Yesterday, I spent not 1, not 3, not 5, but 7 hours sorting out a driver issue with my audio interface. It was a real waste of time when driver installers of vendors won't work as it should. When I was around the 4th hour, I kid you not, I wanted to cry already. But I had to make it work because I was preparing for my January clients. I HAD to get it sorted.
Now I hope none of this happens to any of you. But if you do find yourself in a similar situation, I hope these small tips may help. If you do encounter some technical issues with your equipment, try these...
1.OFFICIAL VENDOR SITE : Your first move should be to visit the vendor's site and check out their links to perhaps software updates for your drivers, etc.
2. VENDOR FORUMS : Next is to check if they have a dedicated user forum for support or dedicated forums where their product specialists chime in for technical support. This is the quickest way you can get answers if you don't know where to get them.
3. EXTERNAL FORUMS : Now this is quite tricky but the way I end up in these is I usually do a google searches and words I used sometimes match words of other people who may have the same problem but decided to post it in forums they frequent. Don't dismiss these even if you feel the forum names seem quite irrelevant to the problem at hand. I find Reason problems solution sometims in Ableton forums or vice versa. Remember that a lot of people also have tons of software that they use for particular functions so they may have a Reason problem but their main software of choice is Ableton so they may frequent the Ableton forums more but of course there are other Ableton owners who have Reason so they may share knowledge there and find your solution there. But again, you'll find these via google searches. Don't try to visit other forums blindly trying to find solutions for unrelated software.
4. YOUTUBE : We tend to forget that Youtube has now become a Google search for videos since a lot of videos are used now for everything so you may find your solution in YT with a video to boot! Now that's easier coz you have a guide now!
Things to remember for software installation issues like drivers, full install, reinstall or uninstall:
- Sometimes you really have to uninstall everything from your system and I mean ALL of it. Like your computer should be free from anything related to the software. Imagine a fresh system before you installed any of your audio software.
- REdownload everything. Sometimes you need to get the latest updates. They update for a reason :)
- REdownload old installers. Sometimes if the latest won't work, you can try backtracking to drivers, etc that USED to work for your system. This way you can also isolate a bit which causes the problem.
- Think outside the box. One of the solutions I found for my problem that worked wasn't exactly the solution recommended by the vendor but if you know your way around computers then it's worth experimenting a bit if you dare :)
So there. I hope that helped a bit in case you find yourself in a bind.
God bless!
Cy
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