PC Notes
Technique : PC Notes
If you ever have to re-install all your
software after a PC upgrade, there are tricks that can save you a lot of
time, and also help you to be more organised in the future. PC Notes
rounds them up, as well as keeping you up to date on Vista compatibility
for musicians.
Regular readers will know that I've recently built
myself a new dual-core PC based around an Intel Conroe processor. I
discussed my hardware choices in PC Musician February 2007, and followed
up in March 2007 by covering the issues musicians need to be aware of
when installing Windows. To complete the trilogy, here's a batch of
hints and tips that should save you quite a bit of time whenever you
have to re-install all
your software. We all have to do this
periodically and it can be a nightmare without a little preparation.
If you're upgrading to larger-capacity hard drives
to hold sample data, don't bother re-installing all your sample
libraries from scratch. You can instead temporarily connect the new
drive to your old PC and copy the data across from the old drive to the
new with a single click-and-drag. This may still take several hours, but
the transfer rate will be considerably faster than that of any CD/DVD
drive, and you can go off and do something else in the meantime, which
certainly beats feeding in the original CD-ROMs and DVD-ROMs by hand all
over again.
All you need to do is remove the side panel of your
PC case and plug suitable power and data cables into the new drive, even
by temporarily disconnecting one of your existing drives and using its
cables. The new drive doesn't need to be bolted in either, and can
simply be balanced on a box or something of suitable height outside the
case. Once you've booted into Windows and the new drive has been
detected, just use Windows Explorer to drag your entire sample
collection across to it — or audio projects, synth libraries and any
other data, for that matter. Applications must, of course, be
re-installed manually once the drive has been installed in your new PC,
so that all the correct entries go into the new Windows Registry.
Preset Preservation
Presets can take many hours to create, so don't
leave them behind on the old PC: always make image files of the Windows
partitions of your old PC, using a suitable utility such as Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image,
so that if you have forgotten to back up any personal data (and there's
always at least one plug-in or soft synth that stores its presets in an
obscure folder) you can later extract the appropriate file from the
image and copy it to your new hard drive.
You'll probably recognise most of your own user
presets because of the file names you used to save them, and you can
nearly always copy them across into the same folder on the new PC, where
they should be immediately recognised by the application that created
them. However, it's also worth visiting specific product forums, where
you can often pick up less obvious time-saving tips. For instance, I've
spent a long time organising my Wavelab plug-ins into folders
such as Compression, EQ, Reverb, and so on, and I found I could avoid
doing all this again by copying a file called PlugInPrefAE.set file from
my previous install to the same Wavelab/Presets/Plugins folder on my
new machine.
As you're making a fresh start, now's the ideal time
to check on developers' web sites to see if there are any free updates
available, so you can download and install the very latest versions of
your applications. I used the opportunity to upgrade my Firefox browser from version 1.5 to 2.0 (www.firefox-2-0.com), and my Open Office application to version 2.1 (www.openoffice.org), as well as downloading various plug-in upgrades.
Always create a separate Updates partition to store
these files, so you can easily find them again in the future if needed
(this is especially true now that some updates can be 100MB in size!).
I've done this for every software application I've installed over the
years, so I was able to copy my entire Updates partition to the new hard
drive, as described above, which saved quite a few hours of downloading
updates all over again.
|
Firewalls & Low-level Utilities
This month I suffered an annoying problem with an
unusual cause. If you ever come across something similar my experience
may give you a head start in solving it.
I'd installed Intel's Desktop Utilities
for my new motherboard, primarily to monitor the CPU and motherboard
temperatures while altering fan settings. After working fine for several
weeks, the utilities suddenly stopped launching properly and instead
popped up an error message reading 'Service program is not active',
although I wasn't aware of having disabled any Service that they used.
Even reinstalling them wouldn't resolve the issue, yet the same
utilities still worked fine on my other Windows partitions.
A search on the Internet for this error text showed
that a lot of other people were suffering from exactly the same
problem, but no-one seemed to have a solution. Fortunately, I eventually
traced the problem to my Firewall software. As soon as I allowed the
IDU permission to be in its 'Trusted Zone', which generally allows other
computers in a LAN (Local Area Network) to share resources such as
files and printers, it started working perfectly again, presumably
because giving any software application low-level access to motherboard
devices is (sensibly) regarded as a security risk. So if you ever find
low-level utilities inexplicably refusing to run, take a closer look at
your Firewall settings.
|
Box Clever
If some of your plug-ins or soft synths use
challenge/response protection, make sure you also copy and paste both
challenge and response into a global text file on the same partition, in
case you need them again on any new PC, along with any serial numbers
and other information required. This approach provides another benefit:
you can discard all the original packaging and put all your discs into a
CD wallet. I also put the version numbers for each software item into
the same text file, which has saved no end of time when I visit
developers' web sites and can't remember what version I'm currently
running.
