Oh don't get me wrong, I HATE Apple with a passion, and now that Linux subsystem exists on Windows, at least I still have bash but still.
I'm running Manjaro these days... For my DVS I now use Mixxx instead of Traktor since the newer versions are epic. LMMS seems like a good one if you can figure it out.
Worst case you could always run Windows in a VM
There is a dent in the back of my stainless-steel kitchen sink from some small piece of gear flung into it in a moment of anger, can't even remember what it was. (I don't do things like that very often, but every once in awhile...
)Worst part is, the dent is near the rim in the back, so I'd probably have to pull the whole damn 2-bowl sink just to get half a shot at pounding it out reasonably clean. Makes me feel a tiny bit ashamed every time I look at it. Maybe I'll just leave it there as a reminder.
Hey George, I found an updated list for Linux... Renoise looks good.
15 Best Open Source Music Making Software for Linux
15 Best Open Source Music Making Software for Linux
Back in the 80's I tinkered with some primitive music software using dedicated hardware on my Apple II clone. About the time I was losing interest in that I wandered into Ace Music in Miami where the salesman gave me a pirate copy of Cakewalk 3.0 for DOS when I bought the required Roland MPU-401 MIDI interface. I hooked it up to my KORG DW-8000 and had a blast. I liked it and bought a legit copy of Cakewalk 4.0, and nearly every upgrade ever since. In 2013 Gibson bought Cakewalk and instituted a yearly subscription model...I went along. In early 2017 they offered a "lifetime subscription" again I went along, having used Cakewalk for almost 30 years. In November 2017 Gibson pulled the plug screwing over all of us who had paid for "lifetime subscriptions." No I won't burn my Les Paul, but I will never give Gibson another dime nor will a lot of other users.
So during this time I had collected the free, starter or lite editions of FL Studio, Ableton Live, Pro Tools and a couple others usually with a hardware purchase of some kind. I played with a couple, but I had learned the workings of Cakewalk and grown with it from a simple MIDI only editor to an extremely complex DAW that was quite different from the others.
My brief experiments with Ardour were more of a how can I do this without Windows than how to do this without Cakewalk. When Cakewalk died, I moved on to Ableton Live, which is almost a polar opposite of Cakewalk, but as my ability to play an instrument is diminishing, Live has become more of a tool for making music and making me think.
The last time I played with Ardour was 3 or 4 years ago It didn't hold my attention too long, so I wound up wiping that PC and installing W7 and an audio analysis system for the good sound card that was in it. That PC is now sitting under a bench and hasn't seen power in at least a year. Mixxx may be something to play with, but I didn't know about it until you mentioned it, likewise LMMS. The Youtube videos I saw make it look like an early version of Cakewalk, but most of the music in those videos is noise. So..
OK, there are two and a half PC's sitting under my workbench unused. Neither has seen power in about a year, but both were working W7 machines. My last Linux (Ubuntu and Ardour) experiment was on one of them before I decided to use it for a dedicated audio analyzer, in which I blew up the audio card. I had never heard of Manjaro, but it looks interesting. I will try it on the old PC (Core I5-4570) that was used for Ubuntu a few years ago....One question, KDE or XFCE? They both have their merits. If this works out the PC will be used mostly for music and maybe video. If I like it, I will find or make a better machine.
Yeah, there's a couple of other things on that list I'd like to try too.
I bought a W10 pro disk a while back when Newegg had a sale. it's currently on three different unfinished PC's but not authorized on any of them. it may stay on one if I finish something that I want to keep and use, but that would require some outdoor time and the cold stuff has arrived early this year. All three involve 7th or 8th gen Intel chips which won't work right with W7.
I am slowly losing control of my fingers and hands. At first I blamed the things like mice and keyboards and killing them gave me a reason to get another, but I know it's me. That was one of the biggies for accepting early retirement. My hands got worse while parts got smaller....LOTS smaller.
