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About dmitch57
- Birthday 10/23/1957
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You can store most of Logic's disk-space-hogging stuff - sound libraries, samples, and your working projects - on an external SSD disk, which costs way less than adding internal disk space on a Mac. Instead of paying Apple $200 for a half a TB, you can get an external 2TB SSD for the same price. Works fine.
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I've used two of them. Logic Pro 11 has a new Mastering Assistant which is pretty much hands off. You don't really have any control over, or even visibility into, what it's doing once it analyzes your tune. Meh. The assistant on Ozone 11 is much better. It can run hands-off, but you can go in and tweak the parameters for each stage it sets up (front end EQ, compression, dynamic EQ, etc. ). Nothing is hidden and you have lots of options. There are options for what you want the end result to sound like (rock, rap, jazz, etc.). Or, you can give it a recording of some other music and tell it "make mine sound like that". I've found some pretty good sounding mastering chains that it gave me starting points for.
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Their Best Work Later in Life
dmitch57 replied to Geoff Grace's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
I've been watching Ry Cooder play live since the 80s. He's 77 now and he just keeps getting better. He plays less flash and more sweet stuff now. It's kind of like getting wiser with age. -
Good idea, I hadn't tested the outlets in my studio for a long time. Alas, they all look good, everything is properly grounded. Very low noise floor for me, also, all the time. It's just static zaps that bedevil me. I'll get one of those grounding pads you touch when you start working. Maybe that'll help. Thanks.
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I have a Mac Mini and an LG monitor connected via Thunderbolt. Audio is Scarlett 8i6 via USB-C. The problem is static electricity zaps. Often after walking across the room, when I touch the monitor - any metal part including the stand - I hear a static zap in the main speakers (via the Scarlett). Amazingly, the Mac Mini does not have a 3-prong AC plug, so it isn't grounded on its own. I tried reversing the Mini's AC plug and that does not help. The monitor is grounded. It looks like Thunderbolt carries a ground signal, but I don't know if that means that the Mac is actually grounded via its TB connection to the monitor. I don't get the audible zaps when I touch the Mini. Or any other piece of metal even remotely connected to any of this gear. Only the monitor. Mac, monitor, Scarlett, and audio amp are all plugged into the same well-grounded AC circuit. This did *not* happen when I had an iMac. So it's got to be something about the Mac Mini or the LG monitor. The zaps are pretty loud; if the mains are cranked up, the zaps are downright scary. Anyone ever see/hear anything like this? Any words of wisdom? Thanks.
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I was in the room when that decision was made. It was part of the move from the closed-off old-school OS9 world to UNIX-based OS X. Yeah a resource fork was a good idea in its time, but the problem was, it didn't play well with any other systems...any other systems, anywhere. Try to send a file to someone using any computer other than a Mac, you'd need a special tool at one or both ends. Any data channel anywhere - if it wasn't specifically designed for connecting two Macs, then it didn't handle resource forks well (at all, actually). That made the resource fork mechanism more trouble than it was worth. The move to UNIX-based OS X was a result of the Apple/NeXT merger. Lots of Apple folks were unhappy with the decision to drop resource forks. NeXT folks, who had been using UNIX for years, were more positive about it. 🙂 Filename extensions were and are not the replacement for resource forks. Lots of Mac files don't need or have extensions. Executables of any kind do not need extensions. Magic numbers and file headers are the modern replacement. So I guess I'm saying that this particular decision by Apple to drop an old technology was actually driven by a need for more compatibility with other systems. Quite different from the decision to drop FireWire support (which I certainly find appalling).
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Still Laughing at Me About Physical Media?
dmitch57 replied to Anderton's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
I don't think it's storage issues that make movies disappear from streaming platforms. It's licensing. -
Why I Don't Use Compressors Anymore
dmitch57 replied to Anderton's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
I agree that general use of compression is less and less useful. One application I'll probably always use it for is certain high-gain lead guitar tones which need a lot of sustain. Compression before the amp is a super-useful way to get those sounds. -
Most reliable: Mackie 1402-VLZ mixer. I'm all for digital equipment, amp sims, etc.... But this Mackie, which is the router for all audio in my studio, works as well as the day I got it about 20 years ago; of course it never needs a reboot or a software update; I've never had to open it up to clean the pots or anything else. It's certainly the most reliable piece of gear in my studio. Least reliable: Roku Ultra streaming box. I don't even want to go into everything that was wrong with it; I ditched it for an Apple TV 4K and streaming is just so much easier now.
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(I'm allowed to post these because, as you can see from my avatar...) How many guitar players does it take to change a light bulb? One to change the bulb, 9 to say "I can do that". How do you make a guitar player stop playing? Put some sheet music in front of him.
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Now that it's out there, I hope folks, you know, listen to the song before pontificating further. It sounds like John singing to me...because it is him. It's not AI-generated. It's 4 Beatles performing on a previously unreleased record. The production is pretty nice (though the strings are kinda obviously derivative). Heck, Paul even ceded composer credit entirely to John, which never happened on a Beatles record before. It's not the best rock record of the last twenty years, or anything close. But I'm glad it's out there, and I'm glad I listened to it today.
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Switching from 44.1 to 48 kHz
dmitch57 replied to Anderton's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
My personal take is that as long as that number is not 100%, then there is no question: I am going to work at a sampling rate higher than 48K. I'll spend all day working on 4-bar section of music if it's not yet as perfect as I can make it. Even if 99% of the listeners won't know the difference, of course I'll still do the work. If there is a 1% chance that working at 96 is going to sound better, of course I'll work at 96. Why not? Disk space is vanishingly cheap. There is plenty of CPU power these days. I just don't see any reason NOT to work (and listen) in a way that maximizes the chance that my music - or anyone's music that I listen to - will sound better. Even if it's only 1% of the time. (My ears tell me that that number is greater than 1%, but it doesn't matter to me - as long as it's not zero.) -
So...Apple Had an Event Today.
dmitch57 replied to Anderton's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
I'd add the whole Apple Silicon (M1, etc.) chip line to the list of revolutionary Apple designs. That was pretty recent - 3 years ago this month - and Apple users are still switching over from Intel to Apple silicon and being amazed. It's not just the technical design which is groundbreaking (unified memory bus; RAM and GPU on the same chip as the CPU, and, let's face it, freaking fantastic performance). It's the idea of one company truly owning and controlling the entire stack from silicon to apps, for all their products. Nobody else has ever done it in the consumer arena. (IBM did it in their space 60 years ago....) We could go 20 years before anyone else does it. That's pretty big. I don't think they're slacking off at all. Sure, I wish there was a M3 27 inch iMac announced the other day; I'd buy one soon. Patience, grasshopper. -
Looks Like You'll Never Own Movies Again
dmitch57 replied to Anderton's topic in Craig Anderton's Sound, Studio, and Stage
Amazon Music has an uncompressed option: https://www.amazon.com/music/unlimited/why-hd So does Apple: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212183 Some other services do as well.