Here's one that's at the intersection of my fields: tech and music.

I bought a new virtual instrument (Wave Alchemy's Evolution) that happens to use Native Instruments Kontakt as the platform.  For those not familiar with electronic music production, Kontakt is a synth platform that runs on your computer that other people can create instruments with.  It's also a fine sampler.  Native Instruments (the company that makes it) makes buckets of money with this stuff.  But I digress!

So I bought this new instrument and it just was NOT showing up in the library section of Kontakt.  However, if I ran Kontakt as an admin, it did show up.  Well, unfortunately, in the music business it's not uncommon for users to run as admin all the time because the developers and users of these products sometimes have a poor understanding of the Windows security model being this is a Mac-first industry.  And musicians, god love them, just want stuff to work, they aren't going to troubleshoot it.  So admin all the time it is.

But not me.  I can't go against the very core of my nature with regard to IT security!  It just feels *wrong*.

So I fired up ProcMon.exe to see what's going on.  I mean it has to be a permissions thing right?  

Well this one was easy.  After filtering on the Kontakt exeutable and searching for "access denied" I found an interesting file.  The file "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Native Instruments\Service Center\NativeAccess.xml" was showing as "access denied."  I tried to open the file and was denied.  So I looked at the properties and saw it had exclusive (non-inheriting) permissions that only allowed SYSTEM and Administrator access.  No other file in the folder did that, so I'm going to assume this is a mistake/bug/whatever.  And previous instruments I bought always installed okay, so maybe this only happened after an NI update?  Not sure.

The file looks like it's just a master record of everything installed from Native Instruments, so that would make sense that if a normal user couldn't see that, they couldn't see newly installed instruments (presumably the other instruments' installation are cached in the per-user data somewhere).

So, I reset permissions on that file, allowing inheritance, and now it works.

Easy.

The 3.0.7 release is now available on Chocolatey, but it hasn't finished going through all the automated tests and moderation.  You can still install it (and it appears a few dozen of you already have), but the installer may have issus. 

I also submitted the new installer to CNet Download.com and TUCOWs.  Surprisingly, people still use both of those.  RD Tabs still gets hundreds of downloads per week from Download.com.  I'm trying to get them to merge the 32-bit and 64-bit listings as well since RD Tabs has a unified installer now.  My previous submission to TUCOWs was never approved.  That attempt looked like it was going to have a comically long waiting period to process, but it did end up taking only a year.  This time they claim it will be processed in 57 days.  We will see.

I'm looking into submitting RD Tabs to Windows Store.  To do that I'll need to do some work getting Desktop Bridge / Project Centennial stuff set up.  I'm not sure how heavy of a lift that is. 

Keep in mind, if you are rely on any third party site for RD Tabs updates, you will be lagging behind the latest version.  But you will possibly have peace of mind that the app is more deeply vetted.  The fastest updates will always come from this website.

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SO HEY RD TABS FANS.  Can you spread the word?  Get people hooked?  I'm trying to make this something worthwhile for myelf to dedicate more time to and that means increasing the user base so I can eventually make some money on premium subscriptions.  Everybody benefits from this.  You get sweet new enterprise features.  I get motivation to turn this into something more than a hobby and just doing tweaks for myself in the ways I use it for my day job.  There's not a lot of apps in this space for Windows Admin types and the better ones are pretty expensive.  I think RD Tabs's premium features can compete pretty nicely and at a very reasonable price point since I don't have a huge amount of overhead.

So what I'm saying is, get active on social media.  Follow @AvianWaves (upper-right corner of this page) and like, share, and retweet my posts.  Tell colleagues about this app.  If you are an influencer, maybe this thing can break out of it's little niche and get some legs.

What else is in it for you?  Well...... Anybody that verifiably spreads the word on social media and anybody who has donated to Avian Waves at any time in the past will be eligible for free subscription to premium features when that arrives later this year.  More details on that to come!

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Last thing, 3.0.8 will be ready in a few days.  Yea, things are moving quick.  The general release led to some new good bug reports.  So keep posting in the forums and submitting error reports if the app crashes, it's helping!

RD Tabs 3.0 reaches RTM! The beta is over, thanks for everybody who tested. The update is available right now right here. Users with any beta build of RD Tabs (3.0.0 through 3.0.6) will receive the 3.0.7 automatic update notification first, within the next 12-24 hours. In 24-48 hours, users on any older version of RD Tabs will receive the update notification. Thank you for your patience and enjoy!

More information in the forums here.

Tonight I updated to a new blog module for the website.  The old one was so very slow and the author isn't really supporting it anymore, so I bit the bullet and bought a new one.  This one seems pretty great and it's a lot more powerful and fast.  I might make enhancements in the future, but the goal was just to get all the articles imported and for the look and feel to be basically the same.  Use the contact form to notify me of any bugs.  And hopefully the RSS feeds (if anybody still uses that) still work.