I got sent to college on Motorola's dime in the early 90's where I got a computer engineering degree. Programming frustrated me to no end sometimes, and I was working 50+ hour weeks while going to school full time and working at it hard enough to make the "deans list" several times. I recall one night where I was up late working on a program. Apparently I fell asleep with my head down on the keyboard which set off a repetitive beeping from the (probably 80286 class) PC. This sent me into some sort of weird dream where I was inside a video game. When I finally woke up......the PC died an ugly death and I had bloody hands.
Sometimes I make things that just refuse to work, they seem to laugh at my attempts to make them work. Many many years ago more than one of these died by ugly means like nuked in the microwave, or tossed in the pool while powered up, but I settled on death by power supply for some of my tube stuff that refused to work. Just turn up the voltage till it blows up.
So I built a little tube guitar amp for the Hundred Buck Amp Challenge several years ago. I use tubes that have 150 volt maximum ratings. The amp works, but sounds dull and lifeless. After wasting several weeks of time tweaking on it, I give up and turn the power supply up to 400 volts......Not only did the little amp survive, it ROCKED! And that's how I found out that you really can run a 50C5 at 400 volts!
Personally, I run GNOME because I love the overview and I don't like KDE, but I don't like Windows either. KDE is VERY customisable, but like GNOME and to a certain extent, Cinnamon, they are resource intensive. Right now All I'm doing is running a browser but I'm using 3.1GB of RAM. If you have less than 8GB, I'd go with XFCE (or get more memory, If you need DDR3 I have 24gb from my last machine available 2x8GB@1866, and 2x4GB@1600, both G.Skill I think). It kind of looks like Windows XP anyway. If you don't like it, you can try a different DE. You can have them all installed and select which one you use at login if you want.
Last edited:
"System halted" could come from several places.
The first is BIOS. If it can't find a disk boot sector, or a BASIC ROM, it cries and halts.
One of the obscure ones is BIOS keyboard stack overflow. Leave a heavy book on a PC keyboard and it will Halt.
The other one I am less sure of. IO.SYS bootstraps itself and then loads DOS.SYS. IO is in/out, DOS handles the filesystem. Since there is no filesystem at the hand-off, IO.SYS can't go looking for DOS.SYS, and will halt if DOS.SYS is not consecutive to IO.SYS. (This evolved into Win95: IO had the whole code, DOS was a dummy of minimum length because "some" code checked for DOS.SYS validity by length.)
I know a halt which is so hard it doesn't say HALTED. If you had a 5150, without a math chip, but had the DIP switch to say it did (oops), every program in the world would run except code compiled with MS QuickBasic *and* had any math, even "1+1". Something in the start code called the 8087, blindly, and waited forever for the interrupt and result.
> "Keyboard error: Press F1 to continue" when the keyboard was missing...
Frequently, if you plugged-in the lost keyboard and pressed F1, all was well.
So less stupid than it may appear. You could be in this situation with a keyboard switch (one keyboard for multiple PCs), or as you say, a keyboard lock switch.
I supposed you've noted that newer BIOSes have an option to "Ignore keyboard error", so it will come-up anyway.
Frequently, if you plugged-in the lost keyboard and pressed F1, all was well.
So less stupid than it may appear. You could be in this situation with a keyboard switch (one keyboard for multiple PCs), or as you say, a keyboard lock switch.
I supposed you've noted that newer BIOSes have an option to "Ignore keyboard error", so it will come-up anyway.
Last edited:
Coffee. Yes, I still know how to make camp coffee. I don't mind it, and sugar helps. But, I don't have time to mess around with things. So today I visited Tim Horton's a few times. The dog got a few "Tim Bits" (little round balls of dough, cooked), so he's happy. Around here in Georgetown, things shut down early, so I would love a coffee, but nothing is available. Plus I want a de-cafe at this hour. At least that's what my wife tells me I want.
Computer hell. Yes. I loved OS/2 after warp 3.0, and their advanced server was solid. Don't ask me about Microsloppy servers (junk). I agree with all the negative comments regarding windows. I'm trying to install W10, legit and everything. I'm going to put up Fedora, given that it's close to the commercial Red Hat version. I'm running Win7 mostly, XP and Win98 (to power some hardware that needs exclusive access to the printer port). I flipping hate having to run all these different computers only because Micro$oft can't seem to retain backwards compatibility.
