If you don’t want to upgrade to pro, the same article shows you how to disable the Windows update service, which will work on the Home edition. I went the pro route as the the control is then more WIN7/XP like when I had those set not to do automatic updates, but I could check when going to Windows Update in the control panel without faffing about with manually starting disabled services.
I used keep the computer disconnected from the Internet before the gig, but that didn’t save me in the example I gave above when I was on WIN10 home. It had been disconnected for a week, and it still decided to go into update mode when I didn’t want it to. I was also pretty certain I had set the active hours. I was lucky in that I had a spare laptop.
I currently use a tool to do this (click here) on all my live machines (Cantabile laptop and LivePrompter tablets)
This blocks Windows updates (so far pretty reliably) using various registry changes and other modifications - without the need for Windows 10 Professional. So far no negative effects that I have experienced.
I just make sure to deactivate it once a month and let all the current updates run their course - I’m all for Win updates per se - just don’t want them to happen in the middle of a gig or rehearsal…
I went the pro route as I always had pro versions of Windows until I was daft enough to accept the “free” WIN10 home update, so I decided I wanted to get back on Pro after that “experience” I had that I relate to above. When that laptop went into reboot just before sound check on its own accord (it was the creator’s update), it was well over two hours before it came back to life, and I decided I could not face that again, especially as at the time we were doing theatre gigs, where the Show had to go on (fortunately it did, via the backup laptop). With WIN10 pro, so far, so good…
Just downloaded it. I read the online manual (about 10 pages) and then watched Bedroom Producer’s YouTube tutorial. It’s looks much easier to program than Sforzando.
I had Grace in my live rig before switching to Sforzando. Basically a good bread-and-butter sampler; unfortunately didn’t always play nice in my setup (threw some nasty exceptions on trying to open it for editing), so I abandoned it for sforzando.
Actually, Sforzando is not so complicated: this is what a typical melodic single-sample-patch looks like:
So it’s the same things you would set in Grace:
the sample used
what its fundamental pitch is
the attack and release times
velocity sensitivity
how it tracks with the keyboard
Just in text form - once you get used to it, it’s actually faster…
For simple sound effect samples, it’s similar:
I’ve just set the key tracking and velocity tracking to 0, so it doesn’t matter how hard you hit the trigger pad and what note triggers the effect.
So no need to be afraid of Sforzando’s complexity - works nicely for simple stuff!
I agree that once you get text based editing down it’s much faster. Thank you for posting the examples, it seemed more complicated before I saw those. I’ll try Sforzando first.
