Category Archives: Labs

[OSX86] Building a Hackintosh with ProQ’s AnyOS Motherboard

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motherboard back

Prolegomena

With all those different Apple Computers available like Mac Mini’s, Mac Book Air’s, Mac Pro’s, why the hell should we consider setting up a hackintosh these days, since a Mac Mini comes at a price tag of only 600€ here in Europe?

Well the answer to this is quite simple. Hackintoshs aim at people who are basically interested in understanding and tweeking. If you just wanna use you Mac for Mails and a bit of internet-surfing a hackintosh is most likely the wrong thing for you.

But if you are artist for instance, dealing with audio- or video-editing a hackintosh definitely comes a lot more handy than an original Mac. The reason is simple: original Macs have become a lot less flexible when it comes to manual hardware upgrading during the last eight years. Let’s take the latest Mac Pro for instance. The design is still outstanding, but this design comes at the price that Apple entirely dropped the PCIe Bus architecture. What means, that we cannot use dedicated DSP, soundcards or videocards in that device anymore and need to switch to Firewire or Thunderbolt solutions. Which is an additional economical strain. Continue reading →

[MacOS] How To Uninstall Waves Entirely

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wavessm
Well, in case you just upgraded from Snow Leopard to Mavericks (like we did ;-) ) and your Waves plugins don’t behave as expected a new installation of Waves could make sense, but first things first. A proper uninstallation does not always work entirely well with Waves’ uninstaller. So in case something goes wrong, follow these steps for manual uninstallation:  Continue reading →

[Bitwig] The Platform-Independent DAW Is Out NOW

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bitwig-logo-screen2One of the most promising tools of the last view years – the platform independent DAW Bitwig Studio has eventually been released yesterday. It is available for MacOS, Windows and Linux. Bitwig is a Berlin based company, originally founded by former Ableton developers. The relation to Ableton is something that put the expectations of Bitwig to a comparative high level in the field of DAWs.

We’re gonna check out Bitwig in depth during the next few days and let you know what we think. In the meantime: get yourself a demo run for free. Since the save and export feature is disabled in the normal demo version, we recommend to go for a trial license, which requires registration. Head over to https://www.bitwig.com/en/account/register.html and give the next generation of platform independent DAWs a serious go.

[DVB-S2] Tips & Tricks for the Cloud IBox II

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Abstract

The Cloud Ibox II is a cheap affordable satellite receiver running Linux. It is priced between 90 and 130€. It features:

  • 2 x USB (although the case shows otherwise, it seems this is 1x USB 1.0 and 1 x USB 2.0)
  • Ethernet connection
  • DVB-S2 tuner
  • 1 x card reader
  • linux based
  • dreambox plugin compatible
  • price tag is between 90 and 130€ (often including a USB Wi-Fi Antenna)

It mostly comes pre-installed with a special version of the OpenPli 4.0 frontend. This is due to the situation that OpenPLI at this moment not yet supports the Cloud Ibox II. But I strongly hope this will come soon.

After tinkering with this device the whole weekend, we have some tips and tricks for the other users of this device. Continue reading →

[Ableton] Repairing Defective ALS Files Manually

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abletonlogoneu2

 

What happened?

  • many avoidable (stupid) situations arise from hectic rush: we for instance accidentally deleted an ableton set (.ALS file extension) from a local NAS server
  • without going too deep into detail: since we don’t have a RAID based NAS we could recover (some parts of) the desired .als file by putting the NAS’ drive into an old PC and restored the found data with UFS/XFS-Explorer (absolute recommendation) to an external USB drive
  • after loading the recovered ALS file, we encountered the corrupt file error from Ableton

bildschirmfoto-2014-01-01-um-3-59-16-pm

The following article is written by a Mac user, but many (if not all) things should most likely be able to be applied to Windows aswell. Continue reading →

[iOS] iPhone 4 and the iOS 6.x firmwares

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iphone4-pwnedAbstract

You are using an iPhone 4 and you coincidentally updated to iOS 6.1.3, which cannot be jailbroken at the moment. Since you saved the SHSH blobs you think you can restore by doing a replay APTicket attack with TinyUmbrella or Cydia. Sadly iTunes shows errors like 1600, 1601, 1602, 1604 etc.

If you have an iPhone 4s or iPhone5 you can stop reading here. This article will not be able to help you. The iDevices with an A5 CPU or later cannot be downgraded with replay attacks at the moment. Continue reading →

[MacOS] Determine Manufacturer of a Mac Book Pro Retina Display

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There is a a lot of fuss going around the latest Retina equipped Mac Book Pro’s. Looks like the MBPs can be delivered with either a Samsung display or a Sharp/LG. The problem is: the Sharp/LG displays seems to produce ghosts on the screen. Apple says there might be “image persistance” in some rare cases, but did not admit that it is related to the type of display used. Anyway the Apple discussions forum provides a huge thread.

So if you wanna make sure that you don’t have a Sharp/LG display in your MBP just type this line: Continue reading →

[Muzaq] Universal Audio Annouces UAD-2 Octo

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uad-cto_core_hq

Universal Audio is stepping on. Producers who still thought the UAD-2 Quad’s power ain’t sufficient can soon get a UAD-2 Octo, thus effectively using 8 SHARC processors. Nuff powa foa de ppl ;-)

As a side effect of this step the prices for the rest of the UAD-2 family (PCIe and Satellite) are lowered. Entry price for the UAD-2 Octo is about 1,500€ (1,200 GBP). Distribution in Europe is expected to start between middle and end of October.

1. UAD-2 Starter Packages

Version

Amount of
SHARC DSPs

Entry Features

Current
Street Prices
1. UAD-2 Solo (PCIe) 1
Compressors: LA-2A, 1176LN, 1176SE
EQ: Pultec EQP-1A
Reverb: RealVerb Pro
Channelstrip: CS-1
 ~ 300€
~ 240GBP
2. UAD-2 Duo (PCIe) or
UAD-2 Duo Satellite		 2
see above
 ~ 700€
~ 560GBP
3. UAD-2 Quad (PCIe) or
UAD-2 Quad Satellite		 4
see above
 ~ 1,000€
~ 800GBP
4. UAD-2 Octo (PCIe) 8
see above
 ~ 1,500€
~ 1,200GBP
5. UAD Apollo Duo 2
see above
 ~ 2,000€
~ 1,600GBP
6. UAD Apollo Quad 4
see above
 ~ 2,500€
~ 2,000GBP
7. UAD Apollo Thunderbolt Card -,-
Thunderbold Expansion Card for
Apollo Duo or Quad. In
comparison to Firewire Thunderbolt
reduces UAD plugin latency.
 ~ 500€
~ 400GBP

2. UAD-2 Custom Packages

Continue reading →