The nice thing about a blog is that you can speak (type) uninterrupted and at length about topics that you, the blogger, find fascinating, but that your readers may or may not find even vaguely interesting. Today's entry will no doubt be intolerably boring to all but the hardest core electronic music production nerd. But hey, it's a free blog nation, right? I feel the need to express myself, but anyone who I start talking to about the following topic immediately gets this glazed over look in their eyes, either that or starts looking around furtively for an escape route.

This weekend I reconfigured the MIDI setup, both hardware and software, in the studio. As anyone who has done this with more than a few pieces of gear knows, this can easily become an all day project. In this case it did. Most of the time was spent trying to get the new MIDIsport 8x8 from Midiman (thanks to Stephen Wilson for the recommendation and more on that one) to work both with the G5 running Tiger and the G4 running 9.2. The G4 was previously hooked up to the Opcode Studio S4 via the Stealthport modem to high speed serial port converter (which worked great ... no latency at all). But no matter what I did, I couldn't get the G4 to see the new MIDIsport 8x8 from OMS. I tried deinstalling and reinstalling OMS from scratch, I tried installing the Floppy Enabler extension, I tried hooking it up alternately via USB and via the Modem/serial converter ... but still no see-um. My guess is that upgrading from 9.2.1 to 9.2.2 might have worked, but there was no way I was doing that ... last time I tried that it put Cubase VST 5.2 into a serious tailspin, I think probably because of some incompatibility with the processor upgrade (we took the G4 from a 400mhz to 1400mhz a couple years ago). So finally I just gave up and plugged the G4 back into the Studio 4. Even though it doesn't have any MIDI gear plugged into it at the moment at least Cubase VST won't choke when it looks for the old OMS config.

As you may have guessed by now, I'm trying to get two systems to run in parallel. Not quite ready to make the leap and give up OS9 altogether ... there are too many tracks we might need to access without wanting to go thru the import/conversion process into Cubase SX3.

So ... the new system ... it's working great. Super fast G5, dual 2.8 or something like that. MIDIsport 8x8 was easy to install and everything works perfectly as far as I can tell (though I think our PAiA Fatman that I built on the kitchen table at Halcyon Court 5 years ago has finally died ... all I can get it to do is hum ... but that's not a MIDI problem). Imported tracks from Cubase VST work really well ... there are a few plugins I need to upgrade but mostly everything just works. For some of the older tracks I'll need to lock in the fx in VST 5.2 before importing into SX3. Kind of a pain, but not too bad really.

OK, there's one really fun bit about setting up MIDI in OSX (which I know everybody else did this five years ago but I'm a slow upgrader ... if it ain't broke why fix it?). Anyway, it's pictures! You can replace the default gear icons with actual pictures of your gear ... the configuration makes a lot more sense that way when you're taking a quick look at it - much more intuitive. I downloaded the pics below via Google images, resized to 128 max width/height as tiff, and dropped them into the appropriate library subfolder on the G5.

Neato, huh? And I know there's some crusty old gear in there, but we still use most of it once in awhile. Finally got rid of the old Roland D-70 ... it hadn't really been touched in years. Most of the new sounds are coming from Reaktor, Battery, Halion, and the other 30 or so VSTi's we've bought or downloaded in the last few years.

After I got all the gear working with the G5, I went back to working on a track I'm still developing on the G4. No longer having any MIDI connections to external gear, I ended up playing some parts directly into audio ... which I think worked out pretty well. Seemed so at the time ... I'll have to listen again today.

Any if you read this far then CONGRATULATIONS ... you're a studio dweeb.