Connie's Ramblings

Yesterday I arrived home from the SOSA appreciation brunch to find my Adobe CS5 sitting on the doorstop. Quite exciting! I decided to do some ‘clean’ up on the computer before installing as I know i will not need to complete CS4 and CS5 on my system. Went through and uninstalled everything except Photoshop and InDesign CS4 since those two are the ones I use the most and was most concerned about upgrade glitches on – the others I figured CS5 would do the trick. Loaded up CS5 and copied over my preferences.

Alot of the user preferences for adobe products are located in:
C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Product\Product Version\Language
at least that is basic format.

So if you are like me and have some Grep Find-Change Queries you want to grab the “Find-Change Queries” folder from the previous InDesign folder:
(C:\Users\Username\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\InDesign\Version6.0\en_US\)
and copy to the new version  – then you don’t have to recreate your saved queries.

Likewise, I copy over my “Snippnets” and “Workspace” from Dreamweaver above format and then Configuration\Snippets and Configuration\Workspace, some custom Save for Web Setting I have in Illustrator and some Photoshop Settings… Makes it easier to get up and running.

Only ‘snag’ I had with the install was when it came to the registration. Like in previous versions, when you register your product you are offered a “complimentary benefit” for registration. CS5’s included the new  AdobeText Font, 30 day trial of Linda.com, 30 day trial to Safary Book, 40% off 2 or more titles from Adobe Classroom in a book series, Phototools standard 2.5, or 2 issues of Layers magazine. In the past they have emailed you a link after you’ve registered. This procedure seems to have changed. What was frustrating is at one point you have the choice of continuing updating your profile or picking your freebie – I went with updating the profile and couldn’t get back to the freebie selection page and never got an email for it. So I tried Adobe Support Chat – TOTALLY USELESS! Finally figured out that if you open Photoshop or one of the others and go to “Help/Complete Update Adobe ID Profile” you can again get the options for the freebie…

This morning I actually got to go in and do some work in Dreamweaver – I just did some minor updates to a couple sites and everything went smoothly. I didn’t play with anything new though I’m looking forward to a couple new features I’ve read about…

Next was InDesign… Unforutnately, Extensis has not updated it’s Fusion 2 font activator for CS5. So I had to open Fusion and manually activate the fonts used in the newsletter I was working on. I did get to check out a new feature here that I was looking foward to and that was the span paragraph – works beautifully! Looking forward to working with this new version more!

In regards to the Extensis Font activator – while it would not work in InDesign, moving the ExtensisFontManagementAICS4.aip from the plugin directory in Illustrator CS4 to the plugins directory in CS5 does seem to work. Looking at the InDesign plugins folder, it appears Adobe changed the format of the InDesign plugin which would explain why it doesn’t work there.

One last little note – Acrobat is still the Acrobat 9 that was in the CS4 packages, apparently it did not get an update. It is also interesting that it has it’s own serial separate from the collection.

All in all happy – though I wish I had more time to play with the new features…

Yet another reason the camera has been neglected a bit lately… I decided to finally act on my desire to learn how to play guitar and on February 22nd I bought a Guild GAD30E after visiting the local guitar shop and am slowly learning how to play. While I have figured out the notes/layout of the fret board and my finger picking coming alone smoothly, I’m still working on learning chords. Interesting concept – chords, not something I’ve  ever had to deal being a flute player.
Played with the photo in Lightroom to make the new guitar look old and liked the effect of this… Below is the original.

Woke up to cloudy skies and rain again this morning. Taking a look outside I noticed that the blossoms on the weeping cherry were past prime and realized that I haven’t made it out to take any photos of them this year. They really don’t stay around more than 3-4 days and my camera has only been taken out a few times this month for family photos on Easter and Jon’s gymnastics demo on Monday. Comes down to time constraints – unfortunately there are only so many hours in a day. Though it would only take a few moments to take it out and look at life, I often find myself scurrying through it instead. Yet on this rainy day, being reflectful, I decided it was high time to take the camera out for a few moments just to capture the day… Just a couple glass birds on the window ledge. The blue one was purchased in the gift shop of the hotel I stayed in while interviewing to become an instructor for the Navy in 1991. My husband’s grandmother had one just like it and I had admired it when we went up and visited her a few months prior. The other used to be yellow and was bought shortly after we bought the house in 2000.

Background: Since building the new computer, I have noticed with both the built in soundcard on my ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 and with the Creative X-Fi Fatal1ty Pro there is a noticeable latency problem with the line-in in Windows 7. When I say noticeable it was VERY noticeable by me and drove me crazy. My non-muscial husband on the other hand didn’t notice it until I pointed it out and even then it didn’t bother him… In basic terms it is a time delay experienced in the system such that the audio through the line-in port has a slight delay from the live audio source. Not something I ever experienced with Windows XP.

This weekend it was particularly annoying in that I was trying to play the stereo through speakers outside where my husband and son were working on ripping out some brambles as well as through my computer where I was working on SFLMA.org’s site. Since I could hear both the sound through the outside speakers and my computer the latency issue was driving me insane and I eventually went to wearing headphones.

So this morning I decided I really needed to figure this issue out! From various searches this seems to be a common issue with Vista SP2+ and Windows 7 regardless of the soundcard being used. I found if you change where you activate the Line-In then the latency issue goes away. There are two ways to listen to the line in.

Continue reading “Fix: Windows 7 Latency Problem with Line-In”