Bigscreen Beyond
My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.
Rambles that are fluffy, by fluffy
My Bigscreen Beyond arrived today, right before I had to leave for choir practice. So of course as soon as I got home I set it up and tried it out. This is a quick first-impressions review.
So the new keyboard arrived today and I swapped it into my setup, along with the Akai MPK49 (which I also finally restored to working condition). Here’s some vague unstructured thoughts about it.
Hey y'all, I’m trying to sell some music gear that I no longer need or find helpful or which otherwise doesn’t spark joy. Here’s what I’m selling. Local Seattle pickup preferred (except for the software licenses), although I’m willing to ship (but keep in mind that shipping prices will be pretty high, especially for the keyboards). Prices are negotiable.
If you’re interested in buying any of this stuff, get in touch with me and we can work something out.
All items are in excellent condition unless otherwise noted.
My impressions on the hardware, for what it’s worth:
Yesterday my other big hardware upgrade arrived, a Focusrite 18i20 for my Mac mini in the studio, to upgrade the 18i8 I had before (which is now on the Mac Studio in the office).
The tl;dr: for most people the 18i8 is just fine and the 18i20 doesn’t really add anything. Consider the 18i20 only if you have a couple of fussy needs.
I got my Mac Studio yesterday, to replace the Mac mini in my office (the mini now replacing the 13" MacBook Pro in my recording studio, the MacBook Pro replacing the frustrating Lenovo laptop in the living room), and I have all my stuff set up on it. I went with the 10-core M1 Max model (with the upgraded GPU) and 2TB of RAM, sticking to the stock 32GB of RAM.
The keyboardio Model 01 was an amazing keyboard, with a couple of unfortunate flaws. The Model 100 is a billion times better.
Because of the cryptocurrency market crash, GPUs have really come down in price. They probably have a further ways to go but I decided that I’d waited long enough to finally upgrade my GTX 1050Ti, and picked up a supposedly-barely-used refurbished eVGA RTX 2080Ti Black Edition off eBay. The seller claimed it was bought from eVGA’s refurb department and used for only two weeks in a gaming rig. I’m not sure sure I believe that, but I figured it was a worthwhile risk to take. The total cost was $550 after tax and shipping, which happened to be almost exactly what I’d earned by participating in the itch.io queer games bundle, so that worked out nicely.
Going through a few rounds of troubleshooting with folks on the macOS community forum as well as Apple tech support regarding the SSD overheat issue has helped me determine the following things:
For now I’ve moved my most critical files from the Crucial stick to my older SATA drive (which isn’t having trouble) so I can continue to work on the things that I normally do on my desktop, and my studio laptop seems to be okay with the PNY+Thunderbolt combination so I don’t think Novembeat is at risk because of that, at least.
This does mean I won’t be able to work on music from my desktop computer in the meantime, and video editing will have to be direct to NAS, which is doable, just not ideal.
Hopefully this all gets sorted out in a macOS update.
Today’s Apple announcement brought forth the usual advancements that I was looking forward to: faster processors, better GPUs, and so on.
But Apple has this hyperfocus on making The Best Laptops Possible, which is a little puzzling when the entire focus of today’s update was on creative studio uses, especially on music.