MikeRivers

I don't think the software is required. In fact the author of the drivers is using it with Reaper and Pro Tools. Since Apple doesn't use ASIO Mac users are out of luck on this.

Oh, so this is about using only the hardware box, not the PARIS system. OK. I can get that. I'm in favor of being able to put something to good use that you already own. It's But does it really sound better than, say, a Focusrite Scarlett? I don't know. And it did have a nice control surface. Does that work with Pro Tools or Reaper?

 

I still have original masters for Linda Cohen's last classical guitar album in the PARIS format. So I'm glad to hear I may be able to transfer them to some other format.

I never got close enough to PARIS to learn what's inside, but doesn't it make WAV files somewhere along the line like every other recording system? Like any other DAW, the editing/playlist functions are internal and don't transfer to anywhere else - that's why everybody uses Pro Tools. However, a new ASIO driver would allow the hardware to get audio in and out of a contemporary computer. If the PARIS software will run on a contemporary computer, you could at least use it again.

Maybe.

There was another issue, too, and that's with the PACE dongle. The software that supports that dongle doesn't run under 64-bit Windows 7 and later (I don't know that the Mac situation is) and since it's a challenge-and-response piracy protection system, it needs new response codes now and then, and the last ones issued have expired. Maybe the $50 solution also bypasses the PACE protection.

By the way, PARIS is an acronym for Professional Audio Recording Integrated System.

Good to hear that someone's keeping it alive. Paris was a really great system, not just for its day, but, I'd say, for any day. Very well thought out, sensible user interface, and it sounded just fine.

Me, I'm still trying to help people keep their Mackie HD24/96 HDR and MDR recorders working. Few DAW editing tools make as much sense as on the Mackie HDR24/96. That's my preferred tracking system. If someone wants to take home a Pro Tools file, I give them a set of WAV files and send them on their way.

 

I gotta love people like Jack White who keep the old school traditions alive, because they work too and worked well for decades. I used them too. But there's nothing magic about them, the magic in any technology is what the people put into it.

It's hard to get people to believe that. The "vintage sound" was the sound of good musicians and good singers who could play together and, without nit-picking every breath or string buzz, record a song that caught the listener's ear. Sam Phillips didn't have any particularly exotic equipment - RCA and EV mics and Ampex recorders. That, plus his good sense of what was musical and how to get it on tape is what made hit records.

Today, moneymaker hits are made in a factory, and individuals just want to get their music out and maybe get a few thousand Facebook friends or YouTube plays.

There's no reason why you can't boot up Pro Tools and have a band play with gobos and be looking each other in the eye. Eventually, people who were not able to resist fads will realize they CAN resist fads.

And that's another problem - For most people, studios were the only place to record - studios cost money to build, staff, and maintain, and therefore recording was expensive enough so that cost was at least partially a "quality filter." If you were good enough, someone with industry savvy would foot the bill for your recording and hopefully sell some records, or if you were wealthy enough, you could book your own studio time and do whatever you choose with the recording. Today, for $100, anyone can record at home, so they do. And because they're using a DAW, be it Pro Tools or the one that came bundled with the $100 interface+mic package, they don't have to be able to play or sing very well, or put together a group of players and singers to work with them. They can, and do, piece things together using the technology.

Like the blind squirrel who eventually finds an acorn, they manage to put something together. Some keep at it long enough so that they have had time to learn not just how to work the technology, but how to record well crafted music, and come up with some good work. But that takes enough time so that most get bored and do something else - maybe make videos???

The line I always use at workshops is "all that matters is the emotional impact on the listener' date='" because people listen to music to have an emotional reaction. Sounds obvious, but people don't listen to music because they want to evaluate whether a guitar sound is an amp sim or a miked amplifier.[/quote']

 

If that was true, we'd have an awful lot of emotionally impacted people a lot of the time. I have music playing around me a lot, yet I rarely get emotional about something I hear. It fills the silence and occasionally catches my ear for a moment. But when I have a radio program playing and I'm doing something else, I can't tell you what the last song played was. But I'd miss the music if it wasn't there.

 

However, unless someone specifically asks me, I never listen to music to try to figure out if it's a real amplifier or a simulator.

 

[video=youtube;7fJmmDkvQyc]

I am not saying we put out stuff that is just sloppy trash' date=' or that hurts your ears at certain frequencies. [/quote']

 

Oh, but we do put out stuff that's just sloppy trash, and (for possibly different reasons) does hurt the listener's ears. That stuff shouldn't be put out or should be improved before it's put out. But there are defenders who say that this is "creativity" and people have a right to hear it. I exercise my right to not hear it, and don't really worry about what I'm missing because there's a few lifetimes of music out there that I enjoy. Much of it has stood the test of time and is as enjoyable today as it was 50 or more years ago. The new music that I enjoy follows the path and has the characteristics of the music that I enjoy, I remember, and that doesn't hurt my ears.

 

My point was, if it plays well on all devices and everyone that heard it likes it, isn't that the whole point really?.

