Home Studio Improvement - New Sheriff in Town

Finally, after a few more heat strokes from my old work horse, I got a new laptop for my studio. No more sweaty palms and panic accompanied by the sweet scent of electric burn. No need for the usual questions. When was my last backup run? Did I remember to save? Will it start again? Where's Matlock?

Now there's a new Sheriff in town. ASUS N750J taking control and asking no questions. A huge improvement, not only in reliability, but in performance also. But it wasn't all that easy. When it came to moving my studio software and audio interface, what started as a simple task, transformed into a vortex of licensing procedures sucking the life out of me.

WHAT'S NEW?

As far as my limited knowledge takes me, I understand that the most important components for a studio laptop are: Processor, Memory and Hard drive. So let's take a closer look at the Sheriff and what we got.

Processor 

Brand new i7 4710HQ keeping the pulse high and mighty. Released April 2014 still having the new processor smell on it. Four cores of calculation heaven, handling eight threads of power. If I understand correctly, Reaper is quite fond of multi threading, so this alone should be a major improvement.

Memory
Eight lovely gigabytes of working space to run my projects in. That should be more than enough, even for my bloated mixes. And to be completely honest, I believe that even the old work horses 4GB memory was enough for mixing purpose. But I guess that the extra space won't hurt me.

Hard drive
Fast and silent 750G hard drive spinning at 7200 rpm in sync with my eyeballs. It also has a 24G cache, which I believe makes a huge difference. A definite thumbs up.

This all looks great on paper and has major performance improvement compared to the old laptop. This can be seen from a simple thing like starting my DAW. The time to get Reaper functioning is now maybe one tenth from the old days. And most importantly I have more than halved my latency for recording. My new latency is 5.0/10.0 ms, so recordings should go super smooth.

 

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

Here's a look at what I went through, when equipping the Sheriff for the new task. Next time I'll know better, and hopefully this might also work for you as a reminder, if you are planning to switch or acquire your own studio computer.

DAW

Reaper was the easiest component to install and validate. I downloaded the program and after start-up a window popped open asking if I had a license (or would I like to have one). This was followed by my quick email search with words 'reaper' and 'license'. I grabbed the licensing file from the email and pointed reaper to it. That was it. Thank you.

Of course, this was not all. My customizations were reset and I needed to get them back. I understand that with Reaper, there would have been a single(?) file to be copied, to have my options back to where I wanted it, but I wanted to manually set up my Reaper to my specs. It took a while, but I think it was worth it. The work I did here reminded me off all the options available, and I got know my working environment once again a little bit better.

 

 AUDIO INTERFACE

Now this is where the trouble started. I plugged my Audio Interface to my computer via USB. Nothing happens. I guess I need some drivers or whatnots. So off I am, to the line6 website downloads, where I spot familiar looking Line6 monkey and Line6 Authorization manager. I'm sure those are just what I need. I fool around with these programs a while with no avail. Then luckily, I remember that I still have the original packaging for my UX1. From there I dig up the quick installation guide, which quickly prompts me to download and install POD Studio 2.5. After that the process was very simple and efficient and guided by the installation program. But really. I should have known that to install my Audio Interface UX1, I need to download and install POD Studio 2.5?

And another gripe also. While activating the license, I saw that I have limited number of activations left (9). Seriously. In some obscure distant way, I can understand this with software (a really really obscure distant way). But I have bought a device, a physical object, and the manufacturer can limit its lifetime by allowing me to use it only on a limited number of computers? This must be a misunderstanding from my part. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Please please correct me.

IK MULTIMEDIA

I also have some plugins from IK multimedia (Reverbs, EQ, etc.), that needed to be moved. Now this was another user error related process. It all looked so easy. I went to the web page and signed in (after the usual have you forgotten your password routine). From there, I easily found my product related license numbers and proceeded to download the authorization manager. Entered the codes to the authorization manager and got a message: Unable to authorize, please contact support. Really. Contact support. I don't understand why the program couldn't have notified that I have not downloaded the plugins that I am trying to authorize. Instead it wants me to contact customer support. Well, that's one way to use resources. After downloading the plugins and running the authorization manager again, things went smooth as a smoothy.

WAVES   

I'm using some Waves compressors and channel strips, and this was the part I dreaded the most. Waves does not officially support Reaper, and I remember that I had some trouble with these installations before. Now, that I had gotten my mindset turned to the overprotective mode that all of these audio companies seem to use, this was surprisingly the easiest transition of them all.

After downloading and installing the plugins I started Reaper. It prompted that I have unlicensed Waves plugins that I should activate and start Reaper again. So I turned on my old laptop and opened the Waves licensing manager -program. From there I moved my licenses to the license cloud. Installed the license manager to the new laptop, and retrieved the licenses from the cloud. I started Reaper again, and voilà! All was good to go.

FINAL WORDS

All this would have been very easy and straightforward, had I remembered all the steps. The thing is, that the next upgrade of my studio laptop is hopefully so far to the future, that I will surely forget what I did. But next time I can at least try to dig into my blog archive and reference this text.

And in the end, the process was not so impossible. I may have written some harsh words, but it all worked out fine and I'm very happy with my audio interface and software. This upgrade gave me some more insight into the inner workings of my DAW, and reminded me of my existing plugins, giving me some inspiration to try out some of my older forgotten ones on some future project. As my final words, I for one welcome my new studio overlord.


Please leave a comment, Any experience with the licensing vortex?