Music for Games, Films, and other Visuals

I made the plunge today. After months of drooling over applications and features. I think it went well, but only time will tell. I’ve been needing to run things like BootCamp, and OmniGraffle Pro… and I’ve really been stymied with OS 10.4. So… I ordered a new hard drive for my laptop and installed it Friday night. I know, I know, exciting weekend fun!

(I’ve been running 10.5 on my desktop Mac Pro machine since PT HD was released)

Well, long story short… I am now running OS 10.5.2 on the primary partition of my laptop (shh… don’t tell Berklee, we’re not moving forward on 10.5 right now, for one thing ProTools LE is not yet compatible!). I also have a Windows Vista partition (scary I know but I’ve already got a real pc running XP so I thought I’d go out on a limb!). The third partition is carrying my old OS 10.4 material which makes it easy to be Berklee institution certified!

One weekend and I have a new bounce in my step! Spring has never felt better! I have had so much fun poking around 10.5 and all of the new applications available. WOW! I also installed the VMWare tool so I can run that BootCamp Windows partition while still working in OS X! Many of you will remember the old days of running Virtual PC and other emulation tools. I’m sorry, don’t cry. Those days were full of promise yet in reality caused much pain and suffering (as well as too many of us staring at our computers while the incredibly slow process of opening a document or application was performed.)

This new world of OS 10.5, BootCamp and VMWare could very well be the world we wished we had back in the 1990’s. I’ll check in with my progress as I move foreward, but right now, things seem to be working very well and the promise of a Mac/PC collaboration might very well be the outcome!

Ok, so… you’ve restarted and then repaired your disk permissions and still your application won’t open, or worse, exhibits some very bizarre behavior. What should you do? Aside from wiping your system and reinstalling the OS and application!

Many times the issue may be caused by corrupt preferences. Preferences are the settings that an application loads everytime it is opened. It could be related to I/O, your session setup, your playback engine…. all kinds of settings that persist from session to session.

There is a wonderful new utility that finds all of these files/folders and moves them to the trash. Once you restart (there we go again! Don’t be afraid to restart!) ProTools will reset all of your preferences. You can find it here

ProTools Prefs and Database Helper

Now, the resetting of your preferences may be a drag, so I suggest, once you have your system up and running smoothly, use the Backup and Restore functionality in the Helper application. This will allow you to freely trash your prefs but also to restore your system to a working state that maintains your personal settings.

Notice at the bottom of that screenshot there is a very important symbol. It is the PayPal donate symbol. We as a community MUST support those developers who are supporting us by creating wonderful utilities such as the ProTools Prefs and Database Helper. I do not personally know Jean Charles Deshaies but I am grateful for this mini application and I want him to continue to update for new versions of PT and new versions of the Mac OS. I would gladly buy him a coffee (even a high-priced one!) everytime I use this utility. Doing the paypal donate is a small gesture of support and in reality, his little application saves me a lot of time when I use it.

I have a few more tips on troubleshooting ProTools coming up next!