If you have an iLok dongle for some of your
plug-ins, be aware that lots more developers are now offering an iLok
authorisation as an alternative to challenge/response. I took the
opportunity to switch to this protection method for my PSP and Izotope
plug-in ranges, because once the authorisation is sitting in the dongle
it will be there for ever, even if you upgrade to a new PC, so you'll
hopefully never need to go through the authorisation process again.
Anyone buying or building a new PC at the moment is
bound to be wondering whether to install Vista or stick with Windows XP.
With this in mind, I'm happy to report that more audio manufacturers
and developers are now getting behind Vista and releasing new interface
drivers, announcing compatibility details for their existing software,
or releasing new versions of their software that are Vista compatible.
After all, without suitable drivers our hardware can't be used at all
under Vista, while without compatibility information we are unpaid Beta
testers, having to find out the hard way whether or not a particular
application will run reliably, or indeed at all.
If you already use an iLok (this one was supplied with Pro Tools),
why not see if any other music software in your collection can be iLok
authorised? One iLok can hold up to 100 authorisations, and you will
never again have to wait for a challenge/response when moving to a new
PC.
|
On the hardware front, Lynx Studio Technology (www.lynxstudio.com)
have released 32-bit and 64-bit versions of drivers for their Lynx Two,
L22 and AES16 PCI cards, as well as announcing their first PCI Express
product, the AES16e (with essentially the same feature set as their
previous AES16 PCI version). RME (www.rme-audio.com)
have also announced new HDSPe cards and HDSPe MADI cards, both in PCI
Express format and with Windows Vista drivers, while MOTU (www.motu.com)
have announced that they are shipping 32-bit and 64-bit
Vista-compatible drivers for all their Firewire, PCI and USB audio
interfaces.
Meanwhile, Emu (www.emu.com) have announced a new Emulator X2 Platinum
software sampler, in 32-bit and 64-bit Vista-compatible versions.
However, for me the most exciting news is that once again Cakewalk (www.cakewalk.com)
are ahead of the game, releasing the first major sequencer application
that natively supports Vista in 32-bit and 64-bit modes.
Sonar 6.2 is a free update for existing
users and takes advantage of new features in Vista such as WaveRT driver
support for enhanced CPU performance at low-latency playback settings,
and MMCSS (Multimedia Class Scheduler Service) support to give the Sonar audio engine prioritised access to CPU resources. On 64-bit PCs running Vista in 64-bit mode, Sonar
6.2 users will also experience benefits that include enhanced CPU
performance and the ability to access up to 128GB of RAM. These are the
sort of important Vista-related improvements we've all been waiting for!
For those about to embark on the big change-over,
the other big question must be whether Vista is likely to run existing
applications that have been deemed Vista-compatible at the same speed as
Windows XP, faster because of the new Vista engine, or slower because
of extra overheads for features such as the Aeroglass graphic interface.
Launching time for your favourite applications is
certainly likely to be significantly faster, because Vista uses a new
Superfetch feature that monitors your typical software usage and then
pre-loads files that it expects will be required the next time you boot
up your PC. It even memorises how often you launch them and when, so if
you only have time to boot up your sequencer at the weekend you can
expect it to know this and be prepared. Load times may be cut by more
than half!
Once running, most existing 32-bit games and 3D benchmarks seem to end up performing a few per cent slower with Vista than under XP, although, on the other hand, some audio and video encoding algorithms run faster, occasionally by a significant margin. However, the OpenGL graphics library is not supported by Vista, so the performance of any professional graphic applications using it will plummet. Across a range of other software it's pretty hit and miss, with both gains and losses of a few percent in performance. One thing's for sure: anyone primarily buying Vista to make their software run faster is likely to be disappointed, although we may see more gains with future Vista-optimised 64-bit applications. Sonar users can be justified in feeling a little smug in this respect, while the rest of us will have to wait.
No comments:
Post a Comment