mike_mccue




"Anybody else been able to totally shield their DAW system from internet completely?" 




Yes.

My primary DAW runs Win XP sp3 and it hasn't had an update since the day it was assembled.

It works.

I work.

I will not let the internet put my work at risk.

Last year when Cakewalk PR reps chastised me for stating my personal opinion that a DAW shouldn't be any where near the internet I realized that we didn't share the same interests.

When the Cakewalk reps stated that there is "no reason not to" let your DAW see the internet I recognized that I had my best interest in mind and Cakewalk did not.

I am appalled that Cakewalk advises people that there is way to run a DAW safely while connected to the internet. I don't think any one, any where, is qualified to offer such bad advice... but that's just my personal opinion.




I'm sticking with my policy because it works.



Sorry to hear of your frustrating circumstances.


Good luck.


best regards,
mike

I remember Brandon suggesting that basically being connected to the net on a DAW machine these days was no big deal.  I kind of agree with him too.
 
Although I seem to remember that conversation I don't honestly remember you being chastised for clinging to your view.
 
I think it's fine if you've got your DAW all set up and working and don't want to upgrade your software to keep it offline, it's a personal choice.  Bear in mind though that much of what comes out this year won't be supported on Vista and probably wont even run on XP anymore.  So while that ol' machine might appeal to you I can see why many of these young whippersnappers would likely rail at your ideal.
 
I can however see the point in a lot of people that create on-line media and that colllaborate over the network and want the latest and greatest apps and plug-ins wanting access to the internet directly from their production machines, increasingly more and more are doing so as time passes, more and more DAW vendors are incorporating online services within their apps too it seems normal for a DAW to have an upload to soundcloud option or something similar nowadays, I guess that is a customer driven decision.
 
Consider yourself fortunate too that you are in a position to own more than one machine where you can adopt that off-line only policy, there are plenty of young and proficient content creators that can't run to an additional dedicated machine to keep off-line but many of them don't consider it a handicap.  I think most of those in that kind of mindset that can run to two machines would connect both anyway.
 
Those producing on-line content tend to regard being on-line as natural rather than weird and I'm inclined too to think that it makes sense having a production machine that can transport me where I want to be when I want to be there without having to boot up another machine and transfer whatever content I wanted from my isolated production machine before I can do anything with it.
 
It's easy to understand why it is fastly becoming a more popular choice to be online at your DAW for the under-50's demographic from that perspective too.
 
Have fun being appalled while the world moves on from McQ's 'correct' view without taking a blind bit of notice of your overarching wisdom yet again.  Hey, but I've only had the best part of 5 years of runming a DAW safely while connected to the internet so what do I know?  How many more years do I have to go through before I become qualified to speak and offer a view on the subject and say that it's really safe?

Jon,

 That seems like dribble being offered to a guy that just got stung by an official windows update and wasted most of his day trying to get back up and running.


 It seems like you could have stated your opinion without concerning yourself with mine.

 
 I enjoyed your vacation.
 


 FO,
mike

mike_mccue


Jon,

That seems like dribble being offered to a guy that just got stung by an official windows update and wasted most of his day trying to get back up and running.


It seems like you could have stated your opinion without concerning yourself with mine.


I enjoyed your vacation.



FO,
mike

 
I'm sorry I just had to quote the dribble offered by you here as appeared on the poor guys thread.  You still seem to be promoting the idea of interweb bogey men which to my mind prolongs the idea that things can unexpectedly go wrong that can't be put right in minutes when you clearly have no experience in the matter, so I thought I'd clarify from the point of view of somebody who does have some experience.  It's like if you work in any environment you get yourself properly equipped to deal with it, provided you do that I can assure anyone there are no problems in having a production machine networked and as I say there are many advantages in doing just that these days. 
 
As far as updates go I notice you say your machine has XP SP3 and what do you imagine those service packs largely comprise of?  If you said Windows updates you'd be right.  If you were a REAL purist you'd have an original XP install. 
 
I actually have XP installed on this machine on a dual boot it has no access to Windows updates as the network driver is disabled, yet on the same machine my Windows 7 installation with all the latest updates including the ones cited as being errant in the OP and it smokes that old XP installation, just being able to run 2.5ms better round trip latency is enough of an improvement to make that change but there are countless other improvements I've benefitted from since.
 
btw Here's the sensible prevention method I offered directly to the OP to save him having to go through it again.
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/fb.ashx?m=2755271
 
I don't doubt you enjoyed my vacation as your genius could be believable if it ever went unchallenged by someone who knew better.
 
FO?  What does that mean? it seems like it was meant to be a bit mean spirited to me.

