LP Update/Comment Thread

[IskatuMesk]

A new XXE and a new Coffee Hour are now available.

[IskatuMesk]

As I detailed in coffee hour, my mic has been having issues for the last while after I found it fell off the desk one time when I was sleeping. I didn't fall very far, maybe a foot or two, but the cord was rather short on it so the cord immediately got fucked when it went between the two desks. Luckily I had a long replacement cord I had bought with that drive for standing recordings I had been too lazy to put in, so in that cord went and all seemed well.

Until I continued to randomly lose connection to vent (about 1-2 times a day). I also began to produce very rare but very bad static during some using vent and I was able to catch the static once using audition.

I've gone through the motions of attempting to reproduce the problem, but to no avail. Reinstalling the USB device has also had no effect.

I can't actually unscrew the top of the microphone off anymore, it refuses to move. Unfortunately I can't even roleplay hardware technician because unscrewing the bottom doesn't seem to allow me to do anything. Probably glued shut.

The dangers of recording with this should be obvious given the history with alice. When an application loses hook of the microphone, even for the fraction of a second, it plainly stops recording mic input and never tries to re-acquire it. I've never actually witnessed it losing power - I suspect the cord getting yanked may have moved the usb input port a bit and either cracked the circuit board or pulled a wire or something. The fact I can't unscrew the top even with very high force is telling that the drop must have been rather violent (this thing weighs enough that it falling could probably cave in a skull).

Given I just used my money on a drive, I'm shit out of luck for quite a while. I'd be hesitant to spend money at this point, though, given I cannot 100% pinpoint it to a hardware issue.

I have a strategy I can employ for recordings which is to run audition alongside my process on the other monitor, because mic failure will immediately show up as the waveform going blank. I have to otherwise figure out what I'm going to do about this in the longterm. I could get another yeti or get a cheap XLR setup, but the cheapest equivalent quality starts at $200 CAD. The mic is like 5-6 years old so I got a good run out of it, but it's really disappointing to have yet another massive hardware problem so soon.

/edit

I have discovered there is the rare sharp spike of static in some recordings. Ugh...

[Audible Idiocy]

About the XLR setup we talked about. I looked at it again, and it seems you can shave off about 30 bucks from that price if you get an M-Audio M-Track II instead of the Focusrite. The other advantage is that I know the retardation of M-Audio pretty well, so I could help out on any technical issues there. Or if you feel like expanding your horizons, you could always cut off about 50 more bucks from the price by buying a used fasttrack on ebay.

The other advantage is the satisfaction of being able to pull that Asus card out of your rig permanently.

[nu1x]

That sucks.. microphones cost a lot, I just recently bought a decent one (Rode NT-USB). Try not to throw too much money out the window. Also yes, USB microphones like Yeti are pretty self-contained, and who knows what's broken, it's all in one chassis. To identify what's wrong, you need plenty of electric engineering knowledge, a tester, soldering iron, and plenty of online manuals / forum posts. Not really worth it unless you know what you're doing imo.

[Mucky]

I can't actually unscrew the top of the microphone off anymore, it refuses to move. Unfortunately I can't even roleplay hardware technician because unscrewing the bottom doesn't seem to allow me to do anything. Probably glued shut.

time to break out the heat gun

or failing that, hair dryer

[IskatuMesk]

We don't have anything like that, haha.

[Mucky]

how do you not even have a hair dryer

canada plz

[IskatuMesk]

Exposure to sunlight would surely melt it during summer. Probably the entire chassis, too.

Hair dryers are fucking expensive dude. Any kind of heating equipment is really expensive and considered a luxury item for government officials. I doubt they live anywhere cold enough to warrant heaters, though. But they all probably maintain trump-style hair.

In related news I switched the mic to another usb port on the front side as a last-ditch effort to rule out non-mic damage (assuming the port is damaged from the wire pulling it or some other odd issue creeping up). No power outages on it for a day and a half. I'd rather go for 2 weeks without issues before trusting a major recording, but I'm itching to finish DDDA sooner than later. For now I am burning through some league/heroes replays and keeping a really close ear for any static. So far, no one on vent or whatever has heard the static other than the one time. This is a very odd issue.

So much as touching a drive cable caused windows to flip out and claim it was unformatted and spam me with prompts to format it. Um, no. Had to restart it manually to fix that.

/edit

Nevermind, mic lost connection again. Whelp, that's it. I need new hardware.

/edit 2

Caught this crap with fraps. Didn't totally short and lose connection, but it definitely sounds like an electrical issue. I really have tried to take off the top of this thing, enough to strip skin off my hands. It's really, really stuck.

/edit

rip blue yeti 2/27/2016 7:34pm

My conclusion is that the impact from the drop caused the removable portion of the capsule to fuse to the motherboard. Attempting to turn the capsule to unscrew it was actually moving the motherboard, which is why the buttons were tight. The connector is what must be fucked up. It is now losing power at the slightest provocation just from trying to unscrew it again. I managed to move it so all the knobs were movable again but no dice. The damage was already done.

I've swapped out to the Samson Q1-U. The quality is a lot shittier and it sometimes produces a peak of static on my yelling but at least it should suffice until finances warrant a proper replacement.

[IskatuMesk]

17 new blizzard dota videos are now up. Produced some test recordings with the substitute mic. It's... garbage. But acceptable for casts for the time being. Not like I have a choice. Totally unusable for vocals (e.g. tech doc recordings). Tis a depressing spot.

