roncli.com blog

I've officially had it with my Sound Blaster Audigy.

First of all, Creative's customer support sucks. Second of all, Vista has been out for about a year now, and Creative has yet to write drivers for many of their sound cards, including the Audigy, that allows the use of all of the features the Audigy is supposed to be used for. The Audigy is what connected my computer to my J-Station, cheap MIDI keyboard, and my Shure mic, and now I don't have those connections anymore.

The problem is, I don't know what to do about it. I don't want to get a whole new sound card, because the ones I'm looking at are expensive. I also don't want to get something just to get rid of it whenever I decide to buy a NeKo. Problem with that is they no longer make the 76-key version, and have replaced their standard model with this absolutely stupid 61-key "Timbaland Special Edition", which apparently was designed with the help of Timbaland himself. THANKS A LOT YOU MUSIC-STEALING RETARD. Grr.

I was actually looking forward to getting a keyboard with more range than what I got now, and a 76-key beast would have been perfect. Now I'll have to find a spare keyboard whose price will probably be jacked up, deal with lesser keys again, or actually get a full-size keyboard that will serve as a control device, which would suck.

But until then, that means no singing, no recording live stuff off my piano, which I loved, and no exploring guitar recording, which I have been itching to do for a while now. Unfortunately, all solutions here will cost me a good amount of money, something I can't really afford until later on in the year, so my hobby seems to be on hold for now.

Labels: Music, NeKo, Sound Blaster Audigy

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Yet Another Roundup
Posted: 4:54:00 AM 0 comments

Not a whole lot going on. Here's a list of things that have captured my interest in the past month:

- Cute Trance Girls, or CTG Music as they'd prefer to be known, is back. Apparently some nastiness involving the server's host caused it to go down for a while.

- Trax in Space is slowly coming along. I just wish there'd be more development and bug fixes going on than there are. There have been some rather interesting discussions going on over there, with one in particular that's annoying me. Basically, a strung-out reviewer wrote some pretty bad reviews while he was high on something, which started an argument on review quality. Debate in book form ensued, mostly stemming from differing opinions as to what Trax in Space should be. Fun stuff.

- If you ignore the Timbaland junk, Open Labs has some pretty cool products, most notably the NeKo. Over $8,000 for the model I want, this all-in-one digital audio station is very impressive. I was going to go for a full studio solution, but I think that this will fit the bill nicely for now. Well, not now. Rather, when I have $8,000 to blow on music.

- Kathy and I will be vacationing in Niagara Falls, NY next month for a week. It's supposed to be us celebrating 6 years together, but we're a few months off this year. We were going to time it to coincide with a wedding, but that's not happening now. Oh well, we're still going up, and we're still going to have fun. Maybe I can win big in blackjack again.

Labels: CTG Music, Life, Music, NeKo, Niagara Falls, Open Labs, Trax in Space