what was your worst hardware purchase of all time?

KU · Post by KU » Mon Jan 07, 2008 4:45 am

condra wrote:A really huge crap old organ. Piece of shit.

wow i have one of those too! its like 300lbs sitting in my parents house. its a 40's wurlitzer organ with like 50 12ax7s in it. It actually sounds pretty ok but that thing is stationary for keeps. way more trouble than its worth.

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:11 am

Sibanger wrote:
Machinesworking wrote:..... NI are on my shitlist again for Battery 3, freezes Live for up to five minutes before you can use the Session/Arrange views! Blah, I'm going to end up buying the complete Ableton 7 suite just for guaranteed stability......... of course as soon as I do Battery will stabilize...... blah.
Is that since the 3.03 Battery 'upgrade' ?

Seems like it, it hung a bit before the upgrade from what I recall, but now you got me curious..... still have Battery 2 on the G5...

Seems to be a mac problem so far.... Ew the mod on the NI forum is a windows guy who has no issues so....

ewistrand · Post by **ewistrand** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:16 am

Machinesworking wrote: Seems to be a mac problem so far.... Ew the mod on the NI forum is a windows guy who has no issues so....

Yep, I'm not seeing that at all. Is anyone else seeing this with 3.0.3 on either platform?

ew

tricil · Post by **tricil** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:48 am

Machinesworking wrote:
Sibanger wrote:
Machinesworking wrote:..... NI are on my shitlist again for Battery 3, freezes Live for up to five minutes before you can use the Session/Arrange views! Blah, I'm going to end up buying the complete Ableton 7 suite just for guaranteed stability......... of course as soon as I do Battery will stabilize...... blah.
Is that since the 3.03 Battery 'upgrade' ?
Seems like it, it hung a bit before the upgrade from what I recall, but now you got me curious..... still have Battery 2 on the G5...

Seems to be a mac problem so far.... Ew the mod on the NI forum is a windows guy who has no issues so....

try engaging full screen in live then disengaging it... i thought it was a live bug until you just posted that and i realized it only happens on the battery tracks.

anyways, switching from full to back or vice versa makes it work

ewistrand · Post by **ewistrand** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 6:03 am

tricil wrote: try engaging full screen in live then disengaging it... i thought it was a live bug until you just posted that and i realized it only happens on the battery tracks.

anyways, switching from full to back or vice versa makes it work

Hmm... now that's interesting. I'll pass that on; thanks =)

ew

Machinesworking · Post by **Machinesworking** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 6:07 am

ewistrand wrote:
tricil wrote: try engaging full screen in live then disengaging it... i thought it was a live bug until you just posted that and i realized it only happens on the battery tracks.

anyways, switching from full to back or vice versa makes it work
Hmm... now that's interesting. I'll pass that on; thanks =)

ew

Ew is everywhere!

parma · Post by **parma** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 9:12 am

ewistrand wrote:
tricil wrote: try engaging full screen in live then disengaging it... i thought it was a live bug until you just posted that and i realized it only happens on the battery tracks.

anyways, switching from full to back or vice versa makes it work
Hmm... now that's interesting. I'll pass that on; thanks =)

ew

I'm on a mac pro and have the same problem with the same workaround (resizing the window).

However, I have one live set that uses a large rex file in Battery (lots of slices) and the GUI for Battery doesn't open, instead giving the beach ball of death. The track will continue to play however - but Live's GUI becomes unresponsive and I jave to "force quit". this is with the latest version of Battery and Live. Before this Battery update, the Battery GUI would take a couple of seconds to load, but it would always load.

brightonalex · Post by **brightonalex** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 1:39 pm

sparklepuff wrote:
Machinesworking wrote:
rozling wrote: I know how you feel. I am stubbornly sticking with it though because a) I won't be able to afford new MIDI controllers for a long time, b) I want one with dynamic displays anyway and can't afford an SL and c) I'm kind of addicted to the custom user page functon. When you have user pages set up the way you want them it's actually very sweet.

Oh yeah and d) I would get sweet f-all for this if I sold it
if you haven't upgraded to Kore 2 for some reason, then I would.
Kore 2 is everything I hoped Kore would become, Kore 1 got trumped by Lives Racks, and other DAW innovations to the point to where it didn't fulfill it's promise IMO.
Also, realistically if you don't have Komplete 4-5 then Kore isn't half as cool. The new step sequencer, and other things in K2 make it worth it and some IMO.
I'm just happy as shit being able to scroll through presets in Kore like you would on a workstation synth, that alone sold me.
Which brings up why the fuck did Ableton switch to that 'productivity killing browser based double click..... oops I opened up another of the same dammed effect instead of browsing presets' way of searching presets????
Ok, Ok, Ok, I spent the $59 to upgrade to V.2 software. Maybe throwing just a little more money at this thing will make it usable.

