Yesterday I bit the bullet and installed MIDIQuest 9.0 on the DAW. I’ve been a regular follower of Sound Quest’s universal editor/librarian since about version 6.0 but I never really managed to leverage it. I don’t think I even installed 8.0.

Well – given my recent paranoia about my older synths breaking down or resetting and losing their memory, you’d think I would have done this earlier, but I’ve always found the process of configuring the software to recognise the different instruments, and figuring out how to save the patch banks to disk to be daunting.

9.0 has been given a UI overhaul which seems to have improved things a lot. It’s still daunting, though. It seems to me that there is a market for a kind of “getting started” user guide that would be helpful for people in my position.

Due credit to SoundQuest, the manual is actually pretty good, and if I read it twice from cover to cover I’d probably be a lot better off. I’m sure the information I need is in there, and if it isn’t, it’s only because the number of different instruments they support is so big that there are going to be some gaps no matter what.

Anyway, yesterday things were going really well. MidiQuest 9.0 actually has support for every peice of equipment I own, including the GSP-21, J-Station, and Line6 POD 2.0.

I backed up the patch and combination memory banks of the Korg M1, Alesis D4, and Korg TR-Rack, but when I got to the TR-Rack “multi” configuration, I got a blue screen of death. This would be my first one since switching to Windows XP a year ago.

This is kind of sad, things were going so well. And I must bear in mind that “things aren’t backed up until you’ve proved you can restore”.

Oh, and Happy Birthday, Walter.