OB Dave

I'm always pleased to hear things like this. My good friend Dave Starkey (MIDI9) developed this system many years ago, and I wrote the software for the USB interface.

Oh, and let me add Gomez: Split The Difference. I love this band. Great chemistry, three great songwriters, really nice vocals. But this album was a victim of the loudness wars and it sounds like shit. I would love to hear this album remixed and remastered, but what happened in post is an absolute travesty. It's unlistenable on headphones.

Traffic Welcome to the Canteen. Smoking show, bad recording.

There's a nice Preference Pane called Switch ResX that I find useful when working with external monitors. It show up in the menu bar and allows you to easily tinker with monitor resolution.

If you have wall warts, a Furman Plug lock is essential. I'll screw this to the side of the rack near the back, just inside the back cover. And for gear that uses standard IEC-3 (computer style) power cables, replace those with short 1 or 2 footers. For internal connections use the shortest audio and MIDI patch cables you can. Since you have a couple lump-in-the-middle supplies, screw some of these zip tie anchors into the inside of your rack and secure the power supples to the side of the rack that way. And if the power supply has detachable power cables, replace those with shorties. Basically you want to minimize the length of any cable that you can, and then use zip ties and anchors to bolt everything down. You can't really do this with SKB racks so I prefer the regular carpet-on-wood types. For a 4U rack the weight differential would be negligible anyway. You had noted that your deepest rack item is at the top. I usually try to do it the other way with the deepest on bottom, but really doesn't matter that much. You will probably find that it's easiest to mark the mounting locations for stuff with the gear all racked, then unpack everything so you have room to work and fasten power supplies and power strips down, and then re-rack everything and connect it all up.

Well you can't play on this thing.

There's no split output option, unfortunately. I ended up building a MIDI-triggered switcher to handle my signal routing. Otherwise the easiest way to do it would be use an A/B pedal to route the organ to a Leslie and the other voices to a regular amp, and you'll need to remember to hit the switcher every time you change voices.

CES has been cancelled.

I am reminded of this epic quote: I'd like to see that happen via Zoom

Like pay Joe Lamond over $900,000 a year? Yeah, no. I'm still chapped that they cut Non-Exhibitor badge allocations from 4 to 2 the year after they raised the dues. My renewal is up this month, and now I get to pay for zero NAMM badges. Woo!

Not to pick nits, but Parallels is not a Windows emulator. Maybe you're thinking of Wine? Parallels is a virtualized BIOS, but the Windows you run on top of it is real genuine, licensed copy Microsoft Windowsâ¢. I use VMWare Fusion - similar product to Parallels - and frankly it's amazeballs. I'm surprised that it works at all, let alone as well as it does. It's fantastic. Currently, I am running Keil uVision5 - an embedded software development IDE, with USB real time debugger - in Windows 10 hosted within VMWare Fusion, on a ten-year old iMac with an external 30" monitor. Blows me away how well it works. About two months ago, at the same time I was running Keil, I was *simultaneously* running Rowley Crossworks (a competing ARM embedded development environment), in a separate virtual machine running Windows 7. My work files are all on shared volumes hosted within the Mac's native file system, so everything gets backed up hourly by Time Machine. And the virtual machine itself is a single file - a sparsebundle - that I can back up very easily. About to make a potentially-scary change to my Windows environment? Back up the file and if things go sideways, just delete and restore the old version. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Windows runs better in a virtualized environment than it runs on actual hardware. It will be very hard to walk away from this.

I guess I'm in the minority here but I have big concerns about the announcement, as expected as it was. I still rely on Windows because there are some tools you just can't get in MacOS, and for the past ~10 years, I've been able to run Windows (XP, then 7, now 10) in a VMWare virtual machine. It works amazingly well and really is the best of both worlds. Even though there's an ARM flavor of Win10, that isn't that case, and may never be the case, for some Windows apps. I guess we'll see when we get there. I'd hate to have to go back to having a dedicated Windows machine. This is even worse news for anyone who recently dropped $50k for a fully-loaded Mac Pro.

Dave's not here, man!

Apparently the 61 passed EMI emissions testing and the 76 didn"t. Ferrite core was the cheap and easy fix, I"m not familiar with these keyboards but apparently the internal circuit cards are different for something. Do the 71 and 76 have different control panels or something?

You apparently have never been to the San Gabriel Valley. LA Chinatown is for tourists. SGV is where it's at for real Chinese food. Back to the topic at hand: I gave up my 4-6 times per month gig at the end of September. Just got tired of it for various reasons and wanted a break, which actually has been nice and recently I've been super busy with WFH software development contracting gigs. So that's been keeping me busy and semi-sane during the lockdown. It will definitely be interesting to see what live music looks like when we come out the other side of this. As others have noted, a lot of venues were operating on fairly slim margins and may not survive. One of my biggest worries is that the larger independent venues will all get assimilated into the LiveNation / Ticketmaster Borg collective.

I guess I'm not sure what the Preview feature you're referring to is. As for right-click, I assume you're using the Apple mouse? Right click works on trackpad just as you'd expect it to. I use an Apple magic trackpad with my iMac too, and I find the gestures to be quite handy. And it's a lot easier going between iMac and MacBook since trackpad works the same both places. I also have a generic Logitech mouse attached to my iMac. For one, Adobe Illustrator works better with a mouse. But also, I run Windows 7 and Windows 10 inside VMWare Fusion, and for some Windows stuff I find the mouse just works better than the trackpad. Have never used the touch screen interface in Win10. I'm curious what apps you find it handy for. I doubt it would work that well for Quickbooks or my software development tools that require the use of Windows. Reaching for a mouse is a lot easier than reaching for a screen, at least on a multi-display desktop setup.

