All is well!
Sep. 29th, 2014 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
avevale_intelligencerIt's been suggested that I should have expanded a little on the nature of my music problem, which I mentioned here earlier, for the benefit of those who don't do the Facebook...
When I had a Windows XP machine, I had a legal copy of Cubase Studio 4, and it was good. Then I upgraded to Windows 7, and I couldn't make it work on that one. So, reluctantly, I began to haunt waterfront taverns and consort with unshaven types wearing eyepatches and parrots, and by and by I found myself possessed of Cubase 5, which was also good. Till, in the act of clearing out some rather nasty malware last month, I must have stepped on a dodgy flagstone or picked up the wrong golden idol or something, because when I emerged from the secret passage just seconds ahead of the huge rolling boulder, my Cubase wouldn't work. (My boomerang wouldn't come back either, but that's another story.)
Loud lamentations on FB resulted in a very kind offer from a friend to sub me for a legal copy of Cubase Elements 7, which while not the full monty is more than adequate to my needs, and I accepted with much thanks. It arrived, I installed it, I tried to launch it, it crashed. Many times. Many, many times. Gods know how many kittens died (thanks, Tom). I uninstalled this, reinstalled that, updated the other, all to no avail. I did, twice, get to the point where it ran, but I could not get any sound out of it, which for a music production package is kind of central to the issue. I went into something of a decline.
Enterpbristow, swooping in to the rescue. He came to visit us yesterday and today, and spent most of last night and a lot of this morning wrestling with the thing while I supplied cups of tea and stupid footling questions. We were on the brink of despair.
Then he said "What about this other audio driver?"
I said "Well, I tried it, and I can't remember if it crashed but I do know I couldn't get any noise out of it."
"Shall we have a go?" he said.
We selected the correct option, and wonder of wonders, (once we'd disabled the Steinberg Hub, which seems to have no purpose other than getting in the way and incidentally crashes Cubase anyway), it stayed up, albeit still maintaining a dignified silence. Paul went out to find some blank DVDs, and I sat here idly twiddling, and wondering when the dreaded Blue Screen was going to leap out at me.
And idly created a new MIDI track in the open project and moved the little coloured blocks on to it.
And heard heavenly music.
Well, actually, it was just me plinky-plonking at some point in the distant past, but it sounded heavenly to me. Cubase 7 works ever so slightly differently from 4 and 5, with the result that I had not been seeing the little subpane whereby you tell a particular track to play through a particular instrument, and didn't know how to find it. I had the instruments loaded, I had them assigned to the right MIDI channels for the tracks, but the all-important step of connecting the two had not been made available to me, and so I had assumed that I didn't need it. Wrongggg.
After that it was plain sailing, and by the time Paul returned I had loaded and saved several files, done some transposing, relocated all my old VSTs and was happy as a sandboy, whatever a sandboy may be (Neil Gaiman is unaccountably silent on the subject). I have Cubase. I can do music. All thanks to Paul, without whom I would never have thought to try the other driver, and (more importantly) without whose reassuring presence I would never have been able to think about this clearly enough to see where I had been stupid. (I knew I had, of course--that's axiomatic--but I didn't know where.)
So, kudos once again to the Bristow man, saviour of the Nyrond's sanity.
And that's the full story.
Originally posted on http://avevale_intelligencer.dreamwidth.org. Comment here or there or both if you wish.
When I had a Windows XP machine, I had a legal copy of Cubase Studio 4, and it was good. Then I upgraded to Windows 7, and I couldn't make it work on that one. So, reluctantly, I began to haunt waterfront taverns and consort with unshaven types wearing eyepatches and parrots, and by and by I found myself possessed of Cubase 5, which was also good. Till, in the act of clearing out some rather nasty malware last month, I must have stepped on a dodgy flagstone or picked up the wrong golden idol or something, because when I emerged from the secret passage just seconds ahead of the huge rolling boulder, my Cubase wouldn't work. (My boomerang wouldn't come back either, but that's another story.)
Loud lamentations on FB resulted in a very kind offer from a friend to sub me for a legal copy of Cubase Elements 7, which while not the full monty is more than adequate to my needs, and I accepted with much thanks. It arrived, I installed it, I tried to launch it, it crashed. Many times. Many, many times. Gods know how many kittens died (thanks, Tom). I uninstalled this, reinstalled that, updated the other, all to no avail. I did, twice, get to the point where it ran, but I could not get any sound out of it, which for a music production package is kind of central to the issue. I went into something of a decline.
Enter
pbristow, swooping in to the rescue. He came to visit us yesterday and today, and spent most of last night and a lot of this morning wrestling with the thing while I supplied cups of tea and stupid footling questions. We were on the brink of despair.Then he said "What about this other audio driver?"
I said "Well, I tried it, and I can't remember if it crashed but I do know I couldn't get any noise out of it."
"Shall we have a go?" he said.
We selected the correct option, and wonder of wonders, (once we'd disabled the Steinberg Hub, which seems to have no purpose other than getting in the way and incidentally crashes Cubase anyway), it stayed up, albeit still maintaining a dignified silence. Paul went out to find some blank DVDs, and I sat here idly twiddling, and wondering when the dreaded Blue Screen was going to leap out at me.
And idly created a new MIDI track in the open project and moved the little coloured blocks on to it.
And heard heavenly music.
Well, actually, it was just me plinky-plonking at some point in the distant past, but it sounded heavenly to me. Cubase 7 works ever so slightly differently from 4 and 5, with the result that I had not been seeing the little subpane whereby you tell a particular track to play through a particular instrument, and didn't know how to find it. I had the instruments loaded, I had them assigned to the right MIDI channels for the tracks, but the all-important step of connecting the two had not been made available to me, and so I had assumed that I didn't need it. Wrongggg.
After that it was plain sailing, and by the time Paul returned I had loaded and saved several files, done some transposing, relocated all my old VSTs and was happy as a sandboy, whatever a sandboy may be (Neil Gaiman is unaccountably silent on the subject). I have Cubase. I can do music. All thanks to Paul, without whom I would never have thought to try the other driver, and (more importantly) without whose reassuring presence I would never have been able to think about this clearly enough to see where I had been stupid. (I knew I had, of course--that's axiomatic--but I didn't know where.)
So, kudos once again to the Bristow man, saviour of the Nyrond's sanity.
And that's the full story.
Originally posted on http://avevale_intelligencer.dreamwidth.org. Comment here or there or both if you wish.