ridiculous cubase frustation!

[Damon]

I have Cubase SX and I have never gotten it to work. First I installed it on a PC laptop and had play back problems and all kinds of background noise. Of course, everyone told me the first problem with my scenario was that I was trying to use a PC laptop. I tried to get it to work every so often and become demoralized and put it away. This went on for a couple of years. Finally, I got a G4 Mac and thought my problems would be solved. Not so. Now I cannot get a signal into the program. I can see the signal in the mobile pre usb and I get it in the monitors on my Mackie board. I can't see a signal in the transport panel. I went into devices and vst connections and selcted the mobile pre as the asio device but still nothing. Shouldn't it be easy to get started? Can anyone help?

[On the Loose]

The two main forum topics appear to be people who have big problems with usb/ firewire and those preaching how they got theirs to work. After no success in usb I went back to pci and all my latency and recognition problems disappeared. I have to wonder if some people have managed to get it working perfectly. how come none of us has managed to punch out a genuine hit.

[brandondrury]

Of course, everyone told me the first problem with my scenario was that I was trying to use a PC laptop.

I'm sure this "Everyone" group consisted of ministers in the Mac religion. I know of many, many, many people who use a PC laptop for recording and do just fine. This suggests that there are issues with your particular laptop.

Shouldn't it be easy to get started?

Yes and no. When you have an understanding for this stuff, it's not bad. There are often hurdles on the technical side simply due to the fact that audio recording is very demanding on a computer and has special needs that Photoshop or whatever doesn't have. There are also hurdles with some people not taking the time to read manuals and such. It's not efficient to learn Cubase by playing around with it. You need to understand their system. Maybe you have read the manuals, but I'm just generalizing here.

You didn't mention whether you created a new track, armed it, selected the proper input from your audio interface, and then pressed record. You didn't mention to which output you routed your stereo out from Cubase.

If you've already used the Getting Started guide in Cubase, I'd suggest checking out this: Soundcard Troubleshooting 101