5.5 question

[Bill Odom]

Originally Posted by Rich LePage

Hi Bryan,
Thanks for getting back. Any reason the m/media driver is gone in 5.5 -- and any way to put it back?

The Direct X thing I mentioned has been true since it was first implemented in Medit-- on every system I've tried it on, Intel, AMD, you name it-- I never could get it to work right with any 3rd party Direct X programs, despite the same plug ins running fine on the same systems with other hosts like Cool Edit, etc.

I sent piles of notes on that one going way back to various beta versions of the DX enabler. In fact, I bought the Waves plug ins over 2 years ago, specifically to use with Medit, but I could never get them to work with it.

I held off on registering them (they will always run for 14 days in full function mode if you don't register them, but after that will not run any longer) -- due to the Direct X stuff in Medit never working right. Finally just recently I bit the bullet due to needing their de-esser, and they upgraded me free to a current version which allows you to use it with the ILOK key. You buy an ILOK (USB key made by Pace), and then they authorize the key, so that you can use the software on any computer you want, so long as you plug in the key to authorize it.

So, I then rolled their plug ins out to many computers, all of which also run Medit, but alas, the same result, Medit won't work with any of them. Yet most of the machines also have CEP and a cheapo sound card (bought to eventually allow Medit to preview Direct X) in them-- and under CEP (Cool Edit Pro or the Adobe version of it) the Waves stuff always runs just fine.

Hope all else there is going well. If you have any tips or things I might try, let me know.

Rich

Rich what version of waves are you using ?

Bill

[Rich LePage]

Hi Bill,
Waves Gold Bundle, version 4, but will be upgraded before long to version 5.x.
The Waveshell is really the main difference.

I also tried it with version 3.x of Waves which was what originally shipped,
same problem. I then went to ver 4 which requires an ILOK key.
These plug ins work perfectly with the old Cool Edit Pro, the new Adobe Audition, and several other programs.

Rich

[Rich LePage]

Hi Bill,
Waves Gold Bundle, version 4, but will be upgraded before long to version 5.x.
The Waveshell is really the main difference from what Waves says.

I also tried it with version 3.x of Waves which was what originally shipped,
same problem. (That version "authorized" your drives) I then went to ver 4 which requires an ILOK key, so had to go out and buy one of those. These plug ins work perfectly with the old Cool Edit Pro, the new Adobe Audition, and several other host programs that support Direct X plug ins. But never worked with Medit.

But if you migrate to version 5 of Waves, you can no longer run the plug ins on older op systems, they require Win XP with that version. Several of my older MTU systems run on Win ME and Win98SE. I have one Krystal in a Win XP Athlon 2.5 gig machine running on an Asus A7N8X system (NVidia chipset), and have made another one work successfully in a P4 2.5 (Northwood core, there are 2 versions of this CPU) system running XP, using an Asus P4PE deluxe motherboard. I then migrated the P4 back to Win ME due to the activation thing with XP. I'm about to take the Krystal out of that system and move it up to XP Home and install an Aardvark Q10 I've had for awhile, for running Adobe Audition 1.5. The Aardvark uses a Motorola DSP like Krystal, and so the 2 cards cannot seem to co-exist in the same machine. It's a pretty clean sounding interface.

My reasoning in moving the Waves stuff to ver 5 and foregoing being able to use them with WinME and Win98SE is that I never could get them to work (or any other Direct X plug ins either) properly with Medit.

I'll put that Krystal in an older P3 Intel motherboard system (which it has run with before and which at the moment runs WinME, so I'll install Medit 5.4). Reasoning is that the Krystal does its own processing and thus doesn't really need a super fast CPU -- also with no m/media driver for 5.5 that will work with XP, that's a drawback. So I figure best use of the faster machine is to run Audition which will host the Waves plug ins just fine.