 

Is there a song that everyone who has heard it likes? I doubt it. Some people, believe it or not, like music because it hurts their ears. Some like songs that make them cry. Some like songs that prompt deep thinking. Some like songs that they can never understand. There is no universal song or format or minimum standards of production quality.

 

 

The way that most music is produced these days lends itself to nit-picking. Few people bring a band into the studio, play some songs, maybe fix a couple of rough spots, and then go off to their gig to make some money. When you assemble a song from a bunch of scraps, you have to work harder to get them to all fit together and make something that sounds like music.

But that's OK, because mostly it'll get heard as a bit-reduced stream, while the listener is doing something else, but he wants it in high resolution because he has $600 earphones plugged into the smart phone.

I gave up with the survey after about 25%. I don't collect gear, I just have some instruments, some of which are very nice, some are pretty junky. I can only play one at a time. I don't go out of my way to add to my accumulation, but sometimes something interesting just falls into my hands.

And I don't play no rock and roll, so I'm embarassed to admit that I have three electric guitars, four if you count the pedal steel, and an Ampeg fretless bass guitar.

Originally posted by Rique Wow!   This thread has been revived more times than Michael Myer in a Halloween movie.   It just keeps going and

Because they're younger, they have more hair, (except those who have shaved it off) have more time to waste, and probaby have more disposable income than you do.

Face it, Craig, you just can't compete in the normal consumer world yet. Start off by buying a Blackberry, then get yourself some really cool ringtones (they outsell CDs) and get rid of all that sophisticated music on your iPod and load it up with pop pap. Then you'll be on your way to true enlightenment.

I never throw anything away and dread the day I have to move. Hopefully it will be when I move underground in a box and all my stuff will become someone else's problem.

I have some good friends who, for the first 15 years or so that I knew them, always had good sized houses. When their kids grew up, they moved to go with her job and got a two bedroom appartment. Their next move was to a slightly larger two bedroom apartment, and a few months ago, they moved to a three bedroom apartment in the same building. It's not that they needed space for more stuff, they needed more space for themselves.

When I went out to Seattle for six months to work with Mackie, I rented a two bedroom town house style apartment (left my house with a house sitter). Even though I did bring some hand tools with me, I really felt lost without my workshop. And of course there was no need to bring any recording equipment out there given where I was working. Still, I managed to ship out 1000 pounds of stuff.

I don't have it in me to get rid of stuff and move into a smaller place. It just won't work.

When someone in an on-line forum describes some obviously abnormal and even bizarre performance of a piece of audio equipment and tags it with the phrase "Is this normal?"

Yes, or an external hard drive. But I was thinking of backups for the recording drive whether it's internal or external.

If all you were using the laptop computer for was for gathering sound and all the real work would be done on another computer, then you could probably risk holding off the backing-up until you get the disk to the other computer. But if this is going to be your audio computer, you'd want some thing for convenient backup. Of course you could use an external DVD writer, but that's one more thing to carry.

I think I'd have to take a trip to Hawaii to pick out a nice ukelele.

Now, if you added an extra zero, I might be able to get something really useful, like some construction work on the room.

Doesn't "dedicated" graphics mean that the CPU and its RAM aren't used for graphics? Or am I mixing metaphors here? It's hard to keep up with all of this newfangled cheepcut technology.

It doesn't seem to have a DVD writer. I'd think that would be essential these days, particularly if you do recording on the internal disk drive.

I, too, would like to find a new notebook computer but once I think I've found the right one, it becomes extinct before I can buy it. ;(

I have an Adaptec Firewire PCMCIA card that has a power jack on it, but for the $20 it cost me, they didn't even include the power adapter.

I can understand the concern about drawing extra power from the laptop, though. They're getting down to fleapower motherboards and are getting more battery time out of smaller batteries (users like lighter) but there isn't a lot of reserve there.

But speaking of bus powering of outboard stuff, switching on the phantom power on a TASCAM US-122 when connected to my laptop computer would cause the supply voltage to to the US-122 (through the USB port) to drop low enough so it would shut down, and I had to unplug and re-plug it to get it initialized again. If the phantom switch was on when the US-122 was plugged in, it would come up OK,, but I guess the initial inrush current for the DC-DC converter was too much for the little laptop. I didn't have the same problelm when plugging it into a desktop computer.

Out of curiosity, I opened up a USB cable, put a 0.1 ohm resistor in series with the power lead and connected an oscilloscope across it to measure the transient current. It peaked at over 3 amps for about 10 milliseconds. I belive the USB spec allows for 500 mA.

Gee, and you used to be such a Mac guy. Most if not all Mac laptops have a 6-pin Firewire connector. At least last month.

I was kind of curious about that, too. Since Craig's an honest sort, he probably did have the knobs active, but in a stage performance, I'd probalby not risk anything but the vocal and guitar actually being live (or was there a turntable there, too? I wasn't sure).

I suspect that more than an ad (the polite term is "demonstration") it was just a way to attract people to the Presonus booth where they might see some stuff they'd be interested in. I thought the FaderPort (1 channel DAW controller) was pretty neat. Now if Craig was slamming that around they'd have a real demo.

Cool moves for an old guy.