Lots of good points being made in this thread. Last fall I wanted to get a more powerful laptop and I ended up buying a used 2015 Mac Book Pro Retina 15" off eBay for a thousand bucks. Many people consider this the high-water mark for MacBooks and I have to agree. No butterfly keyboard, still has Magsafe, still has SDHC slot, two Thunderbolt connectors, two USB3 connectors, and an HDMI jack. Almost immediately after purchase I was made aware of a battery recall, it qualified, so I sent it in and got the battery replaced. In the meantime I ordered a 2 TB SSD. In the end I think my total expenditure was about $1600 for a machine with a 2.5 GHz i7 processor, 16 GB of RAM, and 2 TB of SSD. Probably will last me a decade of solid use. Heck my 2008 MBP13 is still puttin' along. I put a 1TB SSD in it several years ago. I think that machine only has 8 GB of RAM tho. I keep it in the rehearsal space and it'll run at least a dozen tracks in Logic Pro X just fine. In general Macs age very gracefully.

Thank you for this thread. I'm at the end of my rope with Dropbox. The integration with MacOS Finder is great, but I too am annoyed that they double-dip by counting the contents of a shared folder against the storage quota of everyone who shares it. And I refuse to pay $10/month for their cheapest paid option. I would consider an intermediate option if they offered one. I don't need a full terabyte. Recently I needed to share some recordings with somebody, and after Dropbox blew up we tried Google Drive. I'm generally too skeeved out by Google to install their apps, so I just dragged stuff into the web browser interface. Worked well enough for a one-way transfer. I do pay for extra iCloud storage, mostly to wirelessly back up my iOS devices. I've never used their folder share or know how well it works for people using Windows.

You're assuming that they're coming in through the front door. if they gain access to the underlying password file, they can brute force crack as fast as their computing hardware will run.

This would not be a correct assumption, but it's necessary to understand the nature of the signal passing through that pot. Volume and expression pedals that pass *audio* universally would be log scale pots, because that's how we perceive the volume of audio signals. I don't know of a single digital keyboard whose expression pedal jacks pass audio. Instead, these pedals are used with DC control voltages, and anything that does that will use a linear pot because of the limited resolution of the ADC converters used to read those voltages. Tangentially related: there seems to be a persistent rumor that the Yamaha FC-7 uses a log potentiometer, and that isn't true. I took apart an FC-7 and wrote about it here. When people have trouble with an FC-7 it's usually because Yamaha and Roland pedals use different pinouts to the TRS plug.

Oh wow, that's terrible news. I never met Mark in person, but over the course of about 25 years we've had many extensive email conversations. Just a great guy. So sad. Be well everyone!

San Diego ringing in. Similar experience here. Seems like the big chain supermarkets like Ralphs (Kroger) and Vons (Safeway) are completely mobbed, and don't even think about Costco. But I've had pretty good luck with smaller independent grocers and Asian supermarkets. So far I've been able to find produce, milk, eggs, meat, fresh baguettes and all the other basics. Be well, everyone. Things are going to get much worse before they get much better and the only way through is through.

It's been a couple years, but I've shipped a couple keyboards across country using Reverb's shipping service. It's heavily discounted from retail rates and well-insured. One of the keyboards was an Sk1 that had developed a "hot" (high veleocity) note during transit. This is commonly caused by dust in the contacts and apparently in shipping some dust got in there. The buyer was able to take it to a local authorized repair shop for cleaning, I credited him the cost of that, and Reverb.com reimbursed me. It was a super easy claim process.

I tried Raper, I mean Reaper, and really hated it. Some people like it but I found it cumbersome. Yeah it's 60 bucks, and I guess you get what you pay for. The way I look at it, it's always nice to have different DAW options out there. For example, when I was in charge of uploading the weekly gigs to Dropbox, I'd do all the initial editing work work in Logic, but I haven't found a graceful way of splitting the songs up into individual tracks. Turns out Audacity does that really well, so the last thing I have Logic do is export a big wav file, and import that into Audacity. Audacity has a really nice mechanism for dropping markers at song boundaries and then exporting the individual tracks in whatever format you like, in my case .mp3s. The individual file exports all happen in one operations, with metadata and song titles being generated automatically from a template and marker info. There are things in Audacity that are a little clunky but man the splitting into tracks thing is pretty slick. So maybe the Behringer app would have something it does better than other apps. For free, be worth a look anyway.

No, you do not pay extra for the headliners. The ticket is a general admission ticket. There are two main stages (Acura and Gentilly) at opposite ends of the racetrack, and that's where the big headliners play. They do have various levels of VIP tickets that get you up close or under shade, but to be honest none of that is really necessary. At various other places in between the two main stages there are ten smaller stages where lesser-known or local acts perform, plus there's food and beverage vendors scattered around the infield. Bring a hat and sunscreen, and wear Tevas or Keen type water shoes without socks, because rain is not unusual and the weather changes quickly there. If there's a sudden downpour you will likely find yourself in shin-deep water. Flip flops will float away and tennies will get soaked. Also, nobody in New Orleans says "Nawlins."