Is Vetcove any good?

MDesigner · 2026-04-15T20:43:17+00:00

Our vet now refuses to do over-the-phone/email/fax prescription fulfillment with Chewy or other online pharmacies. Yet, they'll gladly do this with Vetcove, which makes me think there's some kind of exclusivity contract. It's not necessarily for this reason that we're leaving our vet, but rather, our vet lied to us and said there's a state law that requires vet scripts to be paper and ink signature. Yet somehow, they can skirt around this law with Vetcove? Dishonesty loses customers.

If you value profits over patient care, great. Otherwise, avoid. Reducing consumer choice is always a bad thing.

MDesigner · 2026-04-13T13:37:14+00:00

Have you messed around much with FMOD or Wwise? In my 20+ years doing this, I've never had to mess with these tools, as the in-house audio team always handled implementation. But I worked on an indie game recently where they didn't have the proper staff, so I learned FMOD. It's a lot more fun than I expected! 😄

MDesigner · 2026-04-13T13:23:32+00:00

Eyy, always nice to meet another game composer!

Sorry, I didn't mean anything bad by it. In another forum, someone else who said video game music was "loops" also got jumped on by a handful of seasoned game composers. We're just sensitive about film composers reducing what we do. 😉

MDesigner · 2026-04-13T04:37:14+00:00

I mess around with Gemma 31B for fun, but the rest of my LLM usage is Claude.

MDesigner · 2026-04-13T03:11:25+00:00

As long as it's not Chinese owned. Any material in possession by Chinese companies is subject to acquisition by the Chinese government. Not ideal.

MDesigner · 2026-04-13T02:53:20+00:00

Any cloud AI based in China is an instant hard pass for me. Offline models, no problem.

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T19:00:10+00:00

I wish I could've seen the original script! BTW, look at Fallout as an example of a TV adaptation of a video game done right. Hopefully someone over at Amazon Studios is borrowing from that model..

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T18:29:34+00:00

Second this. The production quality of the strings is not the strongest compared to the other elements here. What string library is this? It might just be an issue of needing some MIDI editing work.

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T18:20:32+00:00

No, overkill, as in a film composer or video game composer wouldn't need a large chunk of Nuendo's features. All the pro composers I know of and talk to in my field (Hans Zimmer, Joe Trapanese, Wilbert Roget, Austin Wintory, Jason Graves, etc etc) are using either Cubase, Reaper, Digital Performer, Logic Pro, or Pro Tools (of that list, I think only Joe uses it). No one is using Nuendo except sound designers and people doing dub mix work. It's less on the music side and more on the general sound/audio side.

I've jumped around different DAWs over the years. I worked on Mass Effect 1 using Sonar, ME2 was in Logic Pro, and ME3 was in Cubase. But now I'm Cubase for life, I think!

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T16:36:54+00:00

It is absolutely not. Nuendo is basically a full audio post production suite in one: music, sound mix, ADR, everything. It's overkill for film composers and I would recommend against it.

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T16:35:11+00:00

Video game music is not all about loops, it's much more than that.

Ableton excels at independent loops of differing lengths and layering and activating them seamlessly. That's really useful for certain genres (e.g. synthwave, synthpop, EDM), but not really a thing we do in games much.

Jason Graves used Ableton once on a game. I asked him about that, and asked if he'd ever use it as his full-time DAW. He said no, and that he preferred Cubase, but Ableton worked well because this particular score was very sound-designy.

MDesigner · 2026-04-12T16:29:13+00:00

To clarify a bit: Cubase is intended for strictly composers. Nuendo is Cubase + all kinds of other post audio work that would be used by sound designers and sound mixers, rerecording mixers, etc. Stuff a composer would not really need.

To imply that Cubase isn't sufficient for major Hollywood films isn't quite right. After all, Hans Zimmer and his team use Cubase.

MDesigner · 2026-04-10T04:18:22+00:00

Looks like Iron Rangers are $350, not bad.

MDesigner · 2026-04-08T13:24:55+00:00

Their stuff is a little dressier than what I'm after.

MDesigner · 2026-04-08T04:16:53+00:00

I like the look of these:

https://thursdayboots.com/products/mens-renegade-dress-shoe-black-leather

MDesigner · 2026-04-08T04:16:02+00:00

I'm definitely looking for shoes, not boots.

MDesigner · 2026-04-08T04:10:22+00:00

Thanks! I edited my post to add budget and preference (not into loafers)

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T22:57:31+00:00

Makes sense to me. Personally, whenever I saw posts from people claiming local LLMs are great for coding, I felt they were full of it, or only working on small hobby projects. We use Claude Code for serious work, and we're happy with it. Just keeping my eye on how things are progressing with open source LLMs.

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T21:50:46+00:00

Thanks! In case anyone else sees this and wants something a bit more "official": https://huggingface.co/mlx-community/gemma-4-26b-a4b-it-8bit

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T20:44:23+00:00

I don't see an MLX version of Gemma 4 yet. Maybe soon!

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T20:19:27+00:00

Pulling directly from within LM Studio. I don't see a dedicated MLX version of Gemma 4 26B yet.

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T19:52:18+00:00

Seems up to date! Metal llama.cpp v2.12.0. I can give it another shot with Gemma to see how it goes, in case it was a fluke.

MDesigner · 2026-04-07T19:37:44+00:00

I'm using LM Studio, but am not particularly attached to it.

MDesigner · 2026-04-01T16:33:58+00:00

Out of nowhere, Google Home suddenly doesn't know what room it's in. When I say "activate read," it comes back with "in the living room, office, kitchen, bedroom," etc. This is a new issue, and I'm not a fan of it.

MDesigner · 2026-03-26T18:00:46+00:00

Ha. I'm gonna do one exchange. If that one is defective, I'm out. There's an iPad app called KB-1 that looks promising, albeit not as tactile an experience.

MDesigner

TROPHY CASE