[wibod]

17 new blizzard dota videos are now up. Produced some test recordings with the substitute mic. It's... garbage. But acceptable for casts for the time being. Not like I have a choice. Totally unusable for vocals (e.g. tech doc recordings). Tis a depressing spot.

[IskatuMesk]

this gif has potential

helps he looks almost identical to one of my cousins

[IskatuMesk]

If Canada Post would get their shit together I could put in the next link of the endless chain and get this show moving again. Otherwise I have been tidying up some unfinished business and I'm getting ready for a fairly big content release soon.

/edit 1

Extras has been fully synced to Gameproc and the thread updated in kind.

/edit 2

The only segment of Turok that was created in 2012 has been added to the Graveyard.

/edit 3

The first batch of site assets has been created - several of the content banners. As time goes on more assets will be created and integrated to help polish the site.

/edit 4

Mic has arrived. It has no stand and I have nothing that can hold it, but it performs as hoped.

http://www.gameproc.com/meskstuff/tekdo ... -mesk3.wav

thanks lavachu!!!!!!!!!

/edit 5

More Gameproc sorting done...

/edit 6

Ascherzon: if it's named favicon.ico it can't work for most browsers
Ascherzon: you can't even force call it with that name via html
Ascherzon: but change it to anything else
Ascherzon: it mysteriously works for everyone

[ArcCain]

The knife is the best weapon in Turok, at least the "new" one.

[IskatuMesk]

Is that because it glasses flesh?

/edit

Some new releases are now available in the Castovers section.

Laconius' people create an American game, Street Master. This masterpiece is a must-watch for people who cling to hope that the foreign world will produce good games.

Meanwhile, in America, Jay Wilson creates a high-definition masterpiece to put on his outstanding resume prior to creating Diablo 3 - Doom Troopers.

And more -

Ai Chou Aniki
R-Type 1 + 2
Sexy Parodius, in which I am sure I continually mispronounce "Parodius"
Diablo 1

/edit

The Blog button on GameProc should no longer get flagged by addons blocking social media.

/edit 2

I hooked up the ps2 to the capture card but concluded the quality I get from it is really not worth recording. I will try emulation again... though my hardware is extremely old and probably still doesn't support it.

/e 3

Emulating TS3 is not going to happen because it requires software rendering and my hardware can't take it. UGH

/e 4

I looked into emulating Xenosaga and, suffice to say, it's also riddled with problems.

PS2 emulation is not going to be a thing until I get a new machine in a decade or so.

Capturing from the PS2 is functional, but the streams are riddled with interlacing that destroys video quality. Progressive scan is a game-by-game hack and the inputs to activate it (which is silent!) don't seem to work for TS3. As a result, Xenosaga is likely to have the same issues. I had also hoped to do Shadow of the Colossus (very) soon, but that evidently won't happen either. Though I think HKS has a ps3 version I might be able to loot off of him in a few years whenever I see him again.

I did tell Nefarius I would do Dante's Inferno since he did Bubsy 3d. I've scrounged up everything and hooked up the ps3 controller so its battery can recharge. I want to do that + that golden axe game before summer hits. So, soon. Very soon. I know I am going to get very very mad. Though I am already very mad after wasting so much time trying to get the ps2 to work. So, we're off to a good start.

I'm grinding through DDDA recordings slowly but surely and I want to wrap that up ASAP so I can focus on FF6 and perhaps catching up to where I was in Spellforce.

Got some more league/heroes videos to upload but everyone stopped playing again so the flow of content has stopped other than one replay steak sent me.

/e 5

I've been messing around with a multi-band compressor. While the goal is to develop better compression methods for my VA, I am focusing right now on possibly updating or replacing the filtering I've been doing to videos for quite some time.

I've used compression in almost all of my videos - I started in SC2 when it was obvious my high/low swings in volumes was going to be an issue in casts. While I first used a very strong VA edit-specific compressor I, over the years, developed a very strong one-glove-fits-all compressor that handles all video production where necessary.

Of course, the big struggle with editing vocals is since the game audio and mic audio are a single stream any changes I make to the voice effect EVERYTHING. This is also why editing out any kind of background noise, like that from my fans, or dealing with volume imbalances is a huge pain in the ass. For reasons previously explored, there's no way around this.

Currently, I am experimenting with a compressor that can boost low volumes more favorably while having less overall distortion. I am experimenting with it alongside my new mic, so getting objective review on the results is difficult (especially without a proper seating arrangement for it). I'm also using DDDA as a test ground but, again, it's really hard to objectively estimate if my changes are positive, especially when messing with audio tends to hurt my ears really fast. My goal is to produce a most neutral compression possible whereas my current compressor sometimes "flattens" certain, especially louder, sound. However, my current compression setting is still above professional quality, so it's not the end of the world if I can't figure out a better solution. If I do, I'll do it in a new project and not an existing one like DDDA.

For reference, Diablo 1 part 2 is using the new mic in a weird spot with the current compressor settings.

/e 6

Went and caught up to where I was in Spellforce. Ready to continue recording when convenient.

/e 7

Spellforce has resumed recording and initial tests for mic are being conducted. I am having difficulties with large volume spikes on random words... but I did improve my basic compressor, I think. We'll see how things go!!

[IskatuMesk]

DDDA recordings are complete. Processing is around 80% complete.