Computer hell. Yes. I loved OS/2 after warp 3.0, and their advanced server was solid. Don't ask me about Microsloppy servers (junk). I agree with all the negative comments regarding windows. I'm trying to install W10, legit and everything. I'm going to put up Fedora, given that it's close to the commercial Red Hat version. I'm running Win7 mostly, XP and Win98 (to power some hardware that needs exclusive access to the printer port). I flipping hate having to run all these different computers only because Micro$oft can't seem to retain backwards compatibility.
So today I saw a cool little tuner and ended buying it. Its an old Sherwood S-2100 tube unit. It's very clean and looks complete - except that all the tube shields are missing!
So here I sit testing tubes, and being old I also test the new tubes. Most of the 6BN8's were bad (new, remember?) except for one. Same with the 6GH8A's. Sylvanias are bad, RCA and GE measure very well. I'm using a Stark 9-66, which is a type of Hickok, made under license in Canada.
The next hurdle is the multi-section filter cap. It's short with four sections at 250 V. This will be the pain to get replaced. Oh well, on forth!
-Chris
Edit: I had a pair of IBM 5150 computers, two floppies and a pair of Seagate ST-225 drives (that liked to fail). Turn it on in the morning and go get a coffee, then it was ready. DOS 2.0 was my first OS, I still have a good copy of IBM DOS 7, and use it on occasion. I used a menu called by autoexec.bat.
So here I sit testing tubes, and being old I also test the new tubes. Most of the 6BN8's were bad (new, remember?) except for one. Same with the 6GH8A's. Sylvanias are bad, RCA and GE measure very well. I'm using a Stark 9-66, which is a type of Hickok, made under license in Canada.
The next hurdle is the multi-section filter cap. It's short with four sections at 250 V. This will be the pain to get replaced. Oh well, on forth!
-Chris
Edit: I had a pair of IBM 5150 computers, two floppies and a pair of Seagate ST-225 drives (that liked to fail). Turn it on in the morning and go get a coffee, then it was ready. DOS 2.0 was my first OS, I still have a good copy of IBM DOS 7, and use it on occasion. I used a menu called by autoexec.bat.
Attachments
Chris, fedora is the research branch. Bleeding edge stuff supported for six to nine months then you have to upgrade to the next version. If you want close to redhat, go centos. Rh8 is the latest (havent looked at it yet), so centos8 would be the way to go if you want the latest version with long support.
Tony.
Tony.
I had, and fixed lots of those, and the RLL equivalent ST-238. The stepper motor driver chip got HOT, hotter than one of my overclocked sweep tubes kinda hot. The PC board was tightly screwed to the cast scrap metal housing, that heat rose up into the housing and the PCB would grow when it got hot forcing the frame to warp. If the PC had two hard drives, the top one was usually the first to fail.
Two failure modes existed. The stepper motor driver chips failed. If the chip was a Motorola, just change it. The SGS chips would turn the board brown, but rarely failed. Digikey had the SGS chips. SGS is now ST microdevices.
Warpage would cause seek errors (that clicking sound) because drives of that era had fixed tracks and a stepper motor. Loosen the board mounting screws furthest from the connectors and mount the drives upside down. This restored many dead drives well enough to recover the data. A few more could be recovered by popping them into the freezer for an hour or so, then running them cold.
In either case a hard "low level" format was needed to make new sectors on the drive.
At the time that Red Hat became a paid "enterprise" product, Fedora was touted as the "free hobbyist" version. It's future was considered unclear by community at the time, hence my, and plenty others, transition to Suse...this was maybe 15 years ago.
I was a beta tester for OS2, OS2 Warp, and OS2 Warp Connect. The IBM plant where the PC was developed was not far from the Motorola plant where I worked, and right across I-95 from the college I attended. IBM and Motorola were by far the two largest tech employers in south Florida. They are both gone now, but in the 90's there were 10 to 15 thousand employees between them. There was the typical migration from company to company, so having "Big Blue" friends or classmates was common. OS2 was developed somewhere else, but I had a direct phone number to the beta team.
