Smack

How to test an audio plugin (Part 1):
* Download a demo of Yamaha's 'Pitch Fix' VST.
* Try to run it on Audition. Discover Auditon won't support it.
* Try to run it in Sonar 4. Discover Sonar will support it, but crashes when you run it.
* Search for another VST host. Find Audacity. Install and run.
* Discover that Audacity supports Pitch Fix, but won't display the proper GUI. And changing the parameters on the basic GUI doesn't seem the change anything. It tunes the test WAV file to chromatic C-Major perfectly, but nothing else.
* Search for another VST host. Find N-Track. Try to install. Find that it needs .NET version 2.0. Remember vaguely that you installed version 1.1 yesterday to test a pitch shift program. Sigh.
* Start to download .NET V2.0 Beta. See that it'll take an hour. Go for a long cup of tea.
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Well, I finally got Pitch Fix to work under N-Track. As an autotuner, it's pretty impressive. As a gender changer for the voice, it's pretty poor. Cirtainly the pitch shifting is a lot more realistic than the Antares Autotune 3 - which I haven't used for months.

I may keep it as an autotuner, though the overhead of needing .NET and N-Track installed just so I can tidy up pitch drift in vocals seems high.
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An old friend wants to meet for a chat. Fair enough. He wants to meet in a sauna. Hmmm.

I'm going nowhere near a sauna till I've lost two stone. Which means (of course) better eating. Which means not living on snacks. Which means eating at the same time as other people are having proper meals. Which means being awake during the day. Which means going to sleep at night. Which I'm not good at.