical to do the j-cards yourself and have the cassettes duplicated by a manufacturer rather than the other way around. There are a bunch of duplication companies in the UK if that's where you are (no idea which to recommend though), and if you make the j-cards yourself you can use any print shop you want, or your own printer. I'd get the j-cards printed on standard paper and then hand cut them (when I've done it I used an exacto knife and straightedge but some kind of rotary paper cutter might be easier, even a cheap one). lay out your cards for printing with reference marks around the edges for folding. Get a bone creasing tool (the kind on the left in this photo) and use it with a straightedge to score the paper lightly along the fold lines before you cut it out. It's slower than getting j-cards printed but it opens up a lot more options and it's probably cheaper in the long run. I've done a couple small runs (40-50) and it takes about an hour and a half to do all the j-cards that way once you get the hang of it. I recommend using semi-gloss photo paper. I think I have some Photoshop j-card templates I made a few years ago, if I can find them I'll share them. EDIT: I just checked and actually it was a standard template, I just moved them to a three-per-sheet document when I printed. This is the template I used, complete with scoring/folding guides: https://we.tl/t-wyl4YO5WK1

You can do similar stuff in Reaper. Every track in Reaper has up to 64 channels of audio and every plugin has its own routing matrix, so you can set up really complicated signal paths on a single track (especially since one track can contain multiple overlapping audio and MIDI clips). Or you can use the "track wiring" view, which essentially gives you a Reaktor-ish modular view of a single track's signal path, but I haven't really dug in to that much. This is a decent example of a couple Reaper tracks with a fairly simple signal path:

Ran out of hotdogs before I ran out of buns so I just put some mustard and sauerkraut in the buns and had ghost dogs for lunch.

Finally finished building my new amp (other than giving it a couple coats of hard lacquer in a week or two after the shellac has fully cured). Sounds really nice, cost about $400 spread out over a couple years (when I started it I didn't have the skills to do the power supply without potentially destroying it and/or myself, so it was shelved for a long time about 3/4 done). Most of the cost was because I bought a custom cabinet, the actual amp was around $130 for all of the parts and the chassis. The speaker just came from the small pile of speakers I've salvaged over the years. Waiting for a couple parts so I can add the switchable negative feedback mod (gives it a lot more headroom when the feedback is on, so it works better with pedals) but with a 20k resistor and 50k pot in series, instead of a fixed 56k resistor like most people use, so the amount of feedback is adjustable from almost impossible to overdrive down to only slightly more headroom than the stock circuit. Will hijack the external speaker jack to make it footswitchable.

I've probably already posted this a few times, but I'm a big fan of putting a time-based effect (reverb or delay) on an aux send and then either vocoding or ring modulating it with the original dry signal. A long time ago when I was completely broke I made a fake sitar sound by sampling a crash cymbal, running it through an envelope filter, and then using that as the impulse in a convolution reverb set to 100% wet and playing a DI acoustic guitar through it. It didn't sound anything like a sitar but it sounded kind of cool.

Definitely possible. I haven't bought any used gear in a year or two (I've pretty much reached "If I can't build it myself I don't need it*" zone for everything at this point) but when I do I pretty much always reflow the solder on the power and audio jacks and change the battery if it has one, just on principle. BUT I may have already mentioned this but my CZ-101 AND the CZ-101 an old roommate had both had this weird issue where every single aftermarket power supply we used with them had a sort of dead zone on it. If you twist the plug a full 360 degrees in the jack there are two poles (let's call them North and South) where the power cuts completely, and the rest of the rotation (let's say SSW to NNW and NNE to SSE) where it works like it should. I've tried at least four PSUs on my 101 and they all have the same issue. When I look closely at the jack, it's not perfectly round but very slightly oval - I'm not sure it that's related or not. I've never found a PSU that doesn't have the exact same issue with it so I just deal with it. Maybe you've got the same problem. *exceptions made for things that are so underpriced they're cheaper to buy than to build, like the $18 Ali Express Tube Screamer pedals.