I became known by them for one phone call......"UH, I dropped the printer into the shredder, how do I get it back?"....."Why would you do that?"...."To see what happened." It was not a trivial task to fix this, since OS2 came on a sizable stack of 5 1/4 floppy disks at the time. Yes, they idiot proofed the printer in my next stack of disks.
Warp 4 connect was a cool product once you got the X windows server working right. I was using it inside a Motorola plant and it was relatively easy to rlogin to someone's Sparc 10, and mess with their head, or more often just run software on their machine, but display it on mine. "How do you get HP's Unix based MDS (Microwave Design System) to run on a PC?"
I built EVB's for the chips that our group designed at Motorola. I used the printer port to send SPI commands to the chips and control other hardware on the board. In old versions of Windows it was a simple matter of throwing bits at an address 0x378 if I remember right. it got more and more difficult, until it became impossible.
I downloaded both versions last night. I believe that the machine has 16GB, and I think it's DDR4. I still have an old Core 2 QUAD machine sitting on the floor. I promised it to my grandson if he cleaned up his room....that was nearly 2 years ago. It uses DDR3 and has 16 GB. I can rob it's memory if needed.
@TubeLab,
I have been through several DAWs too.
FL5 is still my mainstay, along with CoolEdit Pro2.1.
But...
Have you tried Reaper?
A lot of users of Renoise also, and a Sony product that I cant recall the name of. Ableton is something I have partially avoided, and had no opportunity to use (I run Vista, still - no reason to upgrade it with the hardware I have)
Many of the guys I speak to on a UK facebook production group, give the software high praise for a more modern tracker program - given that many of us have progressed over the years from software such as Octamed on the Amiga/Atari.
The odd few still use Octamed!
I have been through several DAWs too.
FL5 is still my mainstay, along with CoolEdit Pro2.1.
But...
Have you tried Reaper?
A lot of users of Renoise also, and a Sony product that I cant recall the name of. Ableton is something I have partially avoided, and had no opportunity to use (I run Vista, still - no reason to upgrade it with the hardware I have)
Many of the guys I speak to on a UK facebook production group, give the software high praise for a more modern tracker program - given that many of us have progressed over the years from software such as Octamed on the Amiga/Atari.
The odd few still use Octamed!
Last edited:
A long time ago a coworker asked me to figure out some software that he had bought for his kid. It was Fruity Loops 3.something. I got it running for them and tinkered with it for a while, then forgot about it. The name changed to FL studio because of a "disagreement" with the cereal company. Several years ago Amazon was running pre Christmas sales and offered the entry level FL studio for something like $29, so I got it. Lifetime upgrades are FREE, so it's now FLstudio 20, but I have never spent much time with it. I remember using CoolEdit years ago, but I think it was Audacity that pushed CoolEdit off my hard drive.
I think that I played around with an early version, but don't remember much.
I have used Eagle to do PC board layout since DOS version 2.something. I have frozen at V5.11 because I refuse to pay Autocad $600 per year to design simple tube amp PC boards. They require the full "PRO" version due to the large board size and will not compromise. I used Mentor Graphics and Cadence products at work depending on which department budget was paying for my work at the time. Remembering the shortcuts, menu picks and hotkeys for three different programs was a nightmare for me and I had to keep a small notebook with them all written down.
Logging in to my Ableton account reveals authorizations for Live 4, Live 5, then Live 9 and 10. So this means that I spent some time with Live in the mid 2000's then picked it up again when Cakewalk crashed. It took a bit of getting used to, but once I got past the initial learning curve, it works for me. Ableton marked a Live only controller called PUSH. When PUSH 2 came out, I got a PUSH 1 cheap on Ebay, so I'll probably stick with Live until there is a reason to change, or another DAW sticks in my mind well enough to not cause memory issues.....I still need a Cheat Sheet for Live.
