NSKit, some really good and free acoustic drum samples:
the aim: to create the best sampled acoustic drum-kit available on the net for free. or maybe just the best sampled drum-kit, period.
I have been busy and tired and annoyed. My modem, which half blew up a month ago, blew up the rest of the way this morning. It seems like every time I leave here and come back, something is a little bit more broken. I'm beginning to suspect people are breaking in here and using my stuff just a little bit too hard. I've been trying to put my little album compilation together, which has been about 50/50 good experience and neurotic waste of time experience.
I had a three day addiction to Grand Theft Auto: Vice City which is now thankfully over.
I've been reworking the forums on Stripcreator to deal with community issues. The forums really get only a fraction of the traffic compared to the rest of Stripcreator and yet they are a million times more annoying to maintain.
I keep almost posting things here, but they're all links stolen from Scott Andrew.
Here's a link to some free one-shot drum samples for Muzys, Reason and/or DR-008.
Found here. Made with this, by this guy.
As prophesied, my song I Think I Started A Trend has taken a tumble on somesongs. It's down to #4 for the week, with a 7.5 score. Pretty neat stuff.
My last sound card related entry in this journal ended on a hopeful note. That was a lie sent to me by God to destroy my mind and soul. In the end it turned out that 12ms was the latency I could use without it clicking, which was about what I was getting on my Darla24 with WDM drivers. So then I decided to try the SPDIF from my Boss GT-6 to the Mia, hoping that digital audio would provide more awesome clarity and thereby justify keeping the Mia. Sure, about the same latency, same driver issues, but hey, SPDIF. I hooked it all up and not only was the sound quality not really significantly better in my opinion, but there were tiny little clicks recorded with the audio.
I had had just about enough clicking. I tried to isolate the problem, failed, decided to be done with all of this bullshit and return it. On Saturday I returned the card and found out I could only get store credit, which is something I had suspected. So I ask them to recommend me another card to try out and they suggest the Audiophile 2496. It was $50 cheaper, so I took a chance on it.
I brought it home, installed it. First of all, I noticed no real significant sound quality difference other than that the inputs seem much louder than the Darla's. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or what.
The ASIO drivers that come with it actually work, which is kind of cool. The on card MIDI port is emulated, which is something Cubase SX tells me is bad and wrong.
When Cubase loses sync on the Darla24, there's usually an audio dropout (click and silence) while it gets its bearings. On the Audiophile there's a harsh, very loud buzzing noise during this drop-out period. That is stupid and annoying.
So my hopefully final decision is to return the Audiophile and be happy with what I have until the next generation of cards that promise things like stability and general awesomeness come out.
In the end, I don't know how much of this is my fault and how much is the card's fault. My system is a pretty standard setup with not too much strangeness, but other people claim to be running happily with these cards. I also may be demanding a bit more than the average user, but there doesn't seem to be any higher-end option that isn't just the same thing but with more outputs and breakout boxes tacked on.
But whatever. I'm done with all this crap and am now trying to figure out what else to blow my $300 music store credit on.
It is the 26th anniversary of my existence today. How about that.
It's been a busy week here at Brad Sucks headquarters. My website Stripcreator reached its 100,000th created comic strip, which despite my best efforts has triggered some sort of wave of nostalgia in me. Almost two years of running that site, over 100,000th comics. Very strange. I spent more time than I should have reworking my other site In4mador and I'm not quite done yet, though I think it can probably coast as-is for a little while.
I still need to whip this Brad Sucks page into shape, what with its default web design and all.
So as a test of my ability to record a song in Cubase SX, I put together this short little rock track called Quit Complaining. My first problem with it was that a few friends of mine had issues with the ending, which I'm not sure how to fix. So I'll wait until someone gives me specific instructions.
My second problem with it is that I just recently found out that the verse guitar riff is almost exactly the same as the riff in "She Hates Me" by Puddle of Mudd (which I like a lot). They're fairly different tracks, but yet I'm still apparently accidentally a hack, which sucks. I usually prefer to deliberately be a hack instead of having it surprise me like this.
So I've uploaded it. You can check it out and judge me. It'll be fun.
Quit ComplainingGenre: Rock/Pop Time: 1:48 Date: 10/25/2002
I wanted to test out my Cubase SX and threw this quick track together. Then there was a little bit of internal drama afterwards, but then that seemed to fade away somehow, as though I were too lazy to continue caring.