Also, with XP you can have more than 512 megs of RAM, which should make programs like Audition even more happy and allow for more real time effects and tracks w/o glitching. Audition 1.5 is available as an upgrade version for any registered Cool Edit Pro 2x users for about $70.00 from Adobe.
Running Win ME, I removed Krystal and installed the Aardvark as a test, and had 16 audio tracks running with a lot of plug ins running real time with no premixing - though it did glitch just a little. I'm figuring with one gig of RAM that will cure the situation, but haven't tried that yet. Win ME, like Win98SE, gets very unhappy with over 512 megs of RAM installed. Lotsa weird stuff starts to happen.

I still much prefer Medit and Krystal for most things, but for doing mastering and fine tuning, I will often make a final project into WAV file(s) and then bring into Audition or similar and do some tweaking with the Waves plug ins,
then take those new files back into Medit for final CD mastering.

If Medit could really support Direct X that would often not be necessary, though. And if there was a driver to support playing through Krystal from say Audition under WinXP, that would at least be a partial solution, too.

Rich

[geezer]

....Got to say that this whole boondoggle is what sent me to Wavelab, and I have not found any serious drawbacks as of yet....I have spent an awful lot of time re-examining converters, dithering and interfaces, but the end result seems to me to be a big improvement, and I can work in 96k, which is becoming an increasing reality for me.

The Wavelab process is very fast and intuitive once you figure it out, and is capable of some incredibly subtle and effective editing, but I do miss the simplicity of MTU for some things, including the non-dithering 24bit-to-16bit math for CD mastering. On my last 2 CDs, however, I found that some specific combinations of processing in Wavelab (with Waves plug-ins) sounded better than the straight math in MTU....For some kinds of music, I might not find this to be true, but, again, this would eliminate the Waves plugins which I have come to rely on for a lot of my mastering....I have just recently bought a hardware version of the Waves L2, however, which could change things. I would like to see how this interfaces with Microeditor (i.e.- Master to 24bit with the L2 and use the math in MTU to get to CD land) as another option for some things......The last CD I did that I felt really worked in MTU was through the old I/O with all the mastering external going to 16bit into the I/O via AES, although I have had success with some straight conversion of 24 bit files prior to this...

I have become attached, as well, to CD text in Wavelab, so this is becoming another obsolescence issue....

I am considering sending in a Krystal and I/O to MTU and seeing if they can integrate me a system on a new computer without losing functionality and all my old files.....It would be nice if this could happen with MicroSync, but I'm not holding my breath. Anyway, my original workstation has become flakey and I really can't deal with it anymore.....Got any solid computers available, MTU?

[Rich LePage]

Thanks for the update. Keep us posted on how well the hardware L2 works with Krystal, etc - very interesting. I've been using the Waves software L2, but of course to do that requires going outside MTU since the Direct X linkage in Medit never really has worked at all for me.

On the integration with M/Sync, that will probably be a tough one, since it needs a m/board with at least one ISA slot, and those are sure getting to be a rarity. I think that once CPUs got much over 1 gig speed, the motherboard companies all seemed to drop ISA slots. If you find one, let me know, I have a spare brand new Microsync. My other M/Sync system runs on an older Athlon 1.2 gig CPU with (I think) an older Tyan m/board. I have another one too that runs on a today-ancient Intel board with an old P133 CPU in it.
It's fine for what it does, which is mostly laybacks to video, though.

Most of my machines have removable IDE drive sleds, the newer ones also have USB 2 and/or Firewire, so I take drives back/forth between them.
But with many of the older m/boards, trying to add USB 2 to them can be
pretty dicey-- most of the add-on cards try to set up a zillion IRQs and just don't work. Ones with the NEC chipset I've heard work better - I tried a couple with Via chipsets and no-go. Firewire seems easier to add to an older m/board, I was able to do that on 2 machines where I just could not get USB 2 to work. You can buy several combo boxes for big drives that support both USB and Firewire, by the way. I've done that with several DVD burners for data and a few large hard drives like 120 and 200 gigs.

I did find a SCSI to IDE converter board that works with most things and allows you to use an IDE CD drive but connected to a SCSI controller. It seems to work very well with stuff like NTI, Nero, and Roxio, but Micro CD won't find it properly, I tried several diff IDE CDRW drives with it.