[The Telenator]

kim, loving all issues re music and computers, this is a welcome and needed distraction during breaks. Now that I have a good handle on Podium I need to clear out a backlog of about 2 dozens tunes in various stages when I left Cubase. Whoa! This Podium truly kicks ass, and I’m using REAPER via ReaRoute or more commonly as a ReWire slave — one powerful and super hot setup. Took another little break earlier and went all through and did full customization of all Podium’s editors and misc. Some didn’t need much ’cause I really fell for Podium as is. Using mainly Digitech guitar gear into DAW via USB. The digitech has always sounded great, but the sound I’m getting blows this old geezer totally away. Hardly needs any further processing. All the groovy sounds being pre-processed outboard saving me at least 25% CPU to boot. Otherwise, I’m back to workaholic with no gigs till Valentines. Got to get caught up!

I know I like to run long when I post — kind of like talking to myself as therapy I guess, considering how quiet things are around here most of the time! I hope to put my verbal excess to good use late this summer and give Frits a break by going through a fine-comb edit of the Wiki/Guide. Any others editorially inclined out there? It’s getting way outdated and lots of little spelling, grammar, clarity glitches.

I think it’s actually a LAW: Designers should not have to write the manual. That’s usually reserved for hacks such as myself. Former career-track music magazine editor until I retired to return to the life of a starving artist.

Anyhow, for michi and others interested the actual meat of this particular post is quite brief:

SOUNDCARD INTERFACE ASIO

Yup, and to answer michi’s latest and re-occuring question, the answer is Yes and No.

Just like ASIO4ALL works just great for over half of all who need it, for a lot of others it will not work at all. Not completely related here but it just doesn’t like certain soundcards and software. In some respects we need to realize that audio on PCs is just now coming out of the Stone Age. The only reason there is any audio at all on computers is because kids demand to play video games and listen to Justin Bieber. No joke. Microsoft couldn’t care less about us musicians and our audio needs, so people need to get used t it.

I knew about this before, but I researched it again. His PC is probably good enough otherwise, although we have to guess. On most forums they won’t even acknowledge your presence if needing help unless you post EVERY spec, stat, detail, fork over your ini files, whatever.

Yes, it’s a flukey digital world we live in. Some PCs act like they have a true personality, some act like snots, just like some people have charisma and others can’t buy a job for any price. Something in relation to his use of Podium (apparently, and this is my theory) is locking down his whole works through the weak link of the soundcard. Don’t care what else it may look or sound like, or how many times and ways it may have worked on various other setups. You see this everywhere and on every forum all the time — it’s the soundcards and related that are halting, locking down, freezing, crashing, refusing to boot these computers. Plugin crashes are becoming less common. It’s the SOUNDCARD and the driver(s) involved.

I’m willing to bet the PC has a truly terrible card, one on everybody’s list; next, I’ll guess that his motherboard is close behind. The chip is probably just fine. They almost never die. One thing we can say for sure, though, it really has nothing to do with Podium. From my experimenting I’ve found the design is almost crash proof — unless you lock it up with a 3rd-party driver.

Cheers!