Markay

Having watched 5 minor categories, each with 3 or 4 shorter lap races at the Melbourne GP, I don't see how that would produce a more interesting outcome on F1 circuits. In the closely controlled formulas like the Carrera Cup or Ferrari Challenge where the only variables are minor suspension, steering and tyre pressure tweaks, after 10 laps the field was seperated by more than 20 seconds, just like in the F1. It is clear that aero and chassis design are currently having a bigger impact than engine, or in some cases driver, in F1. McLaren had a horror season last year, Williams this year. According to some commentators, Ferrari's extra pace in the straight is more than lost in the corners. Maybe they, and Renault, Haas and others can fix it during the season, maybe not. Lets not forget Brawn won 10 years ago with the smallest budget and no sponsors, so sometimes a winning design can be achieved on a shoestring budget. Right now it seems that only Mercedes and Red Bull are in the sweet spot.

Ferrari should give up on team orders and let them race. Leclerc's comment after being told to let Vettel through, and Vettel could not pull away, I'm losing quite a lot of time. I don't know whether you want to know or not, but just so you know

China, the 1,000 GP. Bottas on pole, Hamilton, Ferrari, Red Bull, Renault, Haas make up the top 10. With the exception of Mercedes, in driver order. Maybe a good race, amongst the 2nd tier teams, Ricciardo was only 0.028 of a second slower than Gasly.

Regarding changing the race length or creating 2 races. Based on how the 5 supporting categories played out in Melbourne, even in Formula 4 the better drivers dominated and settled into a tight group of the same 3 or 4 at the front in each race. F1 is what it is, money invested in teams matters. The 2 highest budget teams currently outclass the rest, Red Bull has maintained their position with Honda power, McLaren has improved with Renault power. Renault now need to deliver a car at least as good as the Red Bull. The Ferrari junior teams seem to be doing better than the MB junior teams. Ferrari and MB now have more than 50% of all drivers on track under contract so it is really just Red Bull, McLaren and Renault racing MB and Ferrari. As a sign of protest I still wear my Mark Webber BMW Williams cap at the Melbourne Grand Prix.

The reign of the number 2's continues with LeClerc on pole in Bahrain.

No worries Joe, LeClerc is on the grass in Turn 1 in the pic above. Hamilton's floor damage was due to his error, like the way Hamilton avoids saying he damaged the car. His track record of winning from pole in Australia is atrocious. He has now equalled Senna and Schumacher's record of 8 pole positions at the one track. My take is that never before has a car made a driver look so good in qualifying.

How I saw the race. Melbourne turned on perfect weather for this year's 4 day festival of speed. Having attended 23 GP's here this was one of the best in recent memory, the F1, and including the supporting events, round 2 of the V8 Supercars, GT3, Carrera Cup, Ferrari Challenge and Formula 4. F1 - Bottas came of age today. Lead from the first corner to the last and never missed a beat. A clinical drive from hopefully this years world champion. After 25 laps gapped Hamilton by 30 seconds, reduced by 23 seconds when he pitted and then got back to a near 30 second lead. 5 laps from the end told by Merc to settle for first and not attempt to get an additional point for fastest lap. Thanked Merc for their advice, cleared some back markers and set the fastest lap. Hamilton managed to stay in front of Vestappen, but 8 laps before the end Vestappen was almost close enough to deploy DRS when he pushed too hard on the entry to turn 1 and cut the grass losing a critical second. Red Bull must be well pleased with Honda power on their first outing. Vettel wondered why the car was so slow, didn't hear Ferrari's reply, but a peep in the mirror might have given him a hint. LeClerc also pushed hard and was just in the DRS zone to overtake Vettel when he too cut the grass on turn 1. He backed off after that but I suspect that was due to team orders. He demonstrated that he has the talent to gap Vettel in future races. As for rest, both Williams finished several laps down.

Pics from Lap 1 Turn 1

And the most driven car in F1. http://i.imgur.com/28RAtUf.jpg

Well Q3 confirmed the continuation of the natural order of things from 2018. Some highlights, Bottas and LeClerc kept going faster than Hamilton and Vettel forcing both the no 1 drivers to go harder in the closing 2 minutes of Q3. Vestappen confirmed Honda gives him a solid shot at third. Norris did a stunning job getting the Renault powered McLaren onto 8th on the grid. Haas in P6 and P7 are the big improvers over the winter break. Ferrari powered cars dominate the top 10 with Raikkonen in 9th. No off track action pics so here is pic of the Renault nose cone with new aero from a pit walk I did on Friday.

P2 update. Hamilton, Bottas and daylight to the rest. Through T1 and T2 the Mercs appeared composed and under control. Every team racked up around 30 laps, more than usual, seems like they are all testing fuel and tyre strategies. Vettel defied my earlier prediction and was the second, not the first car, to run wide on T1. After missing the first 45 minutes of P2 due to a faulty seat Danny came out and managed to shave fractions of second off Vestappen. Yeah. The Red Bulls are handling well though, so all meaningless until Q3 late tommorrow afternoon. Williams are 4 secs off the pace so may become the mobile chicanes in this race. Kubica got on the gas too early exiting T2 in P1 and hammered the wall. Late in P2, 2 cars exited the pits baulking Hamilton on a hot lap so he appears to be a moving target. LeClerc was doing quick laps and staying on track but Ferrari had a gearbox issue late in P2 resulting in a spin. Pics 2morrow when, hopefully, I will not have had a big night out and up to the challenge.

