Tag: computer

New Computer Build Imminent

Posted on 2021-11-02 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

Snail on Keyboard It’s getting to be that time once again. Software technology has caught up to the hardware technology available at my hands, making my Music Computer interminably slow. Allow me to detail the situation.

My Music Computer is a 5th-Generation Intel i7-5930K with 32GB RAM. Its C: drive, where most of its VSTs are stored, is an SSD drive. I have precious few VSTs stored on a PCIe 3.0 NVMe drive. At one point in its history, it was a very fast system. However, with the buildup of VST Instruments, KONTAKT Instruments, general processing plugins, and so on, my system is no longer so fast. I’m starting to get crackling audio, sound subsystem dropouts, high latency issues, and other symptoms of an aging machine. I’ve upgraded it as far as is practical, with no further path left to upgrade for me. I must build a new computer.

My build job is complicated by the fact that Intel is about to release their 12th-Generation Alder Lake series of processors, complete with new Z690-based motherboards with PCIe 5.0 and DDR5 RAM slots. Very few PCIe 5.0 peripherals have been announced, and DDR5 RAM is thin on the ground so close to the announced November 4th, 2021 release date.

Of course, the upshot of all this is that predicted prices of the new stuff will be somewhat ridiculous for the time being, probably stretching into 2022. That makes pricing out a new system a difficult task at best. However, thanks to my son, I’ve been introduced to an online tool which makes this job a little easier. That tool calls itself the PCPartPicker.

PCPartPicker lists thousands of computer parts from across the spectrum and lets you select the ones you want. If you go a step further, it then presents you with a list of vendors it has found who carry the product, along with the price for the product for each vendor (shipping and tax included, if you’ve signed in and configured your state and local tax rate) and a “buy” link. You can buy your entire PC from one vendor, or you can spread it out among the cheapest vendors, or you can choose whatever combination you prefer. It makes pricing out a system much easier – no more messing around with spreadsheets and searching around with Google. The only drawbacks to PCPartPicker I’ve found are a) it does not yet include the Intel 12th-Generation Alder Lake and related products, so it is impossible to price out products that are listed as “coming soon” on vendor websites, and b) it does not include vendors like Provantage and CDW, who sometimes have lower prices (especially Provantage).

But I digress.

I have already purchased one component of my new build – a Fractal Design Define R5 mid-tower computer case – but, because of the uncertainties surrounding Alder Lake, I have no idea what I’m going to stick in it. I’m not even sure if I’m going to stay with an Intel CPU, especially if the prices balloon out of control. None of the Alder Lake CPUs get released officially until November 4th, but I’ve already seen online price gouging going as high as $1,800.00 for a top-of-the-line i9-12900KF, up from the announced MSRP of $629.99.

Overall, my son thinks the best time to buy is going to be between January 2022 and March 2022, but as I said earlier, my aging Music Computer is having so many problems that it may not hold on until then. I’m thinking that I may have to start the purchase sometime between Black Friday and the end of 2021. I don’t know how it’s going to fit into the house budget, but I’m going to have to squeeze it in there somehow (if I can convince my wife to go in on the purchase with me).

I’ll keep you updated on the build as new info becomes available.

My Beta Is Over. What Comes Next?

Posted on 2019-06-01 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

My two weeks of having my novel read in a Beta (or rather, a Demi-beta) format have come to a close. It’s now time for me to move on to reading someone else’s book and doing critiques for their work. It’s only fair – they did my book. That’s what Beta is all about.

The Beta period on Tapper was quite interesting. I learned several new things and had several old things reinforced (damn, I thought I’d fixed them). There will be a day when I go through the critiques with a magnifying glass in hand and try to make sense of them, but not now. I have too much of my own Beta reading to do (I’m trying to average at least six chapters a day).

That average took a beating on Wednesday and Thursday, unfortunately, thanks again to another medical problem. I had a simple eye dilation exam, for diabetic retinopathy (everything turned out fine, with the exception of some very mild early-stage cataracts, which run in my family). My eyes were pretty well shot for the rest of the day, which is unusual – I’m normally back on the computer after several hours, but I was very light sensitive, I had a bad headache, and my eyes hurt, especially when I looked at black text on a white computer screen background. I only managed to do one chapter on Wednesday.

Thursday, my headaches and eye pain continued. Thankfully, Scribophile has a “night mode” where the screen turns grey and the text turns white. I managed to slowly crank out my quota on Thursday. Again, thankfully, the pain was gone today, so I was able to turn off “night mode” and do regular critiques on Friday (5/31). Other medical issues tried to conspire against me, but I managed to fend them off long enough to get all six chapters done.

I did manage to get in one Tapper revision today, having to do with the first two chapters. Beta feedback showed me that what I thought was a clever opening could also be interpreted a different non-clever way. I fixed that, along with a couple of bits of Travis’s inner thoughts in chapter two. That’s as far as I dared go without a more in-depth study of the Beta feedback.

But, not to worry. I’ll have my time to take care of Beta details. Probably in a few weeks.

Musical Hardware Havoc

Posted on 2018-10-04 Written by D. Lee Jackson Leave a Comment

If you’ve been following me on Facebook, you’ve seen that I’ve had a couple of issues with music hardware over the past few weeks. If you haven’t, you might want to read on. There could be one or two educational points within.

