New With ??? About My Set Up Options

[torchsong]

Hi, new girl here with lots of questions about hardware and software.
I've read just about everything I can that is somewhat related to my situation but still have ????

I am a cellist and vocalist and want to make backing tracks to play with live and also make demo recordings on my computer. I come from the portastudio school of home recordings so the MIDI stuff is making me nuts!

Here's what I have:
imac running OS 9.2
DX7
Boss DRmkII
Behringer Eurorack
MOTU Fast Lane
Metro 5
OMS 2.3.8 grrrrrrr.....
cello with pickup (although I usually am miked for studio recording)
guitars
cables

I've tried to keep the basic set up simple but am having problems with OMS I think. Metro doesn't seem to like to work with Free MIDI.
I am also having problems playing back audio after recording a track, how am I supposed to hear what I've played to do over dubs?

BTW, I downloaded Pro Tools Free to try it out and just can't get the thing to open (memory error 1,010) so I gave up and went with Metro instead because it was inexpensive to start.

Thanks for any help, this is a great site!

[Levon River]

I trust the MIDI comments and these  two queries are approriate to the forum

Definitely appriate to the forum, Tone (if you're operating in OS 9.x), but you might want to copy yer message and start it as a new thread since it wanders far afield from torchsong's woes that we're trying to get unknotted. (I'm not trying to do the moderators' job; just think you'd get more responses if you put your questions into a relevantly-titled thread of your own creation.)

The short answer to getting better/more "real" sounds into your mixes is definitely "sampler" (or sample-playback unit, if you don't want to get into tweaking or creating sampled instruments). There are too many available options to list, both hardware and software. If you're on a tight budget, definitely check out the shareware VSamp software sampler; it works as a VST instrument or standalone, and also reads Soundfont and SampleCell format. There's a world of free Soundfonts out there to get you started, some of them damn good. The program CDXtract will give you accessibility to almost every sample format out there, and the ability to convert to almost any format you need.

Hope that puts a spark in yer plug.