Word to the wise:
Avoid Win7 64bit for music, and possibly vista 64 and Xp64 to.
Bad bad medicine!
Cubase, Protools, Wavelab etc are all OK, but good LORD the plugins are a mess.
I've now had to put my backup of XP back in play, rip out everythin non DAW related (the unbridled pleasure of such a Stalinesque software purge was somewhat tempered by the horrific speed at which the add/remove programs panel works in XP (got use to 7's which is a bit better, or I'v just not installed enough stuff to fuck it yet).).
Not easy though, swapping 7 and XP around....for one thing, 7 wants 2 partitions on the same disk XP wants only one on. And another more amusing problem is that if I update the Kubuntu on the system, and that updates it's bootloader (rare, but it's done so once already), when I roll the XP back into play, suddenly the bit of the bootloader on the actual bootsector is from a different version to the bit on the Kubuntu partition (The Grub bootloader is a mighty tool, but leaves a lot of itself on the root partition in order to squeeze a rescue commandline into the bootsector itself....what an MS bootloader fills the space with is anyone's guess because it hands off to the Windows drive as soon as it reads, with the entire boot conducted by NTLDR), Result=no boot+extreme genius to rescue system in a painless manner.
I'm going into needless detail because my timelord complex needs feeding, and I do feel I've out-clevered windows and linux all at once.
(the above will come back to haunt me....HAL9000 and FAC9007 are currently living in the hall while I redecorate the Tardis console room.....both with their organs on display and instetines hangin out too.....they're NEVER gonna start anyway, but now I've gone and crowed my superiority all over the internet, I'll be luck if only 3 components fail.....poor HAL, this is the longest he's been offline since the day he had his DOS infection cured and inherited the hostname HAL9000 from the preious linux box)
PS: I had made a little progress with the tune in 7, but it was just too painful. Also remembered why the strings are shit.....because if I use Edirol Orchestra...which has truly wonderful solo and section strings....I had to get all old-school and enter MIDI prg-chng commands by hand, which I am unlikely to bother my arse doing in this day and age, so wiil most likely finish tune with gash instrumentation...then change all of it to something better in one session and use cubase's freeze function (pretty much bounces the output of any VSTi to an audio file), to lock the fucker down.
