Wednesday, March 26, 2008

CEntrance MicPort Pro


Here's a sweet little gadget my father in law showed me over Easter Sunday. It's called the MicPort Pro by CEntrance Inc. It is a 24-bit/96kHz broadcast quality USB mic preamp that is used by many big 3 letter acronym names we all know and love....you know, BBC, CNN, CBS.


This baby enables instant recording with your dynamic or condenser microphones and Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS 10.5. computers. It also features 48V phantom power and headphone output for zero latency monitoring.




This thing is awesome for someone who has a favorite mic and laptop but does not want to pack around a mixer. A podcasters dream. Field interviews. I could go on.


Check out this video of the CEntrance MicPort Pro and see if its next on your list of got to haves.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Mixman DM2


I ran across this at a garage sale about three houses down from my house. I really did not even know what it was except for the fact that it had something to do with turntables and it was a usb device so it would hook to a PC somehow. I asked them how much they wanted for it and they said 10 dollars. I then asked them if they had the software for it to which they said "whats that" and I said the disc.....long pause.......the CD....longer pause......the DVD. Ohhhh!, no we don't have that anymore, will it work without it? how about 5 dollars? Anyway I got it for 5 dollars, got it home and plugged it into my xp machine and what do ya know, no auto recognize. I didn't think it would but it was worth a try right.


I figured that would be an easy fix right, just go to the manufactures website and get the drivers like every other normal company in the world, no need to finish this sentence huh? It took me over a week of looking on forums and different sites to find a copy of the original software that came with this thing. I finally found a torrent on a forum and it was almost dead with one seeder (thank you unknown seeder whom we will never know who you are, you still rock) it took a week to get the thing downloaded. So I finally got it downloaded and burnt to disc and started playing with it and for a toy(which it turned out to be btw) its was pretty cool but none the less at the end of the day it was still a toy. You could scratch and make some little prefab beats and save them to their own little format for the mixman software and stuff. My kid loves it, but like I said from a musicians standpoint I would call it a toy.


I put it up on my little shelf where I put all of my older drum machines and other stuff that I don't play anymore but I still think look cool just laying around my studio on display. (cmon, you know you do that too) It set there for a month or two and I was looking around the net one day and somehow ran across a website called dm2.proboards23.com.

This website had a whole forum of Mixman DM2 users who used the hacked software called DM2 to midi. It turned the DM2 into a midi controller! I grabbed that thing off the shelf quicker than lager turns to pipì.


I had this thing triggering Ableton live in no time. I used it for about a month and it was pretty cool. Here is Mixmans website if you wanna check them out. I don't know if I would say it something to buy at retail price but pretty cool if you run across a deal like I did or some sweet eBay action. I also found a direct link to get the DM2 to midi software.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

To Vista or not to Vista, that is the question


It's been a while since I have posted. I have sat down many times in the last week only to get three words in and hear the words "DADDY COME HERE, or HELP MEEEE ". Anyway, no more excuses, if you have kids then you know and if you don't one day you will say "now I know what that dude with that blog was talking about".


One of my PC's bit the dust 3 days ago. I can't complain since this was one I brought back to life that a friend had retired and it was 8 years old. This time time rather than upgrading it and replacing the HDD I just said forget it and went to work and started looking for something new.


I ended up buying an open box PC (after working around computers they somehow loose their worth like anything else one works around everyday so I just cant pay sticker for a brand new bleeding edge machine anymore). Anyway, like I said, I ended up with an open box PC with a Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Processor, 400GB sata HDD, dvdrw, built in wireless g, blah blah blah. It had 2 GB of DDR2 RAM from the factory but it was running Vista so I went ahead and put 2 more in it. Overall I think I got a really nice PC and did not spend over 500 dollars on it even with the extra RAM so I am not complaining.


So now we come to the point of this post. I work with Vista all day long for a living and do not really have a problem with it 99 percent of the time. BUT..... (big word huh) 99 percent of my customers use their computers to surf the net and check email. I and most everyone I assume who reads a blog like this use their computers for more than checking their email so we might run into a couple of snags running Vista. I'm not saying, I'm more like asking.


All the way home I was contemplating removing Vista all together and loading my copy of XP Pro on this machine for a couple of reasons. One is that since I have been playing with Vista for over a year now I am over the initial WOW factor of aero-flip and the windows side bar (that took about a day) so the only thing I would really miss about Vista in comparison to XP would be the search feature. Two is I already KNOW all of my drivers for all of my third party software work with XP. and Three is I just wanna see how fast XP will run with a dual core processor and 4 gigs of RAM.


Now we come to my second delima. The computer that broke is not my studio PC. The PC in my studio is working just fine, it was our everyday user upstairs that broke. It has crossed my mind to take the new bad boy computer and use it for my studio (hence all the talk above about Vista not working with my third party software). Then I woulld use my studio pc for everyday use upstairs. BUT...theres that word again...BUT there is nothing wrong with my studio PC and I kinda believe in "if it aint broke dont fix it". The PC my studio is running on is a P4 2.something with 2 GB of RAM with 2 160gb sata drives in it and I have no complaints. It would also be a horrible pain in the head to reload everything again just to find something with the new machine was incompatible or to find out I did not gain any performance.


SOOOOO this is where my blog will hopefully prevail. Has anybody used Vista with Ableton live or any mainstream DAWs for that matter? Has anyone noticed a difference in you DAW's performance between single,dual,or quad core processors? Any feedback would be great, for now I think I'm just gonna put this thing upstairs and use it to check my Gmail.


I will say that even with Vista this thing seems to fly with all the junk stripped from it and 4 gigs so I'm happy for now even if I am just checkin my mail.