Thanks to all the excellent responses and sharing of your own issues, whether with computer OS, Sonar, Malware/Virus, and using a DAW on or off the Net. As for my own original issue, it was not a virus or malware problem - more like some corruption of probably numerous system files that drastically impeded the proper operation of the audio driver and interface of Sonar X1. At any rate, I did have good backups of all files - what I did not have was an image of the OS boot drive, and the Win7 system restore was of no help in this case for some reason (although I have used it successfully in the past). I have had few problems of any size so far, yeah mostly the major snafu's with patches to Internet Explorer that went haywire. Using system restore in those cases was a lifesaver. So I did go the total reformat/reload route; I worked all through the weekend off and on, reloading Win7, Sonar 8.5PE with all its Beatscape, DimPro, GuitarRig etc, then Sonar X1 PE, overtop that to update those add-ins, then updates up to X-1d, then started in on all the 3rd party soft synths. Bottom line was as of about 11pm last night I was totally 100% loaded up and all registrations and add-ins worked perfectly - I have the Windows pathes set to "NO don't bother", and no AV installed (but I have other means to scan anything that goes in or out), and the system again works fast and efficiently. Tonight's task includes Ghosting the C drive onto an external USB drive, then put that away in a cabinet so I can always revert back to this point in the future. It ain't fun going through all this hassle, but on the other hand it also forced me to organize my files and folders better and all song projects, and I have a better working setup now than before. I am not necessarily staying with Sonar long term, but like Herb mentioned, there's a significant investment in the software. I am moving forward into a development Linux system in the next several months, if nothing else I want to try more of what's out there in non-Windows-land. But I do think that as long as I keep this DAW off of the internet altogether, I'll be working a lot more stable and productive. Here's to us all protecting our investment better! :-)

John, buddy, paragraphs are  your friend!

(if you're using Firefox, then download the IE tab to use for this forum)

Hey Beagle,

I just downloaded the latest Firefox and that IE Tab.

Works like a charm.

The only thing I miss is, you used to be able to set your cursor at the end of a sentence you were replying to, hit 'Del', and your cursor would jump down and be indented in the correct spot.

You can't do that any more, now you have to grab the mouse and click the indent button. Not a big deal, but that's the only difference I'm noticing.

good deal!  glad it mostly works good

Tonight's task includes Ghosting the C drive onto an external USB drive, then put that away in a cabinet so I can always revert back to this point in the future.

 
That is the key, good stuff.
 
I know malware wasn't your issue here but if an update messes with your system then to my mind it's malware even if the originator was Microsoft.  As I said though I haven't found any issues at all with the latest round of updates for XP or Windows 7
 
The trouble with System Restore is that it doesn't cut it, it often takes as long as restoring a complete image but only replaces some of the crucial files.  Not only that it seems to be a target drop off point for malware in that when you use it after an attack the malware can replicate itself from the System Restore folder.
 
My suggestion is to get into an imaging routine as your system matures with all the things you like to have installed and working, save your working partition as you go and keep the image you've made today as a fail-safe fall back alongside that.  You can then turn off system restore completely and free up some resources into the bargain.
 
I image once a week and back up two partitions, I do it from an optical disk so I don't even need the imaging software installed on my machine, it takes roughly 10 minutes a week.
 
Then whenever my system takes a bad turn it's literally a matter of putting the boot disk in the DVD drive and rolling back that last few days.  My data is all off my OS drive so I never lose any work from having to do an image restore.
 
I've even got a Windows 8 partition setup now for testing and swap that out with my old XP partition if I need to, again in a matter of a few minutes.  It's a very flexible policy and defeats most worries about corrupted OS's whatever they end up being caused by.
 
Like I've said it's even taken any logical worry that I might have had about having a DAW online and get the benefits of being connected alongside bullet proof DAW use, but each to their own in that regard.  I can respect that some prefer not to court the idea but speaking for myself it has never caused an issue, rather it has given me opportunities that weren't available off-line, or at least made those thing easier to accomplish.

Bub


Hey Beagle,

I just downloaded the latest Firefox and that IE Tab.

Works like a charm.

The only thing I miss is, you used to be able to set your cursor at the end of a sentence you were replying to, hit 'Del', and your cursor would jump down and be indented in the correct spot.

You can't do that any more, now you have to grab the mouse and click the indent button. Not a big deal, but that's the only difference I'm noticing.

The other thing I find is sometimes the odd paragraph break doesn't quite work properly and I end up having to put two in to make sure sometimes.
 
I was like you though I stayed on the old FF 3.6.xx for ages and did the IE tab thing a few months ago.  Again down to Reece mentioning it.
 
Good Beagle...