Bollocks I just bought one of these second hand after Future Music gave it a good review. I thought it would be a good way of getting sounds from massive, absynth etc on the cheap!

Its interesting how Future Music, Computer Music etc have never in my memory said "this is an absolute piece of shit, don't even think about it".

noisetonepause · Post by **noisetonepause** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 1:45 pm

Machinesworking wrote:Ew is everywhere!

Yeah.. I wonder how he finds the time, between the daily defrags and Rekaktor reinstalls..

ewi - John Nowak says hi!

monoschall · Post by **monoschall** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:14 pm

brightonalex wrote:
Bollocks I just bought one of these second hand after Future Music gave it a good review. I thought it would be a good way of getting sounds from massive, absynth etc on the cheap!

Its interesting how Future Music, Computer Music etc have never in my memory said "this is an absolute piece of shit, don't even think about it".

Future Music/Computer Music hype *every* thing that comes out on the market - don't forget, they need to sell ad space... (the Live special is good though)

I prefer SoundOnSound - much less hype and much better reviews.

rozling · Post by **rozling** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:29 pm

monoschall wrote:
brightonalex wrote:
Bollocks I just bought one of these second hand after Future Music gave it a good review. I thought it would be a good way of getting sounds from massive, absynth etc on the cheap!

Its interesting how Future Music, Computer Music etc have never in my memory said "this is an absolute piece of shit, don't even think about it".
Future Music/Computer Music hype *every* thing that comes out on the market - don't forget, they need to sell ad space... (the Live special is good though)

I prefer SoundOnSound - much less hype and much better reviews.

I normally treat Future Music as a 'tabloid' style rag for quick consumption/amusement, but I've gone off them completely after a very recent issue where they reviewed Kore 2 they said, and I quote "Don't even think about running Kore 2 on less than a dual core machine." This is basically a classic case of a reviewer just presuming that because a piece of software is new it is a CPU hog. I'm running K2 fine on my lowly 1.6Ghz Tablet (1.25gb RAM).

Sound on Sound... they started going <slightly> downhill about six months ago IMO but I've got great mileage out of the last issue (the one with the in-depth piano recording articles).

@ monoschall: see my post above, I think Kore 2 is a good way to get those sounds on the cheap

I've been well impressed with the included sounds so far, to the extent that I'm starting to regret spending the money on Komplete 3 thru 5 in a way (but I probably wouldn't have gotten Kore 2 if I hadn't got them, thus completes the ciiircle of life).

brightonalex · Post by **brightonalex** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 2:46 pm

Thanks Rozling, its me thats the cheapskate. My plan was to use the Kore 2, and then buy some "refill packs" or whatever that you can download from the NI site.

roby · Post by **roby** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 3:23 pm

Well, I'm sure the Akai AX73 is a great synth, but the one that I bought was just shit.

ewistrand · Post by **ewistrand** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:01 pm

brightonalex wrote:Its interesting how Future Music, Computer Music etc have never in my memory said "this is an absolute piece of shit, don't even think about it".

Maybe because it isn't? I've been using Kore since before it was released (I've got one of the first production controllers).

A lot of the bad vibes generated by v1 in my opinion was due to people not understanding what it was; they thought;
1) it was a MIDI controller (which it's not);
2) that Kore would automatically map itself to your plugin (which it does for the most part; however it follows whatever weird quirks the developer used in assigning parameter IDs, so in most cases you'll have to make your own pages anyways)
3) that you can run USB audio interfaces at low latencies with the same minimal impact as a PCI card solution (which is definitely not the case).

rozling wrote:I normally treat Future Music as a 'tabloid' style rag for quick consumption/amusement, but I've gone off them completely after a very recent issue where they reviewed Kore 2 they said, and I quote "Don't even think about running Kore 2 on less than a dual core machine." This is basically a classic case of a reviewer just presuming that because a piece of software is new it is a CPU hog. I'm running K2 fine on my lowly 1.6Ghz Tablet (1.25gb RAM).

It's even funnier because Kore doesn't use multiple cores...

noisetonepause wrote:Yeah.. I wonder how he finds the time, between the daily defrags and Rekaktor reinstalls..

Well, I do defrag daily. I haven't had to do a Reaktor reinstall in years, though- the only time I do is when I do a Windows reinstall (about once every year and a half).

ewi - John Nowak says hi!

How's John? I haven't heard from him in ages...

ew

popslut · Post by **popslut** » Mon Jan 07, 2008 5:01 pm

roby wrote:Well, I'm sure the Akai AX73 is a great synth, but the one that I bought was just shit.

I bought one of those for £100.

Even the guy that sold it to me urged me not to buy it. "It doesn't even make a good master keyboard" he said.

"It sounds really weak, the action is terrible and every so often it sticks out random 127 velocity values."

And he was right.