Rebuilding the DAW at the studio and general hilarity
 

I've just spent three days rebuilding the DAW in my recording studio control room. One of the DAWs in house started behaving flaky so they decided to rebuild it. In the process they moved up from Windows Seven and Steinberg Nuendo 7.xx to Windows 10 and Nuendo 8.1. Both platforms have been out long enough to get settled. Because our house is a non-stop production environment, we choose to live behind the "bleeding edge" of technology and let someone else do the bleeding! The upgraded box was used for three months to verify that it was stable. Once we had a functional box in another room it was time to upgrade them all, including mine. The maintenance engineer I was working with decided the best course of action was to simply replace the computer's boot drive and build the DAW from scratch. I spent a half-day backing up all that data and all the settings I could before we pulled the plug and replaced the drive. Installation of the new drive, Windows, and all the drivers took a morning and then it was my turn.

The whole installation is complicated by several facts:
1) The computer lives in the machine room and the monitors, input devices, and controllers live in the control room. Everything is remoted by Ethernet and other systems.
2) We are connected via LAN to several hubs that contain more than fifteen production servers managed by multiple access systems that demand different access credentials.
3) The DAW and the mastering software WaveLab run plugins from Waves, iZotope, UAD, Antares, Wavemachine Labs, and others and uses multiple authorization methods from iLok to eLicenser to local authorization files. All these are getting better but there are always a couple of authorization snags each time we rebuild.
4) The video software, Adobe Premiere, and associated Media Encoder must be installed and all video standards used in the house must have templates and presets for quick and proper support.
5) The machine utilizes a three-head video card with two of the monitors being used to contain the DAW’s graphical user interface and the third used to display any video associated with the project.
6) All this software has to live together in harmony. Most of the plug-ins have drivers and handlers. Hilariously, some those drivers need drivers to talk to other drivers and there is no central repository of information about what it takes to bring peace between all the warring factions.

I spent a day wrestling the various plugs into submission and acquiring access and software for all the servers. Then it was a half-day chore configuring all the software to perform properly for my various tasks (music recording, audio post production for film and video, mastering, etc.). I’d call the build 99% done at this point.

And guess what was waiting as my first session the moment I declared the room reasonably back online? It was a live feed between my studio and another on the opposite coast to allow my company's CEO could do a live interview from the recording room! I never seem to get the low-pressure jobs first after a rebuild.

Bob

Wow I don't envy that job, at all.

And here I thought when I upgraded and switched from and HDD boot drive on my Mac Pro, to a PCIe SSD boot drive was a project, which installing the SSD only took like 5 minutes but because in doing so also did a new clean install of Sierra OS, a new install Of PTHDN 12.2 and then had to reinstall all my Waves Platinum , Plugin Alliance , AIR and Slate plugins as well as PT added content plugin installs . Took me about a day to download everything , with the relatively slow internet I had at the time. And about 4 hours to install .

Don't forget the mirror image drive. :)

Yeah, we are running two backups: a mirror image and an OS and operational systems only backup.

Bob

Bob, I don't envy you that task. I'm taking on a much smaller project this weekend and I'm not really looking forward to it. I'm going to take all my gear out of the rack and rearrange it. I've added a bunch of pieces over the past year (Hendy DaVinci, Sebatron Axis, Audio-Scape Opto x2, Audio-Scape 76a) and I want to rework it so the things I use most are within easy reach and also to put the back of my patch bay in a place where I can actually get to it. I still haven't quite figured out where every piece is going to go. That's going to slow me down a bit but whatever I come up will be better than how it is now.

wow, great detail, bob!

i find that i am continually organizing and reorganizing my system. mostly downsizing as some of it that i haven't used gets pulled from the system.

play music!

How's the Audio-Scape 76a????

I haven't racked it and used it yet. I knew I was going to rearrange everything once the 2nd Opto came in, and I figured it was best to just wait. The 2nd Opto comes in tomorrow so I'll be reconfiguring everything on Friday or Saturday.

Well when you get it racked up, let me know how it sounds. I just bought a BAE 1073MPF (single channel), and I thought about racking it up in a 3 space rack with an 1176, just so I can take it with me back and forth between my house and project studios.

Anyone I've known who had a BAE pre loved it.

On a more sour note, I spent the morning working on Project Rack Rearrange. I pulled all the cables, labeled both ends to avoid mistakes when I reinstalled them, and put all my gear but one piece in their new rack places. The head stripped on the very last rack screw I had to remove ...the very last screw. Ugh.

I have to pick up a set of those bits to remove screws with stripped heads. Hopefully I can get this project completed tomorrow. I do like the new arrangement though. And it will be nice to re-cable it neatly. When I removed the cables today, it was like untangling a dozen sets of xmas lights.

good luck with the screw extraction:)

It wasn't easy but I finally got the screw out. The rack is reconfigured and the back of the rack no longer looks like a jumbled nightmare of xmas light strings. The JDK R22 on top isn't hooked up because I'm thinking I might sell it. I haven't made up my mind yet but I'm leaning in that direction. I still haven't tried out the 76a. I'll report on it when I do.

https://i.imgur.com/WSCM1ph.jpg?1