Can’t live with it… Can’t live without it

I resisted upgrading my operating system to 10.4.6 for months, mainly because everything was running smoothly under 10.4.5. Once again, I tempted fate and performed the OS update. Naturally, things started running a little odd. Peak 4 was stalling and crashing, which forced my hand to upgrade to Peak 5. I know there are probably some who are shaking their heads thinking “Why the hell do you use peak?”. It’s just part of my workflow, and I’ve become quite fast using regions and batch processing, so it’s virtually indispensable. Fortunately, Peak 5.2 seems stable under 10.4.6, so things are somewhat back to normal. My main gripe is that Peak 5.2 has this terrible lag between the moment you hit play, and the moment you hear something. I probably need to RTFM and tweak some buffer settings.

RB-303 Improvements

To get a feel for the new version of Peak, I picked up the RB-303 samples and started setting loop points. Looping and shortening the new sample set took a few days, but now the archive is drastically smaller than the current preliminary release. The sample directory is now a meager 4 megs rather than the unedited 74 megs, and for most applications, the sound is indistinguishable with short acid riffs.

The smaller samples have made it possible to add more flexibility to the NN-XT and Combinator patches, and I’ve devised a new velocity switching system that better simulates the accent feature of ReBirth and the TB-303. I’ll be posting the next preliminary release up soon, but there will eventually be some modifications to the skins.

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