I looked over the top 15 Linux list that kodabmx posted and saw Guitarix.....I gotta try that one. I have trouble playing guitar any more due to nerve problems in my hands, but I keep a guitar plugged straight into my PC at all times so that I can just pick it up and play quietly through the headphones or speakers without an amp.
I have been using TH3 from Overloud, but mainly for two or three presets that I have created. It would be neat if I could stuff a sound card, a simple PC, and a small amp / speaker into a portable battery / line powered box.
I kinda skipped over the Commodore / Arati phase of personal computers. I went from DIY computers based on the SWTPC 6800 system to Apple II clones, to IBM clones.
A Singapore company has acquired the rights to Cakewalk from Gibson, and is now offering it as a FREE download for PC only. I tried it when it was first offered and it would not recognize my existing plugins ans settings, but recent news says that's all been fixed. One of the UK music magazines now has it on their Freeware list with decent reviews. I may or may not try it again....haven't decided yet.
Last edited:
I think I'm still stuck on FL5 just because, in all honesty, I had the free evaluation, and a code for full version from the friend I was given software from, many years ago.
CE pro was a free student version, with the basic VST and VSTi only, which we got when we started a Music Production course, again a good few years ago.
Subsequently, after years of moves, the CD got lost/damaged, and so I still use the same v5.**, with its bugs and issues.
But if I upgrade to a Win10 machine, I will fork put for the latest and greatest version of FL and what is now Adobe Audition.
I have found the hardest thing to adapt to is the workflow of production, pattern sequencing in FL and then tracking/mastering in CE.
Most of my breakbeat making mates use Ableton and rave about it, but many of the more old skool electro/ambient guys rave about Renoise and Reaper - I still cant get my head around it!
My somewhat dysfunctional workflow, naff as it is, is the only way I can work - other than a 4 track tape deck.
These days in the small time I get to play, I find I end up noodling in FL with Styrus plugin.
Sadly, age does unfortunate things to us all - in only just in my 40s, but the onset of what I assume to be arthritis, means I have less ability to play guitar than I used to have.
Not to mention, lack of practice and losing the ability to remember songs, I could once play end to end - means I often get stuck playing Wish You Were Here, and Cats in the Cradle, more often that I'd like!
CE pro was a free student version, with the basic VST and VSTi only, which we got when we started a Music Production course, again a good few years ago.
Subsequently, after years of moves, the CD got lost/damaged, and so I still use the same v5.**, with its bugs and issues.
But if I upgrade to a Win10 machine, I will fork put for the latest and greatest version of FL and what is now Adobe Audition.
I have found the hardest thing to adapt to is the workflow of production, pattern sequencing in FL and then tracking/mastering in CE.
Most of my breakbeat making mates use Ableton and rave about it, but many of the more old skool electro/ambient guys rave about Renoise and Reaper - I still cant get my head around it!
My somewhat dysfunctional workflow, naff as it is, is the only way I can work - other than a 4 track tape deck.
These days in the small time I get to play, I find I end up noodling in FL with Styrus plugin.
Sadly, age does unfortunate things to us all - in only just in my 40s, but the onset of what I assume to be arthritis, means I have less ability to play guitar than I used to have.
Not to mention, lack of practice and losing the ability to remember songs, I could once play end to end - means I often get stuck playing Wish You Were Here, and Cats in the Cradle, more often that I'd like!
HEY, my favorite settings for TH3 is surf music reverb......I'm still playing Wipe Out, Walk Don't Run and other surf music songs from the 60's.
It's weird how you can remember songs from your teens, but not all the stuff you played since then. There are lots of possible reasons, but seeing Jimi Hendrix play live was the first time I really figured out that I wasn't going to be a rock star. That sort of dampened my hours of guitar practice.....I spent more time blowing up electronics and building amps.....If you can't be good, be loud!
Speaking of loud, I just scored a set of Klipsch RB51 speakers for the low price of free.
Haven’t yet decided if they will be relegated to the shop at work or not. That was the intention when I set out to find the free stuff anyways, and couldn’t see what they were until I picked them up.
That’s a nice tube tuner there, hope you can find some tubes for it.
