UDG Creator Ableton Push 2 Hardcase Black U8442BL - not really a review

I recently purchased an Ableton Push 2 from eBay that came with this carry case included with it. Fitting the Push 2 into it, it seemed like the case was pretty pointless. So I searched for it to see if others' opinions were the same, or there was some 'reason for being' I had missed.

On Amazon, all the reviews seemed to be pretty positive though. So, as someone that doesn't really have a need for it or having used it, I thought I might as well give my (negative) opinion to add some balance.

Firstly, trying to fit the Push 2 into the UDG case was extremely tight. I guess that's good for keeping it well protected (rather than having it slopping about inside the case). but I would say it's a bit too tight.

Secondly, the foam padding on mine has started to pull away from the edge of the case. This is a case of better glue being needed, and also the tight fit causing too strain when fitting / removing the Push 2 into / from the case.

There's no space in the case for anything other than the Push 2. It's nice that's it quite a tight fit, i.e. the case isn't a lot larger than the Push 2 itself, but I would much prefer it had space for the power adapter and USB cable. What point is taking the Push 2 with you without the power and USB?

Okay, you could argue that the power and USB can just be carried in your standard bag. But (depending on the size of your bag), so could the Push. No, it wouldn't be as well protected as in the UDG Hardcase, but there's not really much on the Push that could easily be broken off in a bag (like faders). If you were concerned about the buttons and knobs, you could put a decksaver on it before you put it in your bag (the decksaver is cheaper than this bag).

You can't use the Push 2 in the bag - it's for transporting / storing the Push 2 only. A design that allows the top & rear area to unzip completely so the Push can be used in the bag, then the top just zipped back on when you're finished would be much better in my opinion.

Other than that, the bag seems fairly decent. Nice zips, decently comfortable handle (though I haven't actually carried it anywhere), well padded, and the case is 'hard' but not completely rigid.

If I was after a case myself I'd be much more likely to go with something like a Gorilla Ableton Push Instrument Case (affiliate link). This case looks like it has room for the power and USB and the Push 2 can be used in the case. It will also look smarter if you already have your other audio equipment in flight cases.

Eating fruit with the skin

You can eat Kiwis with the skin, it doesn't feel furry when you eat it.

You can also eat Orange with the skin, but the taste of the skin is quite bitter. If you only eat a small proportion of the skin it is much more palatable, like eating marmalade. Easy peelers aren't too bad with the skin, though I would say they're nicer without the skin than with. Probably the skin is covered with harmful chemicals they spray on them while they're growing as well.

Grapefruit skin is like orange skin, only more pithy.

Banana skin is too tough.

Pineapple core can be a bit woody. The skin is 'okay' but I wouldn't purposefully eat it. If you do want to eat the skin I would suggest eating the flesh and skin together to reduce the taste of the skin. I suspect if a pineapple isn't very ripe then the core will be very woody and the skin probably taste worse than a nicely ripe one (the one I tried was ripe).

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?!