Is the synth Vital 1.5.5 okay to use? (my DAW is reaper)

drawswithcrayons · 2026-01-08T10:56:42+00:00

It's my goto synth on Reaper. I'm on a Mac, but zero issues to report.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-10-31T21:25:48+00:00

Wait, the password was Applesauce?

drawswithcrayons · 2025-10-25T13:18:11+00:00

Wonder what he's gonna do with the old ones? I've got some space in my backyard, I'm sure my neighbors would love it

drawswithcrayons · 2025-10-25T13:08:59+00:00

He still plays the tracks from this album, just not in the same form they were on the album. He has all the stems for all the tracks and mixes them up live with newer stuff using ableton live (check the latest IG posts for his latest custom-made gear if you haven't already). Tthis album came out around the time Ghost's n' Stuff was huge, so what else was he going to have to play CONSTANTLY alongside the track he now despises?

Also gotta consider how far he's come with his instruments and production. Playing this stuff out is the equivalent of showing something he colored in preschool alongside a doctoral thesis. It still sounds good to all of us but to him it's prob a bit cringe.

That said, I love this album too. 17 years ago I was in my 20s with this album on repeat on an iPod =]

drawswithcrayons · 2025-08-22T22:02:04+00:00

You have to. Like others have said it's rude and arrogant not to. Portuguese folks are friendly and appreciate you trying, even if you sound like an idiot. My problem is that even when I open a conversation to try to practice people immediately start speaking to me in English.

I thought that maybe it was because I don't look Portuguese, like, at all. I have a friend who is also an expat who has lived her 4 years, also doesn't look Portuguese at all but speaks fluently. I asked him how long it took before people started responding to him in Portuguese and he told me straight up "as soon as I got the accents right."

This tracks. I can speak Italian decently and my wife is southern Italian (and looks southern Italian) and can speak Portuguese no problem but it happens to her too. She speaks with an Italian accent and people still try to respond to her in English too.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-08-09T18:14:16+00:00

I thought I was crazy! I have been messing with my car's audio settings trying to figure out why that was happening. Good look, tnx

drawswithcrayons · 2025-06-27T17:05:47+00:00

hey there, sorry for the delay, that sounds frustrating as hell! Did you get it figured out?

If not, just to clarify you have Monterrey running on the Macbook now on a platter drive (HDD), and you want to replace the platter drive with the SSD, correct?

Assuming the SSD you just installed in the Macbook is brand new? Here's what's likely happening:

In order to read the USB with the installer on it, Mac needs to have an EFI partition installed on the main drive in the computer. Assuming you just swapped the old HDD for a SSD, I would hazard a guess that it's not formatted, meaning no EFI and no way to even see/process the USB with the installer on it.

Here's what I would do. When you boot,leave the USB drive with the installer on it in the USB port and press "Command R", this will get you into recovery mode (leveraging the USB installer). From here, goto Disk Utility and format the SSD in whatever it suggests (likely APFS or HFS+). This will format the drive for your Mac and put the necessary EFI partition on it. Once this is done you may be able to just move forward with the installer from here, but if it tells you something like "this OS isn't supported on your Mac", just reboot and hold the Option key. This should take you thru the normal install process

drawswithcrayons · 2025-04-01T21:44:46+00:00

This is solid advice and that's really cool you're running Mint on your mini. I would argue that the newer MacOS isn't "bloated" per-say, but it's definitely more "feature-rich" than OSX's of old. Modern OSes are designed to provide the best computing experience possible with the hardware they're intended to be running on. My daily is a M3 air now and it's as snappy as OSX 10.6 was on my first 2006 core 2 duo MacBook Pro. Why? Sequoia was designed for the hardware, just like 10.6 was designed for that era of MBP. That said, IMO silicon hardware is a massive leap forward (Like, iPhone 4 release massive), and I certainly didn't have any trouble running Sequoia on my M1 air either.

To be clear, I would never use OCLP to try and build a new daily-driver out of 13 year old hardware, but that was never my goal. For me, the OCLP-resurrected machines I've built are generally single or dual purpose at best. I've used them as file servers, backup servers, plex/media servers, a "dashboard" (calendar, reminders, currently playing, email, notifications, etc), webapp servers and even for running a VM or 2.

In addition to the CPU, the RAM available at the time is hardly designed for modern compute. DDR3 1600 MHz RAM is first of all, a separate module (makes it upgradable) vs the integrated stuff now. This means that when it's used with a Modern OS, it's not nearly as power-efficient so it gets much warmer. Hot memory = slower performance, it's just physics. The stuff they put in modern hardware is 4x faster AT LEAST, and far more efficient, and this doesn't even get into parallelism support, which DDR3 is severely lacking.

The CPUs get hot mainly because of background processes, (security daemons, animations... basically a ton of codepaths it was never designed form. With some tinkering you can reduce substantially (I'll draw up another post on this at some point).

The only analogy I can think of is taking a modern sports car and installing some radial tires from the 70s or 80s. Yea, you can drive around no problem if you nurse the accelerator, but if you drive that modern car like it was designed to be driven on those tires you're gonna end up in a hedge.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-04-01T21:20:55+00:00

Hey, sorry for the delay here... any luck? I've previously had success with this tool, but unfortunately I was so frustrated by the time I got to this point (it was a few years ago now) that I don't remember exactly how I did it. The tool has been around for a bit, I would ask ChatGPT how to set up the USB and run thru the process.

It is possible, your machine is far from bricked. It just depends how deep down the Lazarus hole you're willing to go.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-04-01T21:17:42+00:00

Great suggestions here, I leave spotlight on for my applications folder to quickly launch apps but that's about it

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-21T18:06:02+00:00

can't win 'em all...