Haven’t yet decided if they will be relegated to the shop at work or not. That was the intention when I set out to find the free stuff anyways, and couldn’t see what they were until I picked them up.
That’s a nice tube tuner there, hope you can find some tubes for it.
Hi phase,
Thanks. I got it repaired and cleaned today. It only needs an alignment now. There was some nasty brown-black tar and other substances from cigarettes out of the front panel. I was very worried about the lettering on the glass, but nothing bad happened to it through the cleaning process. It's looks amazing now, I don't know if you can see the difference in the pictures or not.
Now to find proper tube shields.
Really nice score on the speakers! You'll enjoy them.
-Chris
Thanks. I got it repaired and cleaned today. It only needs an alignment now. There was some nasty brown-black tar and other substances from cigarettes out of the front panel. I was very worried about the lettering on the glass, but nothing bad happened to it through the cleaning process. It's looks amazing now, I don't know if you can see the difference in the pictures or not.
Now to find proper tube shields.
Really nice score on the speakers! You'll enjoy them.
-Chris
Attachments
I dragged out all my old but still working computers. It turns out that I had 5 that were not doing anything. One is about 10 years old, and still has Vista on it. Two were 2nd gen Core i5's with 8 GB of memory. Both worked and had valid authorized W7, so they will live on to do something useful. Another had a Pentium G3258 in it which I had overclocked into the near 5GHz region. I had another PC fail last year due to bad motherboard caps. I recovered a good Core i5-4690K from it. This chip will kick the overclocked Pentium out of its socket.
That leaves this PC. It has a 6 year old core i5-4570S chip in a 7 year old Asrock mother board with no video card. I added a 18 year old M-Audio Delta 1010 8 X 8 audio card, connected up a 4K TV set to the HDMI output, and a 19 inch 1080 X 1920 monitor to the DVI output. There was a 480 GB SSD with an unauthorized copy ow W7 installed. The machine booted but only the 1080 screen was recognized.
I popped the Manjaro KDE disk that I made last night and hit the go button. After asking me the usual install questions, no choice for dual boot was offered. It was wipe the boot drive or start over.....OK KILL W7. Dual boot is only supposed to work with W10.
The install took maybe an hour and the only thing it asked me for was to plug in an Ethernet cable, I had forgotten it. No drivers, or anything...it just said DONE.
I was expecting a cluster of stuff that would need fixing, but it just works. 4K video on the TV, yes, as good or better than the other computer. Both monitors work correctly. I haven't got a means to test all the I/O's on the old audio interface yet, but good stereo audio is coming out of channel 1 and 2.
I'm typing this reply on the Linux machine. I decided that I need to pop the two spinning disks out of the machine and hook them to a W7 box to see if I need to save anything before formatting them for Linux.....then it's time to download some software and play....tomorrow
That leaves this PC. It has a 6 year old core i5-4570S chip in a 7 year old Asrock mother board with no video card. I added a 18 year old M-Audio Delta 1010 8 X 8 audio card, connected up a 4K TV set to the HDMI output, and a 19 inch 1080 X 1920 monitor to the DVI output. There was a 480 GB SSD with an unauthorized copy ow W7 installed. The machine booted but only the 1080 screen was recognized.
I popped the Manjaro KDE disk that I made last night and hit the go button. After asking me the usual install questions, no choice for dual boot was offered. It was wipe the boot drive or start over.....OK KILL W7. Dual boot is only supposed to work with W10.
The install took maybe an hour and the only thing it asked me for was to plug in an Ethernet cable, I had forgotten it. No drivers, or anything...it just said DONE.
I was expecting a cluster of stuff that would need fixing, but it just works. 4K video on the TV, yes, as good or better than the other computer. Both monitors work correctly. I haven't got a means to test all the I/O's on the old audio interface yet, but good stereo audio is coming out of channel 1 and 2.
I'm typing this reply on the Linux machine. I decided that I need to pop the two spinning disks out of the machine and hook them to a W7 box to see if I need to save anything before formatting them for Linux.....then it's time to download some software and play....tomorrow