Welcome back! I was thinking I hadn’t noticed any updates from you in a bit. Hope all is well!

Part of me has wanted this for a long time. The other part of me wants to forget I now know about it.

At least the handful I checked seem to be random, so likely accidental, but I can see this driving me crazy.

Source

They are super cute! We’ve got 2 at the clinic now just a smidge bigger than these.

They got to do a cute Easter egg hunt enrichment yesterday, of course not when I was there. 😒

I’m sure a good deal of it is just that like being lazy and complaining. 😁

I got some good posts added to the queue today and planted some more stuff in my container garden and made some bread, so now to clean dishes and laundry and try to focus on some piano.

I think I’ve been lost since the gf has gone to a very fluctuating schedule, as it really throws off my routines. It’s like if the sun came out at a different time every day. There’s still the same amount of time and opportunity to do stuff, but you’d feel off after a while doing stuff at what feels like the wrong time of day. I dunno. I’m weird. 😝

My pleasure!

That’s the drawback of there being so much great free music stuff these days! You can get lost playing and never actually finish anything.

I haven’t used Cakewalk. It seems very powerful, but I see people say it’s one of the harder DAWs to learn.

I also hear Sonar discontinued Cakewalk Free and is moving to a paid license, though that was 2 years ago and Free is still available I think, but I don’t know if it’s being maintained any longer.

As hard as it may be to imagine, I feel I’ve been getting a bit behind from where I’d like to be with owl stuff. With so many owl babies right now, it’s been hard to get some of the variety I’d like, and between being sick and depressed, it’s hard for me to focus on owls or music the way I’d like.

But between all those links I’ve shared, you should have years worth of experimentation ahead of you. I hope you find lots of good stuff.

Gotcha, now I have a better idea of what you’re trying to do.

Watching this video about looping in LMMS shows it can sorta be done, sometimes with some help from Audacity.

If you’re adding in more stuff like VST plugins and vocals, you may want to try out Waveform Free, which I checked is for iOS also, so you get a full modern DAW. It’s the same product as their paid full version, just like 2 updates behind.

For more premade loops, check out Looperman if you haven’t already.

It’s not free, but I think I under $20 for the program and all the upgrades, if looping and sampling is something you want to focus on, check out Koala Sampler. I downloaded it the other week and have been sampling vinyl recordings from YouTube, it has an AI stem extractor to separate the instrument tracks, and then chopping and looping that.

It has a built in simple synth now as well, and you can use a midi controller with it. Lots of videos are out there if you want to see how that works. You might be able to incorporate that into your setup.

I do have some other hobbies! 😁

If you’re looking for instruments, effects, etc, the YouTube channel elektronickmusick demos a few each day and many are free or free trials and they run the same midday track through all of them to give you an indeed what they sound like.

I don’t think they’re the best demos because it’s a generic track through all of them, not necessarily something that fits perfect with each unique instrument’s strengths, but it gives you some ideas of the sound before you search for it, download it, and find out it’s not for you.

If you want some nifty and weird sounds with fun back stories, David Hilowitz searches out obscure old instruments, fixes them, and samples them in his Decent Sampler plugin and rotates giving away different ones for free.

I’m still really bad at making my own music, but I like experimenting while I’m learning to do better.

Like in this video?

I haven’t used LMMS in a long time, but he’s manually editing the piano roll (where the notes are stored) but I see a record button here where it should record what you play on the keyboard.

Oh, glad to help! Any other music tools you’re looking for? I’m not good with any of them, but I like testing them out. I’m still just learning and experimenting.

I get a little sad when I don’t see anything new for me on threads like this, but then I’m a bit grateful since that means I’ve already spent a long time enjoying all these things!

And if you need some free virtual instruments, Plugins4Free and Vital.

Other free, though not FOSS DAWs are Reaper and Waveform.

Yay! ☺️

I’m always interested in these situations where Trump is caught in the middle of 2 actual rich/powerful people to see where his position will land.

I feel dirty given the source being NY Post, but it’s the biggest coverage I can find on this, and the sucking up to Trump I feel is the best context given his fairly reliable vanity leading him to who he likes or not. It offers a look at the other side of OP’s article.

