Greg Mein

The only reason that comes to mind for me is isolating instruments in order to help learn your parts for your cover band. A number of years ago there was a program called Jammit that actually got ahold of master tapes and could split out the different parts. It also included a player with notation and/or tab. It seemed like a program with a bright future but the song selections were limited. You would buy the songs individually. I liked the program but it didn't last and died off. A while later someone came along and picked it up; did some reprogramming, offered up all the songs, called it Crammit and sold it for a while. I can still run that version on my oldest MBP.

This is definitely on my list but I'm going to wait until I get back home in a couple of weeks.

It's incredible and inspiring to see them performing at this level all these years later!

You gotta have faith, haha, well ok then, I will! The divorce part reminds me of the city I previously lived in for many years. Speed cameras had been installed on the interstate that went through downtown. In one instance I'd heard about a woman on the outs with her husband that drove his car at a high rate of speed numerous times along that section knowing that all those tickets would be mailed to him. A valiant effort but at the end of the day those tickets aren't worth the paper they're printed on. This is a topic i really shouldn't have stepped into on this particular forum. I only wish everyone here the best of success!

This will never happen, main reason being chain of evidence, without it a prosecutor is going to laugh at you and the judge will not allow it to be entered. This type of evidence has to be collected at the crime scene, documented and securely stored. Furthermore, If someone at my level is capable of making such a video than I'd also have access to the same tools and can create a video of the prosecutor having sex with the judge while flying with the president on Air Force One. My lawyer is going to have a field day!

In a normal world I might typically agree, however, I'm losing count of the major artists that have stepped onto a political stump to such a degree as to alienate large sections of their audience seemingly without a care in the world. They've apparently achieved a level of sustained wealth where it no longer matters. And what's worse, those people are small potatoes compared to the ones who own large internet based enterprises. People at that level don't just speak the language, they create and define it for the all too willing masses to absorb. Politicians, wealthy elitists and the establishment have always been a "deep fake" to me so I'll never be able to share in any outrage over this, it's just more of the same.

Can someone share a link to or point out a "deep fake" that would cause the leaders/politicians/dictators or whatever they are of India to be so concerned that they feel they need to take some kind of action against an internet business based in a country where they have no jurisdiction? The whole thing seems absurd to me on the surface, perhaps someone can enlighten me.

Well, other than banning the platform in their country what do they actually think they can accomplish?

Who cares what India does?

I have a couple I'd like to pick apart and rework but I've found a good use for some of the better ones; I'm trying to learn video and animation programs and techniques so I'll use them to create crappy videos as I hopefully develop my skills.

The most recent interface I bought was a little Apollo Solo with TB3. I didn't want to buy another expensive interface only to have the connector type quickly go out of style (FW400/800, TB2). For what I do the Solo works just fine. I opted for the UAD not only because of the sound quality but also I had some plug-ins I'd bought long ago when still using a UAD Solo Laptop express card thingie in an older MBP. UAD can be annoying however, when you do an update it causes the UAD Meter & Control Panel to automatically load at startup and the only way to stop that is too edit a plist file buried in the library directory. Another thing that annoys me is that updates load every last plugin that they have rather than just the ones you own. The obvious ploy is to get you to try them out but when you do and then not purchase you'll be hounded about the free trial period being expired.

When I put together the latest version of home studio an adjustable desk was on the list. It's best to stand when doing vocals and great to be able to raise things for easy reach and eye level monitors. I also find it helpful when putting down some bass or guitar parts where it's also nice to stand.

I helped an engineering manager get logged into a computer I'd previously used over the phone and through text messages a year after I'd retired. I'd call that going above and beyond!

So far just getting my files categorized is a huge task, roughly 200 gig of files recorded with several different cameras and iphones over the years. Part of it is getting video into a format that works equally well on PC or Mac. Right now it appears that MP4 is a good choice. A funny story, I was converting one at a time on a website called Freemake, very tedious. Later I went to the website from the PC and it had a downloadable "free" program. Well it worked a couple of times and then became unusable by just popping up ads. They advertised the program for $59. I didn't really want to do that, I went to un-install it but then it popped up an ad to buy it for $10. Well ok, I went ahead and did that hahaha.

Small stages, empty venues, disinterested/rowdy/fighting patrons, flights of stairs, electrical blowouts and technical problems are such a cliche, I'd seen plenty of it. It's impossible to pick out a worst. At the same time there have been enthusiastic crowds at packed houses on all different sizes of stages as well. As a general rule I prefer outdoor gigs. Since "forming" five or six years ago my wife of seven years and I were a duo and I put a lot of work into creating backing tracks but I was ready for a change and now we're a four piece live band having added a drummer and bass player. Having moved to a low population area however, our gigs are further apart but the last couple have been really enjoyable. We got on the bill for an annual three day jam festival that's a pretty big deal around here, just across the border in AZ. We came to watch a lot of it and our band clearly got the best response. Around the same time we played an outdoor gig at a fair/festival put on by our little city. Then we crossed a new threshold the Friday before last when we played an outdoor gig in Washington UT put on by the city with sponsors. That made for state number five that my wife and I have performed in. Hands down my most unique gig was several years ago when I got tapped to play keys for a rock hits show with the symphony orchestra.

Kind of like Tinder Live perhaps?

I'd kind of forgotten about iMovie. I've used that in the past and also had Final Cut Express years ago but I think it died with an OS update. After watching a couple tutorial videos it appears that Premiere Elements may have a lot more functionality than I initially expected. I'd not seen Davinci Resolve until this thread, thanks for the suggestions. I really need to dig in and see what's what, plenty of options if I'll put in the time!

