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]

Free MIDI is installed but wasn't running  so I turned off OMS and started Free MIDI,  no crashes so I checked the configuration, everything seems to be working, meaning a signal looks like it is coming from the keyboard...

Oh, that's a blessing. That's religion right there. That's manna from the skies. Now we're getting somewhere...

...except now I have no audio.

Let's keep the MIDI and audio issues separate, or we'll just be back into a taffy-pull.

From all that's gone before, it seems now like the culprit has got to be OMS (Now *there's* a gasp-making surprise ). Okay, now, I haven't wrestled with this beast in months, and somebody said it changed recently, but there was a function in FreeMidi for it to "Emulate OMS." (Somebody sed recently that now it goes the other way somehow, but I haven't read up on it. Pray some of these other MIDI jockeys will wade in here soon and share their wisdom.) But have you addressed this issue of OMS acting like FreeMidi (for the Fastlane) and/or FreeMidi masquerading as OMS (for Metro)? We may have uncovered the black heart of this anti-musical monster.

If you track down what the latest state-of-the-confusion is between FreeMidi><OMS emulation, and get just *that* set up by the book, with yer synth audio outputs NOT going through the computer, but just to somewhere you can hear it, and then run Metro and see what happens with recording and playing back MIDI, that will be a further narrow-down.

Only when the MIDI is working should you start tackling the audio part. They are separate, separate, separate issues. Trying to handle both at once is the fast train to Bedlam.

I have a pair of computer monitors hooked up to the imac.
Would I want to make an audio connection via the mixer? I don't believe I have the proper size connectors to do that.

<A-*hem*!> You just never listen to a word I say, do you?

Adapters are dirt cheap. We'll get there. The *first* step is getting your MIDI equipment talking to your computer and software without crashing the machine.

Where does QuickTime fit into all of this?

Aiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeee!

Leave it alone, girl! Seriously, it's not in this picture at the moment.

As for Metro and other software, do they only work best with OMS???
I won't ask why  :)

I don't know specifically about Metro in its current incarnation. But if you debug the FreeMidi><OMS emulation quandry, it shouldn't matter. The problems arise when there's one thing expecting to find FreeMidi, another expecting to find OMS. The two were competing proprietary <Spit!> methods of handling MIDI when they both started which did not co-exist well at all at the System level, both trying to take over. MOTU relented and provided an OMS emulation option in FreeMidi. That seemed to work well to solve most problems. As I said, I don't know exactly what happened after that; Opcode went belly up.

Thanks for all the help!

Always been a sucker for a cello.


P.S. to damann: just read yours, and Metro does in fact support MIDI; it started out as the MIDI-only companion to Deck. Then Deck and Metro got orphaned to different companies. Metro grew audio capabilities; Deck is still audio-only. Maybe Deck is what you were thinking of. Metro and Deck have the same parents.