CD's sent. Should reach you in about 6-10 days. Loads of loops and sounds to play with... I'm busy at work, I'll catch up with all this sound technology talk later...

Just got Fruit Loops Studio 4. It came free with my brand spanking new Sound Blaster Audigy ZS Platinum sound card

Now I must learn how to properly use the bitch.......

Loops... Reminds me of the module trackers (FastTracker 2, XM and MOD files. Samples...) Try searching for some mods, use FastTracker 2 to extract the sound samples out of them. That should give you enough loops if I understand correctly what they are.

I find that amazing to believe. I've been running my dual G4 840 for over two years using Logic, Reason and Recycle and have not had a single crash. And many other mac musicians I know have had minor or nil problems with thier audio set-up. It's all down to house-keeping and knowing the OS. It's funny. I've had more problems with my XP box than any of the mac's I use on my network. It got so bad that I don't even use the friggin' thing anymore. It's props my bathroom door open when I'm showering.

With mac's, the ram and hard-disk arrays are easy to upgrade. Almost most ATA or IDE drives will drop into a mac for formatting and use. Mac's hardly ever breakdown as the build quality is second to none, and in all the years I've owned various mac's I've only had one power supply blow on me.

Indeed.

It could be the fact that I am used to using Cubase, where you can set an external wave editor like Wavelab, or in my case Cool Edit Pro, to interface more or less as a shell extension of the Cubase Sequencer... I find this a very powerful set up, and yet it loads your settings and mix in around a second with a giga hertz of processing speed...

On the other hand, I actually served the last year of my time in a Pro Tools Studio, and I found Pro Tools to be extremely un-weildy and far less stable, which could be why I took a disliking to the mac... I don't like pro tools at all as a program, I think it is thristy for computer resources, less than stellar for stability and as user friendly as a cornered rattlesnake...

I don't really like mac's as much as PC's philosophically because I approve of the open hardware configuration of PC's, I build all my computer systems myself from components down to tightening the last screw, and I guess I'm just used to the pecadillos of the PC...

Also, the studio I served my time in was runing from a Yamaha 02R96 and this and Pro Tools plugins were being used for compression and EQ instead of outboard units, and I'm one of these nuts who prefers the old snakes wedding of cables, outboards and an analogue desk approach to mixing... I really love Spirit analogue desks, I think the pre-amps are fantastic in them, even the little cheap portable ones that I use for location recordings...

This is a photo of the O2R / Pro Tools setup... Not an outboard in sight... I'm the one with the bass guitar...

I found the best way was to create your drum loop, and then export all your your drums kick, snare, cymbal, hat, etc seperately (scrub all the other ones and do them all one at a time being careful to note how they sit in the drum pattern editor) and then use a wave editor to turn them into mono files and then import them into your sequencer... This means that you still, in your sequencer, have control of Panning, EQ, compression etc on each seperate drum instead of trying to work with the whole drum pattern as a single mix element...

I am quickly finding that out

Am now doing kicks seperate from everything......

Yeah, I always found them to need a lot of care and attention... They get lost in a mix so easily... I've even found myself double tracking them sometimes to make them louder and panning both tracks dead center... And compressing the fuck out of them...

Here's a great trick to get a good release on the compressor for kicks and bass guitars... If you take 60,000 and divide it by the number of beats per minute in your song, then keep dividing the result by two until you get a number between 50 and 100, you get a perfect tempo based pumping in your mix... then slowly turn up the attack until you get the desired envelope to your beats and basslines...

A compressor like the one that ships with the Waves bundle is good (the Waves C1 Compressor), since it shows you graphically how much your sound is being attenuated by so you don't end up overcompressing...

I am sometimes taking 3 different tracks of beats, two almost exactly alike and maybe a third for deep-end a little off. Starting with one for a bit of softness and kicking the next in with the third for a rich deep sound. It works pretty good. I made one song though I might have to go back over becasue it sounded good but crunches kinda awful in some parts due to a heavy bass linked with a deep kick. It can almost pass but me no likey. lol

I am probably going to upgrade to FL5 just for th edamn piano roll they taunt you with in FL4... bastards.... the icon is there give it to me....