Any such thing as a permanent setup?

[mikehende]

Hey guys, how you all doing, hoping all is well with everyone.

Man, I am tired of having to reload windows and do my entire music setup from scratch whenever your pc has an issue and you need to reload Windows? Setting up OTSAV with the licensing issues is one ordeal and also the way my system is setup with Reaper and the VST fx is another. Having a 2nd pc is no help because that will get old after x amount of years.

Just curios how you guys deal with this issue of pc's getting outdated and having to reload your music system?

[socialdancer]

In one case I don't!  My old XP system is still working fine.

If you really have to re-install Windows then having your music collection on a separate drive/partition and recent backups of the media library makes it almost trivial.

[Kev]

It is few and far between that I need to rebuild machines. Licencing etc is an evil necessity. If your Ots machine earns your bread then it should do nothing more than that. Then you should get many years of happy use between installs.

I store my Ots library in Google Drive, so if it ever corrupts I have a recent copy to restore. I don't use any VSTs etc as Ots outputs to a mixer which is then processed further down the chain.

[milky]

Upgrading hardware and software is almost inevitable at some stage. If your hardware is reliable and you don't NEED to have the latest and greatest version of Windows or the flashiest laptop, you can do what Socialdancer is doing and stick with the same platform. I used Ots on a lowly Pentium 3 Thinkpad for a long time after both hardware and software had moved on.

Eventually, this may become a problem. Ots may release a new version which is not backwards compatible. The soundcard you use may never release a new version of the drivers for that early OS. The same goes for the VSTs you use. it is simply not possible to continue to support every piece of hardware and software out there forever. If you use Google Chrome as your browser, they will tell you up-front that they only support the last two versions of Windows. If you try to use it on earlier versions, it may run, but it will warn you that some screens may not be able to be rendered as intended and some websites may fail to load completely.

So, given that you are going to have to suffer the pain at some stage, what can you do to minimise this? Firstly, your music should NEVER be on the same machine as Ots. These days, large capacity external drives are cheap and have plenty or space for all but the largest music collections. Get two, and update both copies using something like Filesynch each time you make changes to your library. Alternatively, set up a NAS (Network Attached Storage) elewhere on your network. Most routers these days come with a sharable USB, so you don't necessarily need specialised hardware. If you have a subscription to a decent amount of Cloud storage, this may also be an option, but you need to ensure reliable download bandwidth to avoid glitches on playback.

OK, we've got the music off the Ots machine. You also need to store copies of your Ots program (and the licence text file), any VST installers, audio drivers etc in a safe place. You should also take screen images of any setup parameters you have used to set up all these addins. This is important to quickly get back up and running. It is also VERY wise to take regular copies of the OML file. I actually have a small script which takes a copy every hour that Ots is running and I keep the ten most recent iterations of this. This can save hours of scanning to rebuild this critical database if that file get corrupted.

When the big day comes where you have to install on a new machine (or re-install after crash recovery), you aply to Ots Corp *first* to get a licence replacement. They monitor the number of times you make a request and, if things look suspicious, they may query the reasons why, but, if it has been a reasonable time since the last application you should have no problem. Similarly, if you have licensed VSTs and other licensed support software, get this out of the way up front.

Now you just have to install Ots and set it up using the screen dumps you have saved. The same goes for support softare, drivers etc. You then point Ots to the external drive where your music is, copy the latest version of your OML file over the blank one that comes with a fresh install of Ots and you are up and running.