I wrestled with ASIO4ALL for quite a while, frankly, and
was about to just give up on its tendency to decide my Line-in channels were 'in
use by another application' - but not all the time, which was really
frustrating! My wife had bought me a copy of Sonar 8.5 for Christmas and
since then I was REALLY seething about it. Tired with the iffy performance
of the on-board VIA/Realtek motherboard hardware, I got ahold of an Asus PCIE
D2X card, and for a bit still couldn't get the ASIO4ALL module to obey, until I
went in with the invaluable CCleaner application, and looked at my Startup and
Drivers sections: Not only had previous sound modules (including an
aborted installation of a PCI card that just didn't work under anything newer
than Windows XP SP1, great support C-Media!) left their rubbish everywhere, but
the uninstalled ASIO4ALL was still working in the background. I sighed and
manually cleared them out thanks to CCleaner (which stands for Crap Cleaner if
you must know), and rebooted. Reinstalled the Asus card's drivers and
another reboot, then a fatalistic running of Sonar to see what it could
detect... and lo and behold, Sonar has a native version of ASIO that runs just
bloody fine!
Let the remastering begin! Starting with my only
physical performance in the UK (thanks to Steve Lawson) in 2001, at the
"Critical Mass" shows. The recording's on MD but it sounds great and won't
require any cleanup so far as I can tell. And now I'll be a bit more
versatile for the online performances as well, since use of my beloved Mellotron
VST is no longer obfuscated.
Sigh. Finally!
Lastly, this Friday's Audio Tarot Bone Throw has an
all-American 4th of July theme, complete with recent footage taken in NYCNY from
the Empire State Building. What fun!
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