Los Angeles-based Leonid Smirnov, who fled Soviet communism in the 1970s, says he’s in a race against time to save Glavprodukt — the Campbell’s of Russia — which he founded in 1999 and built into a household name in his homeland.

“What’s happening with my company is a raid under a government seizure and confiscation attempt,” he told The Post.

And if it can happen to him, he said in a warning to Trump, it can happen to any of hundreds of US-owned companies operating in Russia, after President Vladimir Putin set his sights on foreign businesses after the invasion of Ukraine.

About a dozen companies have been put under “temporary management” in the past three years. Smirnov’s Glavprodukt was the first American-owned company to be targeted, and is famous across the motherland for its canned soups, vegetables, fish, and meat.

With the FTC being the only agency with any independence left at the end of this week when the regulation oversight executive order goes in effect, the current regime is still hesitant to outright screw with American money, at least for big time businesses and investors.

Since then, he said, the Moscow-based company — which employed 1,000 workers across three factories — had begun taking losses for the first time. Overall, he estimates the company has lost as much as 30 percent of its value.

“We basically have this company being destroyed on a daily basis,” said Smirnov.

He supplied partially obscured photos of himself to The Post, saying he now fears for his and his family’s safety.

Two weeks ago, a court ordered the seizure of cash and assets connected to Glavprodukt. Russian prosecutors claimed he had been illegally sending dividends from the business to the U.S.

It was all part of a pressure campaign, said Smirnov, to force him to sell at a knock-down price.

“I put 26 years of my life into that … building this company from scratch,” said Smirnov.

How does one run an oligarchy if the oligarchs don’t maintain faith in you?

Just a note, I’m not pro anyone in this story. I want Ukraine to get their country back (all of it) and for anyone who may have broken the law to see justice. I’m mainly here to ponder the ways this will make Trump enjoy his position as “peace broker” miserable as he needs to weasel between 2 groups he really really wants to like him, but he can only please one or none of them.

Glad to help!

They’re not deportations because the people being sent there are not from there.

Bukele, the Salvadorian ruler, is a fellow authoritarian, and told Marco Rubio he would disappear whoever they wanted for cash.

Guantanamo Bay is US territory, and our government would be responsible for what happens to these people, but by sending them to a cooperative 3rd party country, Trump and company have declared their hands clean of what happens to anyone sent there after that, and as they are out of US territory, we have no means to ever get any of them back.

They are now talking about sending people born in the US there if they are “bad enough.”

Here is a pretty short article that gives you some more specifics if you want.

If you’ve ever spoken out against the government in writing/online, are part of a labor union, or any kind of minority or LGBT or care about anyone that is, you should get up to speed on this quickly.

Oh, very nice. I also go deer hunting for much the same reasons.

I deleted my reply after I saw that comment, but since you replied, I undeleted it.

Even adult animals shouldn’t just be released wherever. We had someone last weekend want to bring in a fox, but they didn’t really want it to get released back to their property since they have chickens. They told the person it’s not like you can just toss an animal wherever. They have families, some species don’t do well alone, and if you drop them someplace different than where they’re from it’s not like they magically know where food, water, or shelter are to be found. How well would any of us do dropped in a random place we’ve never been with none of our stuff?

Rehabbers don’t charge you if you bring them an animal. You can even text them a pic and they can say bring it in or they’ll come get it or just put it back where you found it. If we came upon a human in distress we wouldn’t try to treat them or diagnose them on our own (hopefully!) so why do so many want to do that to a random animal?

It’s good you at least tried to talk some sense into them! Animals are fragile in some ways, but still amazingly strong and adaptable at the same time. Good luck, little bun!

I’m new to rehabbing this season, but when they showed us the baby rabbit room on our tour, they said the door is only opened twice and day and you’re not supposed to talk in there because babies rabbits are very susceptible to dying from stress.

This rabbit looks bigger than most of the ones in there, but if they want it to have the best chances of living and not getting too tame and unable to survive in the wild, it should go to a rehab ASAP.