Lessons From The Lab Part 3
Category: Lab
In the last few weeks I have learned some important lessons about Digidesign's Pro Tools 7.3 and my Akai MPC 1000.
1. Leopards don't play well with Pro Tools.
I recently updated my macbook pro to 10.5 (Leopard). One of the first things I decided to do after installation was edit a Pro Tools session I have been sitting on for a while. Well, it didn't work. Well I could run Pro Tools, but I couldn't execute plugins or save my progress. Oops. So last night, I formatted the mac and installed 10.4.11 and the patches to ensure that Pro Tools would play nice with Tiger.
2. Pro Tools is a bitch.
I read through a host of rules for Pro Tools setups. Like...
Recording is not suggested no the same IDE/SATA chain as the application.
You cannot use a USB hard drive as an external recording storage.
With a macbook pro, you are required to plug in an mbox 2 into the USB ports on the left.
OS X versions get tested, certified, then "officially" supported, at a much slower rate than we would all prefer. This means new systems come out with new a OS. I wait until Pro Tools decides to work with it.
3. An Akai MPC is the greatest and worse tool known to man. If you don't know enough about or pay added attention to file folders and sorting, your MPC hard drive will be fill of crap in no time.
4. JJOS (linky) is the only way I will roll.
5. Just because you have a reason refill unpacker, and 15GB of reason refills, doesn't mean they all need to go on the MPC. I have spent a total of 20 hours just converting, copying, and sorting my samples (>40GB worth) and I am just starting to use this refill unpacker / viewer.
6. Finding middle C on an instrument is the easiest way to sample an instrument into the MPC, there is a auto chromatic pitch changer/assigner in the new JJOS!
That is it for now.