Fantom’s, XV’s and Cubase’s, Oh My.
One of the many things I’ve been trying to get done is to reconfigure and clean up my main studio computer.
With the release of Tiger in all of its goodness, and the fact that I have some time to myself, I spent a good part of the last couple evenings wiping, reinstalling and reconfiguring everything in hopes that it would help with my creativeness.
Everything went more smoothly than I anticipated. The OS installed easily, my MOTU 828mkII drivers installed with only the slightest hitch (my fault for wanting to not do the “Easy Install”), the Midiman (well, M-Audio) Midi Express 8×8 had working drivers, and Tiger’s Audio/Midi Setup saw everything just fine. It was a cinch to add my core midi devices and drag them to the appropriate I/O in AMS.
Most surprising to me was that Cubase SX3 installed and upgraded without any issues, including the stupid USB dongle driver software. I’m not sure if it was because the OS was fresh, but in the past I always had weird issus with Cubase. During the setup of my default templates, I always inevitably had problems triggering my midi devices from my midi devices. That always led to frustration. Well, with this most recent install, it all worked right out of the box.
Amazing. Onward.
When I was tinkering around with the MIDI setup in Cubase, I found it really unintuitive that, even though I chose the “Fantom X8″ as my output device, all my patchnames were using generic names (eg. Patch 1, Patch 2, Performance 1, etc.) I couldn’t deal with this naming convention for obvious reasons, so I headed off to find instrument settings for both of my synths.
A Google search yielded Fantomized.info, which conveniently had the Fantom X8 instrument definitions for Cubase, including ALL of the expansion cards. Now I can actually choose “Piano Number 898 with Hall Reverb 420″ from Cubase, rather than “Patch 4″.
I still had the same problem with my XV-5080, so I consulted Google once again. Behold, I was led to the shareware application named XV-Edit (and the satellite imagery of the author’s town– that Google is so cool). Although XV-Edit allows you to edit and modify every aspect of the 5080, I only needed it for it’s instrument definition exporting feature. I paid the author his $50 to enable saving, configured all the expansion cards and exported a Cubase compatible file. This file was wasily imported into Cubase and works great.
I’m making the XV-5080 Cubase XML definition file available for download, just on the off chance that someone else may find it useful. (It’s only configured for my 5080 setup, so if it doesn’t work for you, go buy XV-Edit.)
After some more tweaks and installs of Reason and Live, I now have a new clean OSX install with all that I need to get back to creating music.
Hopefully the efficient setup will assist with the creativeness.
If not, I’ll just have another beer.