I am soo ready to go back to Hard Disk Recording

I am so sick of the DAW paradigm! For all it’s features and ease of use, when it’s working, the overall loss of productivity is INSANE!!! I have maybe 3 days out of 10 where I just turn my rigg on and go to work. The other 7 days, I’m losing time (sometimes only 20 minutes, other times several hours) tracking down issues: Updates, bugs, drivers, app incompatibilities, “it worked last night, why doesn’t it work now?,” “who knows whats wrong with it?,” waiting for answers from the forums, waiting for someone to answer from product support IF there is any product support, etc.

When I was using hard disk recorders with a desk, I sat down every day and did my work! This morning Windows 10 did some kind of system update. This afternoon, I had an idea for a new song that I wanted to get down. So I fired up Nuendo, only to be told that my eLicense was bad! Usually a quick re-seat of the dongle would take care of that. Not this time. I ran the maintenance app. Only 5 out of 6 points cleared. I had to totally re-install a new license update, by which time the aggravation had totally wiped my idea for the song away. :angry: If I’d been using my old setup of a desk and a recorder, I’d have turned both on and recorded my idea, done! Each only does the one thing it does perfectly and reliably so, there’s no guess work. The rare occasion when something broke, you only had to replace that one part while the unit was in the shop. Life was so much simpler then!

Working on a HDR and desk might not be as fast as the DAW, but I’m sure the overall output would far surpass it. The only bottle neck, that I can think of, would be the offloading of files to the DAW for editing and then re-importing those edits back into the HDR. I know you can’t stop progress and the march of time and all of that, but after a while, this crap really gets old!

Rant over! :angry:

Why connect your DAW PC to the internet? It should be offline and therefore stable - if you have to go online then upgrade to windows pro so you can disable automatic updates.

No DAW requires this much maintenance. You’re making it sound like there could be something wrong with your setup.

I’m kind of with you there. Whenever an HDR comes out that has the editing features I’ve come to expect and depend on that Cubase has, I think I’m out of here!

I am on Windows 10 Pro.

Well that’s just it. Most of this stuff doesn’t really count as maintenance, does it? Today’s snag was because of an OS update. Other similar snags are from other kinds of external forces.

A few years ago, I was working comfortably on a very stable Nuendo 4 setup. I shut down on a Tuesday Night with everything working fine. On Wednesday morning the video was gone and Nuendo was jittery as hell. I lost 3 days tracking down the problem to, wait for it, and update to iTunes that I didn’t know anything about! :open_mouth: By that Friday, when this issue had spread to 100’s of users SB, told us then what was going on. Apparently, the iTunes update screwed up Quicktime. It was a very simple fix, IF WE’D HAVE KNOWN.

SB, dropped support on the Midex 8, changed the code & drivers and my hardware was now a paper weight. Every time Avid does an update on Eucon, I’m quaking in fear! 3.4 was great. 3.5 turned everything to rubble. 3.6 is great. I’ve got NO incentive to try 3.7! Look how many issues are going on as we speak with Nuendo 8! I tried it and had to go back to Nuendo 7, which technically is quite stable. But even the most stable DAW is subject to this kind of crap all the time, as is evidenced by the forum. Look at how many Tango owners are now forced to go to Pyramix because of no more support form the other DAW manufacturers. Look at how many RX6 owners can’t use it with Nuendo. My Real Guitar (ver. 4) VSTis make Nuendo 7 crash. They worked great with 6.5. How many 100’s of 32bit plug-ins/VSTis have you lost now because the DAWs are all 64bit only?

My point is that when I ran a very successful jingle business for 12 years on a Roland VS 1680/880 set up. To this day, I have yet to have a single problem with either of those devices. Before that, I used a Tascam Desk and Multi-tracks and hardware FX. I have friends who’s studios were centered around Mackie D8b desks with Mackie HDRs. They worked 20+ YEARS with nothing more than regular maintenance. Same with Tascam desk/DA 98/88/78 studios. But as soon as you swap out that recorder for the convenience of the DAW, it’s “Russian Roulette!” You spend all your time “reinventing the wheel.” You’ve got to buy Mic Pres, AD/DA converters, Monitor Control units (all of which were covered with the desk) at minimum. If you want faders and a “desk experieince,” now you’ve got to buy a controller. Look at “that graveyard!” Houston, Mackie’s HUI, Tascam’s 1824, Roland’s V-700, Wk’s “id,” Pro Control, Control 24, C-24, D Control, D Command, Smart AV Tango 1 & 2, Euphonix System 5MC & Artist Series and the list goes on and on! 95% of those devices died a “premature death,” NOT because of reliability, but because of some boardroom decision when they could no longer be suitably monetized!

I’m saying that if I’d gone with a Yamaha DM2k desk at the full 96 channels at 96K setup with a pair of Tascam X48 HDR’s, they would’ve paid themselves in under 5 years and the last 18 years would’ve been all profit! I could run that system blind folded. I wouldn’t be worried about viruses or losing projects to file corruption or any of that crap! But since I chose to go with DAWs, I work a little, spend vast amounts of time researching issues to try to keep future proofing the gear and trying to hang on to any of whatever hardware I can long enough to make it into amortization! This stuff is supposed to be a tool that allows us to concentrate on creating content, NOT learning and relearning how to do the same daily tasks over and over again because they keep moving the controls around to make room for some new feature. It’s supposed to be invisible. It clearly is not!

IZ RADAR SUPPOSEDLY has that kind of feature set now. But you’re looking at $20K for a 24 track deck. I cant justify that kind of expense when budgets are driving most of us out of the business entirely! :cry:

I would recommend two things:

  1. Get Win 10 PRO if you haven’t already got it, and defer your updates to later. You can then install them when you know you have time to do it.