Apologies to Zephonic in stealing his thunder but in Melbourne for the 4 day festival of speed and wanted to start the thread to post some pics from turn 1 and 2 once practice starts on Friday. Based on testing in Barcelona it seems Mercedes and Ferrari are again well in front. We won't know till Q3 when, based on previous Melbourne GP's, Hamilton saves his best till last. This evening (Wednesday) the old Minardi 2 seater was out doing laps, which I could hear from where I am staying, a reminder of how loud they were in the past. The current cars are whisper quiet by comparison.

Amplitude is the new kid on the block. Melda has been around longest and L'otary came out a couple of years ago. I have both Melda and L'otary and rate L'otary as being marginally better than Melda. But L'otary is CPU intensive so I use the sim in B5. It gives me all the overdrive I need and realistic fast and slow. If you want the Marshall stack distortion then Air's DB33 gives you that straight out of the box, but otherwise it is rubbish. As for iLok everything you read on the net will include a rant about how it has eat everyone's lunch. I would rather not use it or any copy protection scheme but if using it is the only way I can access some excellent VI's then I can live with it. When I did a machine upgrade and in error reformatted the HDD without deauthorising my 30 or so iLok VI's I wrote to each vendor explaining the situation. The first vendor triggered a reset to zero for their and many other vendor's iLok authorizations. The balance reset their licenses in my iLok account within 4 hours of the request. Ilok on disc licensing has its advantages and has never caused any issues for me. VI's devs have a choice, spend their time on building VI's or constantly updating a copy protection scheme.

Anyone reading this thread would think that music started in Europe 400 years ago. Having visited central Australia and experienced first Australians performing their music, on their instruments, music about the the land we were sitting on, originally composed 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, a very moving experience for me, makes this debate seem like a discussion about who did what to whom last week.

I have never taken an either/or position on any genre of music. As a long time subsciber to our local Brandenburg orchestra which exclusively uses baroque era instruments, I see our 5 concert season each year as an opportunity to immerse myself for 2 hours in well known, sometimes rarely performed works and on several occasions a world first time performance with improvistion if the manuscript is incomplete. But the founder and director takes an eclectic approach to each years program. So we have seen the orchestra provide music to on stage circus acrobatics, old and new spanish and the south american music, sometimes with dance, and a program featuring surfi muslim music accompanying dervish performance. They have also done Max Richter's 4 Seasons recomposed with Moog on stage so quite a broad range of musical exposure to music from western and other cultures. But I also enjoy going to ACDC and Yes concerts, reggae and anything in between. I long ago read the interpretive body of knowldege about the classical pieces I had to study and perform to pass the exam. Since then interest in, and my regard for, the opinions of those who write on the importance and cultural relevance of each genre of music has diminished with each passing year. I enjoy the arts from any period and will enjoy the Tate's pre- raphaelite exhibition at our National gallery next weekend. To me it is simply exploring the historical foundation on which current and future music and art evolves. It is an emotional connection, intellectualising how someone feels about and projecting it as the way others feel is a waste of time.

Well here is a contrary view on intefaces. I have used one for 5 years, currently a Focusrite Gen 2. I have always used the native Core Audio driver and have had zero issues. My interface has a large analog volume knob on it which for me is valuable part of gain staging when playing live, particularly when I want to give a particular patch a temporary boost in volume. So if you have an interface I would use it. Plug it in, turn on and OSX should recognise it. Select it as the default output in Audio Preferences and you are good to go.

The MS structure is Concert > Set (optional) > Patch > Channel strip. Each are saved as seperate entities. Once built patches can be recalled and added to any future concert and channel strips to patches. A Concert file is a collection of pointers to the concert's assets, patches. A patch file contains pointers to the patches assets which are channel strips. Or you can alias a channel strip so one instance can be run in multiple patches.

Also disables power saving, screen sleep and shut down.

That is because the audio processing load is shifted from the CPU to the ouboard DAC. One of the first things to try to reduce CPU overload.

Looks impressive David. Imgur has new format with fewer link options. Select one that has a .jpg extension and delete the before%20and%20after%20the%20link%20when%20you%20paste%20it%20here.

As this thread is about the "best" mono AP is there any point rehashing the mono v stereo debate?

Nah there has to someone here who has tested them all and come to an unbiased conclusion as to which is best in mono. Or we could just claim that the one we use is the best, in which case I will put the ball into play and nominate Pianoteq.

MainStage has an option that you can select to open the same concert when you next open MainStage. So turn on, open MainStage and you are good to go.

There was back in MainStage 2 days someone selling Famous Sounds for MainStage patches for about $20 for 30 or so sounds of the 70's and 80's. They were built using the Logic AU's so anyone who had MainStage had the AU's used in the patches. When starting out I found these useful as a hands on tutorial to see how each patch was built, which AU and effect was used, what settings were used in the AU to get that sound, and how they were layered or split. Plus there are lots of online tutorials, free and paid covering every aspect of MainStage and each of the Logic AU's.

MainStage is a host for Virutal Instruments and Effects. So what you mean is you didn't learn how to use Virtual Instruments and Effects. Hardware or software you have to learn how to use the User Interface to get what you want out of it. I don't think the challenge of learning how to use these would be any different to getting the sound you want out of one of the Kronos VI's or "engines".