After managing to resurrect my old Dell PC and having it run better than ever I tasked myself with trying to get some programs reloaded. The old Cakewalk Pyro Audio Creator is never going to work again and I'll miss it but other programs are working more smoothly than ever before. Among those is a small collection of Corel programs (Paint Shop Pro, Video Studio Ultimate and a couple others). I've never done much with those before but now I'm feeling inspired to try creating some videos for my songs. With any luck I might get inspired to do some recording of the new stuff that's been rolling around in my head for a while as well. My three MBP's have programs I can enlist as well; the gig MBP has the last non-sub edition of Photoshop (CS6 I believe), my oldest MBP has a couple older animation programs (Anime Studio and Poser) and my newest MBP has Photoshop Elements which includes a video editor. I'm sure that between PSP and Photoshop I have anything I'd ever need for photo editing but I figure I'm going to run into some serious limitations with the video editing programs. At this point I'm essentially a beginner with all these programs, even though I've had most of them for a long time, I've never put serious time into them. I have hours of video I've taken through the years, mostly from traveling throughout the country. I'm currently gathering it all together and sorting by categories. Some of the video is shakey and I don't think the programs I have can help with that but there are apparently programs out there that can. I know some folks here have a lot of experience in the photo/video editing area and I'd be interested to know what some of the best programs are. I'd like to use the most capable and full featured programs but at the same time this is only a hobby for me and I can't go crazy on my budget. I'd welcome any advice from the community here!

I touched on the topic of my PC crashing in the AKAI EWI thread. I desperately tried to resuscitate but it was a catastrophic failure of the hard drive and there was no patching or repairing, it was toast. This is a 12 year old Dell XPS 8500, a little long in the tooth but it's only used for what I'll call administrative tasks; Excel spreadsheets, PDF manuals, playing DVD's, hosting a couple backup drives and other rather mundane things. I mostly use my Macs and I could get by without it but it's nice to have around. I couldn't justify the price of a new PC and didn't want to spend a lot of money fixing this one. I had a couple of older HDs around so I grabbed the larger one and managed to bring the PC back to life using a USB optical drive (the one in the PC hadn't been working right for a while) and the Win 7 disk that came with the computer new. That was great and I don't mind Win 7 but it's a dated OS now and won't run some of the modern versions of programs I use. I'd upgraded to Win 10 quite some time ago when that option was offered for free. I wanted Win 10 back on this machine and also decided it should have a new SSD and optical drive before I button the thing back up. I found a 1G SSD for $35 and an optical drive for $25 so the upgrade/repair investment was minimal. Where I ran into a problem was trying to get Win 10 installed. There must be 1000 Microsoft webpages but there is one where I should have been able to get Win 10 reloaded. I had the account, was authorized for it, got the downloads but the two seemingly relevant programs just wouldn't install, they kept throwing errors. I went around in circles for a while trying to figure it out but you know how frustrating that can be. Later, for no particular reason, I went to that Win 10 webpage while sitting at my Mac and wow, it recognized that I wouldn't be able to install Win 10 and so offered me the ISO image file, yes please and thank you 😀. Things went real smooth after that; I burned the ISO to a disk and installed from that, easy peasy. That computer is running like new now, perhaps better with that SSD. I've got programs reloaded and am mostly back to where I wanted to be. Could I have fixed it without the ISO image file? Perhaps but it sure was going to be a hassle trying to get support and figure out what the problem was. No real point to the story except for the irony of using my Mac to fix my PC and I'm hoping to get several more years of use out of that computer.

Now that we live close to Las Vegas we've taken advantage of that on a few occasions. The 600 seat Golden Nugget Showroom has become a favorite venue, we've seen Lita Ford, Tommy James & the Shondells and the Grass Roots there. Fremont Street has a free concert series where we've seen some good shows. The best show I can remember ever experiencing however was The Who last November. It was their last show of the tour, they had a huge orchestra, performed amazingly and the state of the art acoustics and sound in the Dolby Live indoor amphitheater would be hard to match.

It's a good feeling to be able to help, my wife is even ok with it in retrospect, 😀. And yes it's true, having these files now backed up in a secure location could be invaluable someday. It wasn't a big issue, really only cost me a little time. I'm far from adverse to digging into electronic gear, during a 30 year career as an electronic tech I tore into some of the world's most sophisticated avionics and communications equipment on a daily basis. I'll add this to my list of positive things I've experienced here on SSS. It's high up there but I don't know if anything will ever match the time I sold an accordion to a gal who's search lead her to a topic I'd started here.

I opened up the EWI today and pulled the SD card. I uploaded the files to a dropbox location, message me an email and I can give access. I put my wife's EWI back together and it seems to be working although she's rather unhappy that I took it apart for this. Hope that helps!

I have returned home and am catching up on some new and old issues around here. In regard to this I have a problem I'm working on; before we left my 12 year old Dell XPS 8500 desktop crashed. It's a pain of course but I actually use my Macs most of the time. The problem is that the Dell had SD card reader slots whereas my Macs do not. On the PC front it looks dismal for repairing my Win 10 install but fortunately I had an old HD laying around and have brought it back to life with the Win 7 disk that came with the computer new. Also I was able to go to my account on the Dell website and download all the drivers for this computer which should be a beautiful thing. I might even be able to use my Mac. I'm sure I have a USB SD card reader around and it's just occurred to me where I might find it. Anyway I expect I'll be able to pursue this within the next couple of days.

My wife has the EWI 5000 I bought for her birthday three or four years ago. We actually had to order a new battery for it that I installed recently. I'd be glad to help you out but the timing is bad, we're leaving tomorrow for a cruise and will be off the grid until late this month. If you can wait until after the 29th or so I can help.

For simply syncing between drives; connected drives or over my network, on Mac I've been using ChronoSync for years. I bought it once and it's been free updates ever since.