EastWest plugins headaches and workaround

 Hey...

I know it's been a while, but I decided to get back to music creation on Windows. Got myself a new PC - Windows 11, installed my reliable and fantastic Sonar Platinum edition with its plugins and finally installed the FREE Cakewalk by BandLab | Produits BandLab that contains some enhancements to Sonar that was dated 2017. This whole install took only about 6 hours, I wished I would have taken earlier the decision to buy this new PC!

Found myself opening a project that required the QL Goliath plugin from EastWest. They're pretty much the only software company I work with that don't allow downloading the software. And they pretty much could, because you need an iLok to run the plugins anyway. Fortunately, I still had the original DVDs so I started installing it, pretty much what I had done with Sonar, Garritan, Izotope, Image-Line and AAS plugins...

but not only did the install failed, but I got a blue screen right after the install. My only guess is it came from the iLok drivers that were simply too old for Windows 11... anyway I had to restart the whole installation from scratch 😫.

Once I got the new installation running, still wanted to use that QL Goliath plugin but certainly did not want to repeat the same error twice. I copied the library (from the drive of the original installation, the complete QL Goliath Library folder) and told myself, let see what I can do with this. So here is the workaround if you find yourself in a similar situation.

1. Copy the complete EastWest library to your new computer disk
2. Install the latest version of Play, which is the engine that runs any of the EastWest plugins
1. This will also install the latest iLok drivers. THIS IS MANDATORY to run the plugins.
3. Run Play
4. From the Play menu, do a file open and select any of the .ewi files in a subdirectory of the Instruments folder.
5. Play will prompt you to select the Instruments folder of the library and there you go : the plugin was reusable as on the old machine!

This also worked with the Fabfour and QL Orchestra plugins so you might want to give it a try for other EW plugins you have on Windows.

Let me know if this worked for you!

Amazon EC2 and Windows fun (cont'd)

Well I had thought I had found the answer in Microsoft KB, but it did not work. It made sense to restore everything and then to get back some of the stuff that is strongly hardware dependant, such as the boot.ini file in the whole windows\repair directory... but I got the same message...

I found out in doing so that the Windows images of Amazon are Datacenter version as the version I was trying to restore was a standard one. Probably that there are some checks that disallows restoring different version of Server 2003 to one another (which makes sense because otherwise you could restore a Datacenter edition on top of Standard which Microsoft would certainly not want!).

The journey continues!

Amazon EC2 and Windows fun

I've been fuddling around EC2 and Windows for about 6 months now and have been trying to transfer this big VMWare Windows Server 3 image to run in the cloud. I have found numerous post to transfer Linux VMWare to EC2 which I don't think from my research I could replicate for Windows.

The following post was probably the most informative (Webfellas reference) although some of the bundling command involved are not available in the Windows EC2 command API. I thought that I could eventually transfer the Windows image anyhow using a Linux instance but my Unix skills being somewhat limited, and after reviewing AWS forums stating that uploading a Windows image from scratch would not work because of the low level hardware and virtual CPU requirements, I revert to another alternative.

So last weekend I did a full Windows backup into a .bkf file that I uploaded to a specific EBS volume that I had mounted on my Windows instance. Since this file being about 30 GB in size, ti took a while (actually close to 48 hours in total - not surprising since at even an upload bandwith of 1 MBPS it would take about 300 000 seconds = 83 hours).

So finally, this morning I was able to restore all the C drive containing the OS and I also elected to restore the system state. When restarting the instance though, I got the following system log in the EC2 console:

3/23/2010 12:17:59 PM: Waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:22:35 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:24:26 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:26:16 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:28:07 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:29:58 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:31:48 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:33:38 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:35:28 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:37:18 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:39:08 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:40:58 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:42:49 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:44:39 PM: Still waiting for meta-data accessibility... 3/23/2010 12:48:08 PM: Waiting for meta-data accessibility...

I think I might have pushed my luck to hard and ended up messing the low level code of Windows that interact with the virtual hardware.

My plan is now to recreated a new W2k3 instance and selectively restore some of the backup... I'll keep you posted!

A new blog

Well here it is... I have too much to tell and there doesn't seem to be a place where I can share my ideas on my two passions : music and technology. I always loved playing piano, started playing at 11, and was always told I had talent. I was sort of directed, by myself that is, toward an engineering career a while ago, with in mind buiding synthesizers, for maintaining a connection to music playing.

In the process, I discovered computers. Started on Vic-20, learned MVS S/360 and 370, programmed in Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, RPG, Visual Basic, and even some assembly programming on S/370 and 8086 (the ancestor of Pentium for the young in you). Loved it so much started a career in consulting at Arthur Andersen, programmed on S/38 and AS/400 and gradually evolved into that realm to become a vice-president of consulting services... far from music and not enough time to do any, anymore.

So I quit about 2 years ago. Returned to school to learn basic audio and sound engineering, finished about 6 months ago, and now am here doing some contract work both in audio and in technology, and now having fun connecting back to programming and technology installation.

I don't know exactly how all this works, but I intend to keep you posted on what I find that can be useful for mere mortals that we all are! Some subject that I would like to develop:

1. Amazon Cloud computing, EC2 and S3 and related application such as DropBox and box.net;
2. Programming MIDI and audio application with Visual C#;
3. Using Sonar Producer to record, mix and master audio material, music or for video;
4. Utilities that everyone should know about, such as logmein, dropbox, box.net, primo pdf and others;
5. Linux distributions that are popular and my experience with some of them;
6. Management tricks I've learned over the years, such as OAD, partnering with large technology organizations, managing people and building profitable consulting practices; and,
7. Books and music that I have listened to that are worth writing about.

It is always fun to receive comments and suggestion for additional posting, so please don't be shy and let me know if there is something you want to if I know about, I'll reply!

That's it for a first post, now back to Safari Books on line for Visual C# 2008 step by step!