  2. Get something like Marcrium Reflect. It allows you to clone your system drive while the computer is booted from it. I’ve tried it by cloning my system drive and then disconnecting it and booting from the clone, and it worked 100%. So, in other words, when you have a working setup clone the system drive to a spare and keep updating that clone every now and then. Macrium also allows you to do this to a backup set on a backup drive, so you can basically save this to that spinning backup drive and keep a blank spare SSD for example and just restore that set to the new SSD if you have any issues. That may take you some time to do, but far less than days worth of work.

  3. Always keep all drivers in a folder somewhere, or in the cloud, so that you can revert to older drivers if something is wonky.

  4. Never trust Apple. I think Nuendo 7.1.4 or whatever it was updated the video engine, so you can throw that p.o.s. Quicktime out the window.

  5. Never trust iTunes. P.O.S. software that you should get rid of. You can even run Nuendo 7 with the QT engine without iTunes installed. All you need is the QT library. It was the QT player that was a security issue, and iTunes was never necessary to have installed as an app.

Ok, that was five… I just had my coffee so that’s why…

And by the way, I really do empathize with you. It sucks when your system is acting up on a regular basis.

For the 2nd time now, I HAVE WINDOWS 10 PRO! :laughing: :laughing: :laughing:

Here’s my Rigg (in the signature):
Nuendo 1.5 - 8.0.10 |VST Studio Connect Pro | Windows 10 Pro | Intel i7 - 5820K CPU @ 3.30 | 64-bit OS | 32GB of RAM |RME HDSPe RayDAT | NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti Video Card | Euphonix MC Control, 2 Mix & Transport | Xkeys | iConnectivity mi10 MIDI Interface | UAD-2 Octo Core with UAD-1 Legacy Ultra Pak | Isotope RX4 | Melodyne 3.2 | Voxengo Plugins | Real Guitar | B4 II | EZ Drummer | Drumagog 4 | Virtual Guitarist 2 | Korg, Roland, Kurzweil Synths | Apogee Big Ben | 32 Channel Panasonic DA-7 desk | Equator D5 (5.1) & Mackie 824 (St.) monitors | VS-1680 & 880 HDR’s |

MattiasNYC wrote:
2) Get something like Marcrium Reflect. It allows you to clone your system drive while the computer is booted from it. I’ve tried it by cloning my system drive and then disconnecting it and booting from the clone, and it worked 100%. So, in other words, when you have a working setup clone the system drive to a spare and keep updating that clone every now and then. Macrium also allows you to do this to a backup set on a backup drive, so you can basically save this to that spinning backup drive and keep a blank spare SSD for example and just restore that set to the new SSD if you have any issues. That may take you some time to do, but far less than days worth of work.

I have Paragon Backup for my system. It’s an ADK Workstation, so that comes standard with the PC and I do try to keep the backup updated.


MattiasNYC wrote:
3) Always keep all drivers in a folder somewhere, or in the cloud, so that you can revert to older drivers if something is wonky.

  1. Never trust Apple. I think Nuendo 7.1.4 or whatever it was updated the video engine, so you can throw that p.o.s. Quicktime out the window.

  2. Never trust iTunes. P.O.S. software that you should get rid of. You can even run Nuendo 7 with the QT engine without iTunes installed. All you need is the QT library. It was the QT player that was a security issue, and iTunes was never necessary to have installed as an app.

The QT story is old news. That happened years ago. My point in telling it was to show how SOMEthing always seems to pop up. No matter how safe you are (Backups, staying offline, getting updates and testing before integrating, etc.) something always seems to pop up and “bite you in the butt!”
These kinds of thing just don’t happen in the dedicated hardware paradigm. You buy it and it works until it breaks. Then you repair or replace. But you don’t have to coddle it all the time in order to keep it working daily! :angry:

Look, I get it. Time marches on. There are things that I can do in the DAW that are physically impossible with a hardware mixer/HDR setup, let alone the speed in which I can do those things. But on the day to day, “I just need a hammer” kind of situations, the fickleness of the DAW can be infuriating. It’s like owning a Ferrari. It’s gorgeous and its a joy to drive. But it spends so much time in the shop, you need 2 to enjoy one, LOL! :laughing:

I just want to find a way to get as close to the hardware paradigm as I can. I want a DEDICATED fader and knob for each function rather than paging through menus to get to the function I need! I want to work on a system that I can run blind folded like the old days. I want a system that I can learn and master, NOT learn and relearn and relearn ad infinitum! But I guess that’s TOO EXPENSIVE or just too much to ask for in this day and age.

Like I said, my rant is over.

Yeah, I understand all that, but you need THE PROFESSIONAL VERSION!

just joking with you…

sorry I missed it earlier :wink:

:laughing:

Unfortunately, for the first time ever, I was forced to install iTunes since that is the only backup method for Metagrid. I hope PC users can somehow escape this in the future since Metagrid seems to becoming quite popular.

O.m.g. I can’t believe you brought up the midex. Lol

The MIDEX may be un-supported but still works just fine BTW.

This, I’m very happy with mine :slight_smile:

Yep! Midex8 works on Win 10 pro here. Here is the driver for anyone with too many paperweights! :laughing:
https://www.steinberg.net/en/support/unsupported_products/midex_8.html

:mrgreen: I know, right! OP is living in the lase decade.

Lucky me, I go on the net, play heavy games, do all my banking and never a creative issue like you describe. I’ve had three home built PC’s in 15 years and all transfer, update, new plugin, have all done fine.

I have had a license issue that took a few mins to update and sort. I once lost my content for halion which took about ten minutes to sort.

You have a user error going on.