AMD Radeon & NVIDIA Quadro graphics cards together

I recently purchased a Radeon Vega 56 graphics card to go in my PC. I already have a a Quadro M2000, which is good in that it does 10 bit OpenGL (i.e. Photoshop can use it for 10 bit output), but it isn't very good for running modern games. So I purchased the Radeon card for that purpose, and it should also work well for other tasks with its 8GB of HBM2 memory.

Before I purchased the card I spent quite a while researching if the two cards could be used together. There seemed to be various conflicting information. From what I read, it seems that with NVIDIA cards you used to be able to run a Geforce and a Quadro at the same time, but that is no longer possible. It also seems that running a Radeon and Radeon Pro in the same system is not possible. Running a Radeon and a Quadro seemed possible, so long as both are not in use at the same time.

The advice seemed to be to set up dual boot - one OS that has drivers for the Pro card while the non-pro card is disabled. Then another OS for the non-pro card, with the Pro card disabled.

Well, I installed the Radeon in my system, and it seems to work okay without any messing - I can have one monitor in my Quadro, one in the Radeon, and no crashes or anything. The card performance does seem rather limited and I did get crashing when I tried undervolting it. But I suspect this is down to silicon lottery / useless reference cooler rather than any driver clashes.

Something I haven't tried yet is connecting both cards to my main monitor (so I can switch input on the monitor to switch between which card the monitor is running off), but I can't see there being any issues.

Of course, I can't say that all Radeon cards work okay with all Quadros, but at least in my experience it works okay for the two cards I have on my system.

Alesis Multimix 16 USB 2.0 crackling over ASIO4All

I recently purchased an Alesis Multimix 16 USB 2.0 mixer, while this is quite an old and outdated mixer it has the benefit that it can send all 16 channels separately over USB to your PC (rather than just the mix like most modern mixers). In Ableton if you select ASIO as the audio driver type then you can only select 1 device, which is used for both input and output (as far as I know). But this isn't what I want - I want 16 channels in from the mixer, then audio out to my speakers, not back to the mixer.

So to get round this limitation I use ASIO4All. In ASIO4All I select the multimix as an input device, and my speakers as the output. In Ableton I then select ASIO4All as the ASIO device to use.

I was testing the multimix with a microphone input, and found that when I was talking into it there would be occasional crackling. Plugging headphones into the multimix there was no crackling. If I set ableton to use the multimix as the ASIO device, then there was no crackling (but getting the multimix to output only the signal received via USB is a right pain and latency was terrible).

I messed around with the buffer settings quite a bit, but it didn't seem to make any difference at all. Eventually I tried a different USB cable and USB port (one of the recommendations online was making sure you don't have it plugged in a USB hub, but straight into your PC). Amazingly this actually fixed the problem. The original USB cable works fine, but it seems the issue only occurs when plugged into the rear USB ports on my PC. Plugged into a USB (3) hub I get no issues at all.

What's especially strange about this is that whenever I have had issues with USB devices before, it has always been that they need to be plugged into a rear USB port, and that plugging into a front port or hub is the problem. But with the multimix it seems the issue is reversed.

Cheap USB sound adapters quick review

Back at the start of December last year, at work we were looking at USB sound options. On Amazon there were a few that were extremely cheap, so I thought I might as well order some for myself, even though I don't need any. They were sent from China / Philippines / Thailand, so took a while to get here, the last one arriving just yesterday.

I thought I might as well do a quick review on them, though I only tested the sound output capability, not the microphone in.

Two of the items I purchased actually turned out to be the same model, there were:

• USB 2.0 Mic Speaker 5.1 Audio Sound Card Adapter - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B000N35A0Y £0.85
• SODIAL(TM) USB 5.1 Stereo Sound Card Adaptor (Windows 7 Compatible) https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B008KGL2L2 £0.78

The other one, which is a different model was sold as:

• USB 2.0 External Sound Card 3D 7.1 Audio Adapter - https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00WJVGDX6 £0.39

Although all these claim to have surround sound, they actually just have a single basic stereo audio output (and a single mic input). The 7.1 adapter says as part of the product description Comes bundled with Xear 3D Sound simulation software, and turns your stereo speaker or earphones into a 7.1 channel environment!. It didn't actually come bundled with any software (all 3 adapters were just in unbranded little plastic bags), but I presume that you can use software to (likely badly) simulate a surround sound effect when using headphones is how they justify labelling them as surround sound.

The blue '3D Sound' adapters both work the same, as you might expect. Sound is quite tinny and lacking in bass, but if you didn't have anything to compare it with, you may not notice this. That is to say, while the audio quality is not particularly great, it may well be 'good enough', particularly given the price.