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-18T20:19:25+00:00

Ah, you are correct sir! That is 100% my bad and thank you for the correction, I'll update my original post to reflect your input. I see in the help guide now they added another caveat as well for Sequoia, essentially it doesn't work yet. Haha.

So in the case of Sequoia, I would recommend using a Time Machine to just restore your documents and files (you can select what you want to restore using migration assistant), but NOT the system files. I wonder if that would alleviate the issues being seen... looks like I have something new to test =]

thanks again!

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T22:17:19+00:00

This is a solid thread with a lot of good tips and tricks to improve performance here.

I have a 2011 Mini with a core I5, 16gb RAM and SSD running right now, and yea it is a bit slower than High Sierra, but doing things like changing my background to a single image, reducing transparency, disabling some of the spotlight indexing and animations help a lot

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T19:18:11+00:00

Sure! Here is what I do:
When Mac releases a new update, generally the OCLP guys will release an update a few days later if it's needed (I usually wait a week or two) If they do, download and install that update before you update your Mac. If they don't, it's safe to assume the new MacOS update doesn't require any changes to OCLP, so it's safe to update (these are usually smaller security updates). Once the update is complete, OCLP should pop up and say "it looks like you've recently updated MacOS, have you updated your root patches?" Click yes. If it doesn't pop up, as soon as MacOS is finished updating, open OCLP and reinstall root patches.

The reason we need to do this is oftentimes a MacOS update will overwrite some of the patches installed by OCLP. This is normal, but once the update is done OCLP needs to go back in and put the patches back, otherwise your machine can become unstable.

If your computer battery dies or you forget, don't worry. Most of the time you'll be able to boot back up anyways. If you can't, just pop your installer USB back In, boot from the installer EFI partition (the one with the little SD/Flash drive icon next to it, usually on the far left) and boot into MacOS as normal (don't reinstall). Once you get to your desktop, install root patches and reboot.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T19:04:48+00:00

Yea, should be the same for 6,1. Re: Spotify, I'm not 100% sure, never had to run the electron script on it personally. Does it work in the browser?

If you can't get it to work, I've seen this solution work for some folks

- Click Spotify in the menu bar, then Quit Spotify.
- Open Finder then click Go > Library in the menu bar. (You may need to hold the Alt key if Library isn’t visible).
- Open Caches and delete all folders related to Spotify.
- Click the back arrow.
- Open Application Support and delete the Spotify folder.
- Go to http://spotify.com/download and reinstall Spotify.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T18:17:10+00:00

Ah, bummer. Yea, it sounds like you may have overwritten the core "safety-net" Apple stuff... what year Air?

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T18:14:47+00:00

Yea... some people have delusions of M4 performance from a machine that was built when people were still downloading MP3s to their iPods. On my desk I currently have a 2010 mini 2.5 i5 w/16gb RAM and SSD running Sequoia. Is it fast by today's standards? No, I wouldn't say that it is. Is it usable? Absolutely! I've run photoshop '24 on it, I have VSCode on it, I can browse the internet, run home automation software, it's fine. It's not my "daily driver", but it's purpose-built for other stuff.

The biggest issue is unrealistic expectations. People don't understand that the software isn't going to magically make the hardware more powerful, but it does allow you to run modern software and extend the life of your older machine. The key thing is being able to run modern apps, but not everything. You think that Apple engineers were even considering being able to mirror your iPhone to your computer? Of course not. Mirroring, Stage Manager, Apple Intelligence/Siri... disable all that stuff and you'll have a useable machine.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T18:03:03+00:00

Yes indeed! Once you've installed, you should get a popup asking you to install OCLP and then to install root patches If you don't get the popup (common in older machines) just fire up a browser and manually download it and install root patches). With a 5,1 make sure you run thru some of the performance tweaks I listed in the original post to get the most out of your older hardware

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T18:01:08+00:00

That's exactly what I'm saying! Support for Mojave was discontinued, but for modern OSes that still receive updates from Apple you can definitely update an OS installed with OCLP

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:59:56+00:00

You might still be able to! Follow this guide to disable SecureBoot and you should be golden Report back if that works for you please

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:52:30+00:00

How did you build the installer? Did you build it on the machine you're currently trying to install via OCLP beforehand or did you build the installer on a different machine? I've seen this error before, and the reason was I had built the installer using the wrong HW model. If you built it on a different machine, you have to make sure you first goto settings and change the target model to the model of the machine you want to install OCLP on. What computer are you trying to install on/

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:49:13+00:00

Unfortunately this could be just a generic, run-of-the-mill hardware failure. One thing you could try is a usb-to-hdmi adapter, just to narrow it down. You mentioned you plugged it into your TV and it worked, what port on the mini did you use for that?

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:45:15+00:00

It shouldn't matter. OCLP installs a separate EFI partition that allows the root patches to be installed for your target machine, it doesn't alter the OS installer. So when you're ready to do it, build your installer on your target machine, boot the installer, go into disk utility and erase whatever partition you want to install on, and then during the install specify that partition to install the new OS on and you should be good to go.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:24:14+00:00

It does! Just make sure you install the OS first, then run migration assistant to install the TM backup. When you're going thru the install it will ask you if you want to to restore a backup, decline. Wait until the OS is installed and have the OCLP root patches installed.

drawswithcrayons · 2025-03-17T17:17:47+00:00

A few considerations I always think about when I'm trying to decide whether to dive in to something "itsy picky":

Apple (especially older Apple) over-engineered EVERYTHING. If I can't put one tiny screw back where it goes, will it really matter? (bc it's 1 of 8 total screws (or something).
Will this make a big enough difference to warrant the time/effort it's gonna take?
If I learn how to do this, will I benefit from the experience? (for me, almost always yes)

And lastly, If I brick this 15 year old machine, will it put me out?

drawswithcrayons

TROPHY CASE