It all started with a vintage synthesizer. Many years ago, I bought a Yamaha CS6X. It’s a very powerful synth, but circumstances have prevented me from using it in my music. That changed recently, as an opportunity to write more music presented itself. So, after I purchased a dual-level keyboard stand, I convinced my wife to haul the keyboard out of storage for me. We plugged in the power and the cables, then switched it on. I went to play it.

No sound.

I tried playing it through Cakewalk by Bandlab via my Arturia Keylab 88 controller. The level meters showed that a MIDI signal was going to the right place. Still no sound. I tried fiddling with the front of the patchbay. Still no sound. I messed with the cabling on the mixer. No sound at all.

That’s as far as I could go. You see, since I’m disabled (and still healing from surgery to fix a broken foot (a story for another time)), I can’t get to the gear that I originally assembled — in other words, the back side of the patchbay, where the problem likely exists. I’m going to have to wait until my son has time to come over to the house and help me. Don’t worry, he’ll be compensated.

The music hardware problems don’t end there, though. Another one hit me after a software upgrade. Allow me to explain.

Back when I started working on the Duke Nukem 3D 20th Anniversary World Tour project, I purchased a copy of Native Instruments’ KOMPLETE music software bundle. Talk about a powerhouse! It has samplers, synths, sound libraries, and more, all in one rather expensive bundle. Over time, I upgraded to the even more powerful (and more expensive) KOMPLETE Ultimate bundle. I’ve been using it ever since.

On or about October 1st, the latest and greatest version of KOMPLETE Ultimate became available. Of course, I had budgeted an upgrade to it, so I made the purchase and watched with great anticipation as the download commenced. Over thirty new sound libraries were included with the upgrade, all (I assumed) for use with the KONTAKT sampler that is part of the package. I assumed wrong. When the upgrade was finished, I fired up KONTAKT and looked for the libraries, only to find none of them listed in my database.

I went looking for them on my hard drive. When I found them and dug into them, I discovered to my dismay that they were designed for use with a piece of music hardware that Native Instruments builds and sells. That hardware is called MASCHINE. (Native Instruments does all the capitalization, not me, by the way.)

Sigh.

My options were few: either live with the fact that I had all of these untouchable sounds, or hunker down and buy one of the versions of the MASCHINE hardware. After some negotiation with my wife, I finally decided upon the latter. I chose to buy the entry level model, the MASCHINE MIKRO Mk.III. I got a good deal, thanks to the help of my sales representative at Sweetwater Sound, and by the time you read this, that model should have already arrived. It hasn’t as of this writing, though, so I’m looking forward to seeing how it works and am hoping that it doesn’t cause any problems with my Cakewalk setup.

Both my wife and myself have had about all of the music hardware problems we can stand for now. All I want to do now is write music. Please.

Some Health and Musical Stability, At a Cost

Posted on 2017-12-19 Written by D. Lee Jackson 4 Comments

The turmoil of November is yielding a tiny bit of stability in December. However, as the title of this post says, it hasn’t come cheaply. There’s been money spent, but there has also been pain and stress paid out. In return, I’ve been able to go outside, and I’ve been able to return to writing music for short periods. It’s been a long time since I’ve been physically and mentally able to do either.

Keep in mind that all of this has been made possible by my work with Dr. Andrew Konen of Dallas. We’re nowhere near done with treatments, but he’s helped me get this far, and for that, I’m thankful. Ask my wife or myself, though, and we’ll both tell you that we’ve got a lot more to do before we can close this out, if we can ever close it out. That much is questionable.

Now, let’s start with the music. I’ve had days where my pain levels have been steady enough for me to get up and be active, and my head has been clear enough to think about music. I need to keep my Voting Membership eligibility with the Grammy organization, so I need to put out an album by April 2018. Thanks to the stability, I’ve been able to work on that. However, I’ve had to make an investment in a new piece of gear, shown at the top left of this post. It’s a Focusrite 2i2 Generation 2 sound module. My 2i2 Gen.1 still works, but the 2i2 Gen.2 supports higher sample rates and better stereo separation for monitoring incoming sounds. The base price was $149.95, but when you figure in the State of Texas’s taxes, I forked out just over $162 for the new box.

I have plans for the Gen.1 box, though. You see, I used it to compose and record the new music for the new levels in Gearbox Software’s Duke Nukem 3D: 20th Anniversary World Tour. If you’d like a genuine piece of gaming history, you can get it by buying my Gen.1 box! I’ll autograph the original shipping box it came in and the 2i2 Gen.1 box itself. All I’m doing is looking to recoup $60 or $75 of the original box, since times are tough and my medical bills this year have been high enough to break my catastrophic deductible level. I’ll set it up so that it works for an extra $10. If you’re interested, let me know. We can start via the comments or the Contact page, but we’ll have to work out an exchange of funds from there.

If I get no takers, it goes on eBay.

The other part of the stability, obviously, has been my health. This one’s a bit trickier. I’d say my health has only been stable for about the last five days, with one hiccup when my pain level shot up to an eight for a couple of hours. That was just a matter of getting used to the new system Dr. Konen has laid out for me. It’s also a part of the price I’ve paid for that stability. I predict more hiccups, but hope for not many more.

I still haven’t had my epidural steroid injection scheduled. I’m starting to wonder if they’ve forgotten about me on that. A phone call would be in order.

All in all, the month has been more interesting than November. I just hope it ends better.