The '7.1 Channel Sound' adapter I initially thought was faulty. Using my Creative EP-630 in-ear headphones there was heavy static and when I tried to play a song (or any sound) it would just create a high pitch tone. I then read some of the Amazon reviews of the USB sound adapter and saw some mentioned that if the headphone's impendance is too high, the USB adapter may not supply enough power for them to work properly. So I tried my Takstar Pro 82 over-ear headphones, and was pleasantly surprised. There was no static and the sound was pretty much the same as straight from the PC's headphone socket.

The '7.1 Channel Sound' also features buttons for mute mic, mute sound, volume up, and volume down. I didn't test the mic mute button, but the others all worked fine with my Win 10 based PC.

To sum up, if you're interested in just adding sound to your PC / laptop for as cheap as possible and don't care too much about the sound quality, then I'd suggest getting one of the '3D sound' models. If you do care about sound quality then I'd suggest you should be willing to spend considerably more than £1 and get a decent (well reviewed) adapter from a more well known manufacturer.

Annoying VM issues

I spent all this afternoon trying to get my VM working so I could get some work done. I got a new PC recently, and if I tried to save settings in the BIOS then it wouldn't POST. So I updated the BIOS, and it seems that by default in the new BIOS settings hardware virtualisation is off, so when I tried to start my VM it wouldn't boot. So I turned on hardware virtualisation in the BIOS (which did save properly now, though it seems the failure to POST was due to RAM settings, not BIOS version, and it's actually worse on the new BIOS version).

After doing this vagrant started creating a new machine when I ran vagrant up, rather than running my existing VM. So I thought I'd leave it for later and just run it on my laptop (since no changes had been made there). But then that had exactly the same problem, and created another VM instead of booting the existing VM.

Back on my PC I found this thread: Re-associate vagrant with vm. The main piece of advice there is:

• Ran vagrant status
• At this point the VMs where still listed as "(not created)".
• Ran VBoxManage list vms to find the ids of the VMs
• Went in to ./vagrant/machines/dev/virtualbox/id and updated the id
• Ran vagrant status

After that I got a successful result, and so ran vagrant up. But it couldn't ssh into the machine as it had generated a new private key. So I thought I could just copy across the backup of the folder where the vagrant config files for the VM were. But after doing this it went back to trying to create a new machine again, and removing all the vagrant config files.

Running VBoxManage now, I saw that the correct VM wasn't even listed. But it was listed (the only VM) in the VirtualBox GUI and the VirtualBox config file. I tried running VirtualBox GUI as admin since I was running VBoxManage as admin, but still the same.

Eventually I just restarted the PC, ran VBoxManage again, and now it showed only the correct VM. I copied the vagrant machine config files back over from the backup, ran vagrant status, and it all looked good. Ran vagrant up, and the machine started up correctly!

If the same thing happens again in the future, hopefully I'll remember this blog post so I can sort it in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours.

eBay watchlist cleaning

Seems I only ever post on here now when cleaning out my eBay watchlist of old items. Oh well...

Eh? Where's my post gone?!

eBay watchlist cleaning

So, it's that time again when I clear out completed listings from my eBay watch list and make a note of any that I think sold particularly cheaply or expensively. If you're wondering what the point of this is, it's just a reminder that good deals on expensive items on eBay do come along every so often, you just need to be patient.

