WRGKMC

I've read there are some guys getting it to work just like or better than XP. They stripped it down to bare bones progs and services. They say its less likely to crash which is probibly true. With 4G of memory in the box it should be pretty good. I was able to get XP cranking on my old box which was a compaq presario 1.1G. I stripped the system down the other night to nothing and put my sound card in and copied all my files from the old old box. It kicks butt for tracking now. I do have some problems getting my older multitracks to play right. Its mainly some plugins that arent installed properly but after I finish mixing those saved songs I will be working on all new tracks. One thing I am going to do though is take the new wireless keyboard and mouse and swap it in the studio. Its supposed to be good up to 30'. I can actually do live drum tracks if I want and run the daw from across the room Horay. I still have that older Studio tracking box I need to do something with. I could throw in a cheap 4 or 8 track card or something. It might be cool to have it for extra tracks, mixdowns or something. I could set it up as a server backup or something. I can put NT or Lynix on there which I have on hand and load it with all the extra hard drives I have around. Need to find some software to automatically backup the others. I'm pretty sure XP and Vista both have backup progs, I think I have norton backup also. Anyway thay can be a rainy afternoon project for the future. I may need to get creative with it. Its been a good box for 8 years and I dont like letting a good box go. Need to find a new use for it. Hold On - I'm so used to doing audio tracks I didnt think of it right away. How bout a strictly Midi Box. I have 3 Keyboards - Midi sound Moduals and a mini moog. I could build a new Keyboard stand and have the monitor mounted on it Throw in some older alesis midi effects and Run Virtual midi tracks out the sound card etc as well as record midi only to steinberg etc. Steinberg has some cool Native instruments in it and theres tons of free ones. I love the B3 it sounds as real as can be. Another posibility might be to Midi all my hardware sound effects and work them from the wireless too. Wireless Footswitch for PA effects?

Blue2blue, Thanks for the link Sorry about the op system entry. I work in the industry and everyone has verbally called it that since they had computers. I have another article written strictly for daws at http://www.studioauditions.com/proaudioarticledetail.php?WritingID=243 As far as drivers go its a non issue at this point. I wont be adding any older hardware at this time. Its not a bad unit for $800. Its an HP Pavillion 2.6G - Dual core athalon processor 500Gdrive 22"flat panel monitor and light scribe dvd burner and the front panel has all kinds of ports for memory cards and such. Sound cards 7.1 surround and lets you record in 4 channel via front and rear line ins. Sample rates studio quality up to 96000. The memory ports are handy as hell because Im starting to do videos and syncing them to the masterd audio tracks. Plugging in a smart card from the camera is a lot easier than downloading from a cable. The flat pannel was a biggie too. My old monitor went so it was priority #1. Hardware wise Its a decent box. I could have built my own and probibly had a quad core for the price but my wife works at HP so to get an OK to buy a new unit it naturally had to be an HP. Back to Vista, Vista upgrade from XP is pretty much like the upgrade from 98 to ME. They just loaded a good XP systen with as much WOW crap they could, Then they created so many security popups for theyre User Account Security that you think youre connected to a porn site. No serious business will run this program as is. It would be totally non productive. Still I'm going to see how much I can slim down and speed this program up yet still be safe. I found a pretty good guide for shutting down unnessasary services, and a few Tweak programs for customizing. I'd try and figure out the tweaks on my own but there must be a minimum of a couple of hundred buried in there and I dont plan on spending a month learning them all right now. Another Major concern is when I burned a CD on the DVD burner. I was moving some stored audio progs and drivers to the old box to studio unit. I couldnt see the files burned to the disk on the other op system. I wound up using a flash drive. I would move the files, Delete them on the old box, Then plug the flash back into the new box and wa-lah, the files were still there. Vista must write the files differently to other drives, which goes along with the original problem I posted. I suspect it some kinda data compression that prevents data loss thats at the root of the problem. Also Liscencing of audio recordings could be a big problem with studio recordings. If this system has what I think it does The copy security system could cause problems with wave and video files. I also dont like IE explorer type tool bars. Even in the classic mode you have to navigate with an arrow or via a tree in the left pane like win 3.1. Another biggie I been trying to find out how to change screen resolution size. Other versions had a slider under monitor settings to change the viewing screen size. Large Ikon pictures gotta go too. Theyre OK on the desktop but not to populate folders. some of these are littel gripes which I can get used to but some are just plain NFG

If anyone has a known fix for this problem let me know.... I think its important to anyone thinking about trying vist as an op system. I finally went and bought a new system for my mastering and was able to put my old system in the studio as a day which really cranks now. I didnt want to go with vista but didnt have a choice cause all new boxes come with it unless you special order it. While setting up this unit I found the op system has serious flaws all users should know about. The most critical one for recording work is the op system crashes or freezes when moving large files. There is no official fix from microsoft. I was moving about 30 gigs of files to the new drive and it took me an entire day. I had to move wave files a few at a time to get the job done. At first I thought there was a compadibility issue between the XP backup drive and vista but I found out differently. I did a google search and found 1.6 million posts with angry people experienncing the same Freezing and crashing that occurs moving any size files. The best I came up with is the estimated time to read the move is screwed up due to its pre read and write security structure. As of today microsoft has no fix and the op system has been out for how long? What I did find was a some "Try it and see if it works items" which I will still need to try but if they dont you need to install a 3rd party program to move your files around. This is about as stupid as it gets. The first basic function of a computer is to copy cut and paste. Even in DOS and Word perfect (Remember the late 80s)it was the first Moferxx Frekin commands you learned and has been at the heart of every op system designed. This is rediculous absolutely rediculous. I found some sites that give some tweaks to shut off all the extra junk running and will need to shut most of it down. Also the popups are endless. I spend half my time getting past security promps that will need to go asap. I will most likely move it back to a XP 64 system if I can get it close to what I need But I'll give it some time before I completely scrap it.

If the instruments are on separate tracks you can use Gates and or expanders to kill the trails. But with full orchestration it will sound like crap. Why dont you take the dry instruments and gradually build them out of the reverb to have a dry presence. Find the proper room size to match the reverb, Have a duplicate track say of the guitar with heavey reverb on one side and clean(er) on the other. Leave the baass and kick with minimal ammount of reverb, snare will need both dry and reverb. Have the 2 mono vocal tracks one with reverb compressed, and the other clean crispy track with without compression. etc. It might have a good motown recording sound.