• Fuji 56mm f/1.2 lens faulty sold for £300 inc P&P. It was described as SUSTAINED IMPACT AT SOME POINT, AF UNTESTED, MF UNTESTED, OPTICS GOOD, MOUNT IS COMING OFF BODY, APERTURE SCALE IS STIFF HARDLY MOVES. Seems a lot of money for a broken lens to me.
• Sigma EX 300-800 mm f/5.6 APO HSM Lens for Canon sold for £2025 + £200 P&P. A very good price, but quite risky. The seller only had 1 feedback, which was a purchase (not a sale) over a year ago. Furthermore, the seller was located in Hungary. Generally these types of deals tend to be dodgy, but the buyer left positive feedback, so it seems they lucked out on this one.
• Le Creuset Double Oven Glove (new) sold for £18 + £3 economy delivery. That's currently £2 cheaper than Amazon, but I'm pretty sure Amazon was quite a bit cheaper at the time the auction ended. (CamelCamelCamel shows the price on Amazon seems to go up and down constantly).
• Mamiya 645 Pro TL Prisim kit with 45mm and 210mm lens sold for £365 + £25 P&P, which is a pretty good deal.
• Mamiya 645 Camera, 80mm f/1.9, 2x Vivitar TC, 45mm f/2.8, 110mm f/2.8 lenses and flight case sold for £294.99 + £10 P&P, which is an excellent deal. Just the 80mm lens by itself is worth at least £200. I would have bid at least that amount myself if I hadn't just bought myself the 80mm lens for said 200 smackers.
• Leitz Canada 280mm f4.8 Telyt visoflex lens sold for £200 + £10 P&P. Not sure on this as it's not a common lens, but I think that was a pretty good deal, especially considering the as-new condition.
• Canon EF 8-15mm f/4L Fisheye USM sold for £523 inc. P&P. A very good deal. Had a crack in the lens hood, but that doesn't really affect performance.
• Canon FD EOS Converter sold for £300 + £12 P&P. These are pretty rare (a genuine Canon model), I think this was actually quite a bit cheaper than the normal selling price but not totally sure.
• Cokin Creative Ring Flash sold for £15 + £5 P&P. Not sure how I missed bidding on that one. No box or anything, but a good price.
• Voigtlander MACRO APO LANTHAR 125mm F/2.5 SL For Nikon sold for £1,562 inc. P&P
• Voigtlander- nikon APO LANTHAR 125mm - F/2.5 SL - 90mm 3.5 SL - 180mm F4 SL sold for £2,495 inc. P&P, which is presumably a good deal given the price of just the 125mm macro lens. I think the other two lenses are even rarer than the macro.
• Xbox 360 S 250GB Development/Debug Console Boxed sold for £273 inc. P&P. This seems like an excellent deal. Not sure why it was so cheap as current development models of consoles tend to be very expensive normally.
• Canon EF 600mm f4 L sold for £1,171 + £25 P&P. A good deal, but it was missing the gelatin filter holder, which I think is needed for use. And no hood either. (Accessories / parts such as these for the superteles tend to be pretty expensive).
• Panzer Dragoon VHS sold for £2.70 + £3.35 P&P. This was one of those annoying occasions where I was intending to bid on it, but thought there was longer until the auction finished as I had forgotten to force-refresh my ebay.
• Sigma EX 300-800mm f/5.6 APO HSM DG Lens Used Excellent NIKON fit sold for £2,250 + £121.70 P&P. A very good deal, this included both the Sigma padded bag and also a large photo rucksack that fits the lens. The P&P cost is a bit weird though.
• Nikon 400mm f2.8 AF-I D lens sold for £2000 (collection in person). While not the latest version of this lens, it seems a pretty good deal for an autofocus fast super tele.
• Nikon AF-I 600mm f/4 ED lens sold for £1,700 + £41.20 P&P. Again, an old version of this lens, but still quite a good price for an autofocus fast super tele.
• Steel Battalion Line of Contact Controller Xbox Original Used Once To Test. PAL sold for £85, collection only. A very good price if you lived near the seller to collect it.

Extracting audio from video and generating a cuesheet from a tracklist

I quite often listen to mixes on Youtube. Only problem is, you need an internet connection to listen to the music and on some videos the mix seems to be constanty interupted by ads.

The solution to this is download the video - there are plenty of free Youtube video download tools available. But then you have a video file that's much larger than it needs to be (because you only want the audio track), and can't skip from one track in the mix to another.

(If you feel guilty about downloading the video you can always donate a few dollars to Google and a few cents to the video uploader and ASCAP or the equivalent organisation in your country to make up for the lost ad revenue).

So to this end I decided to write a script that could be used to extract the audio from the MP4 video file and generate a cuesheet based on the tracklisting (copied from the video description). And I thought I might as well share it here.

For the initial setup you'll need MP4Box, which comes as part of GPAC.

Ensure GPAC is in your Path: System > Advanced System Settings > Advanced tab > Environment Variables... In User variables find Variable Path. Select it, click Edit, and add to the end: ;C:\Program Files\GPAC (Assuming that's where you installed GPAC to).

The scripts I created using powershell, so you need to allow executing powershell scripts. Run Powershell as admin. Then enter: Set-ExecutionPolicy Remote Signed.

Download the scripts: create-cue.ps1 and video-convert.ps1.

Now you need to allow running those scripts without signatures. From powershell:

Unblock-File create-cue.ps1
Unblock-File video-convert.ps1

That's the initial setup done, which you shouldn't need to do again. Now onto converting the video file.

To convert the video you need a folder containing the video file in mp4 format and a tracklist file. The tracklist file should be a plain text file containing lines in the format:

00:00 Artist Name - Song Title

Many (though sadly not all) Youtubers who upload mixes will have a tracklist in this format as part of the video description, so you can copy-paste from there.

The tracklist file and the video file should both have the same filename (with .txt and .mp4 extensions respectively), which should be in the format:

Album Artist - Album Title

You can run script in several ways:

• From powershell: path\to\video-convert.ps1 \path\to\video.mp4
• From powershell:
  cd \path\to\video
  path\to\video-convert.ps1
• Copy both .ps1 files to the video dir, then double-click on video-convert.ps1 to run it. (This is easiet IMO).

The script will extract audio from the mp4 video, wrap it in an mp4 (m4a) wrapper, and generate a cuesheet from the tracklist file. Because it just extracts the audio, not converting it, there is no loss in audio quality.

If you want the track split into separate files, there are various cue splitters available that will split an audio file based on a cuesheet.