Cubase 5.01

Spin Audio's Skin Rack lets you create a host of stylish looks for your VST‑compatible plug‑ins. Here (top left) is the original one‑knob Choirus interface, along with five new versions I created using Skin Rack.

The root of PC problems can often be found in incorrect or incomplete software installations. Martin Walker shows you how to avoid pitfalls when upgrading and adding to your existing applications.

Installing applications and utilities ought to be easy enough, but there are hidden problems that seem to catch many musicians out. Judging by the number of people I see posting tales of woe on Internet forums, and who seem to re‑install Windows or even reformat their hard drives on a regular basis, it's worth pointing out some installation pitfalls, the ways to correct them, and how to avoid them in future.

One of the causes of strange occurrences is installing one version of an application over the top of another. While in many cases this will simply replace older file versions with new ones, this doesn't always happen and you may be left running a mismatched set of DLL system files. This can also happen if one application updates any of the common files stored in either the Windows or System folders, which are used by a number of different programs. The results of running one application with several DLL files of different vintage are unpredictable, and you may only experience problems in one or two applications, leaving you convinced that these are to blame. A classic example is Cubase VST, which comes in for a lot of criticism for problems which may be nothing to do with it.

If you install a newer version of an application over an older one, your Registry can also be left with some redundant entries from the older one which are no longer valid. This is another reason why, unless you are reassured to the contrary, you should always uninstall the existing version of any application before installing the new one. Of course, this doesn't apply to updates, which normally modify or replace the existing files with newer versions, and which wouldn't run by themselves anyway.

Sometimes you can legitimately and safely install a newer version of an application alongside an older one without conflicts, leaving them both available, but only if the developer specifically states that this is safe to do so. Steinberg have actually been very careful with Cubase 5.0 to ensure that previous versions of Cubase are left well alone during the install, to the extent of creating an entirely new set of Registry entries. This ensures that if you already have version 3.7 running well, you can carry on using it until you get up to speed with all the new features, and any possible conflicts, of 5.0.

A Practical Example

Cakewalk Power!, written by Scott Garrigus, is a comprehensive third‑party guide to the many and varied features of Cakewalk Pro Audio 9.

After I'd installed the new Cubase 5.0 I started getting random corruption of parts of my Cubase display, with whole sections of the screen turning white when I changed the track height. Now although this might have been a Cubase bug, display problems are more likely to be caused by your graphic drivers. I visited the ATI web site to see if there were any available to download for my ATI Rage 128 card that were more recent than the ones I already had installed. There were, along with a dire warning that DirectX version 7.0 or higher was needed to use them fully. Fortunately, this was included on the Cubase 5.0 CD‑ROM, so I installed it before adding the new graphics card drivers.

Before blindly running the setup program for any new graphics driver, you should first read carefully through any notes that come with it. This is where I'd gone wrong previously. Unlike many soundcard drivers, which can be directly updated in the System applet of the Control Panel, my graphics card drivers also had support utilities, and the install notes specifically stated that the previous versions of these had to be uninstalled using the Add/Remove Programs applet first.

I did this, and noticed another entry for a previous version still in place, which I removed. I then ran the downloaded setup program to install the new drivers. After rebooting my PC as requested, I carried on reviewing Cubase 5.0, and have had no graphic corruption since.

A Helping Hand

If you need to uninstall any application from your PC, there are two main places to look. The first is in the shortcuts created in your Start menu when you first installed it — here you may find an entry labelled 'Uninstall' which could well invoke a dedicated utility which can weed out all hard‑to‑shift components. The second option is the Add/Remove Programs applet under Control Panel. This relies on the 'install.log' file created when you originally installed the application, and is normally stored in the application folder.

This explains why simply deleting the entire application folder can leave you with problems. Although doing this removes the majority of the files, it leaves any common system files that may have been saved in either the windows or windows\system folders, as well as all of the relevant Registry entries. The problem is that once the install.log file has been deleted, Add/Remove Programs doesn't know what to remove any more, and you have little chance of getting rid of these remnants unless you really know what you're doing and are happy rooting about in the Registry editor — however, this is not recommended for PC novices.

Making A Clean Sweep Of It

A second line of defence is to use one of the many installation monitor utilities. The best of these in my opinion is still Cleansweep, originally developed by Quarterdeck, and now part of Symantec's Norton range of utilities. The latest version is Cleansweep 2000, which is available for about £30 from most PC suppliers. It sits in the background and records every change made to your PC during an install, including file saves, updates to existing files, and changes to the Registry. Of course musicians won't want it running as a background utility all the time, so delete any entry in your startup menu to avoid this. You can launch it by hand just before you start any install, just in case anything is done to your PC that isn't recorded in the standard 'install.log' file (it's sensible to be a bit paranoid if you want your system running smoothly).

This gives you yet another line of defence when uninstalling applications, since the default option is to create a compressed backup of all files and Registry entries removed during the process. Not only does this give you the chance to reverse proceedings and re‑install if you get any subsequent problems, but if you forget to save your preference files, presets, and other personal settings, they can still be restored individually later. In my experience the only drawback of Cleansweep is that it is sometimes a little too enthusiastic about some of the items it wants to remove, but as long as you let it default to keeping a backup you should have no long‑term problems.

When you next run Cleansweep it will remind you about any of its backup files which are more than 30 days old, so that you can delete them. It also has a very useful Cleanup section which scours your hard drive for unwanted files. Once again you have to be careful if it suggests removing some system files, but I certainly find it useful when clearing out temporary files created during badly behaved program installations, left after a crash, or forgotten by poorly written applications.

If you suspect that an application is misbehaving, don't immediately re‑install Windows or reformat your hard drive. Instead, first make sure that you have the most recent releases of drivers for hardware such as sound and graphics cards, and that they have been cleanly installed. If this doesn't cure your problem, save any application preferences files that might later prove useful, choose the best uninstall procedure, uninstall the application, and then run a clean install. You might be surprised at how often this sorts things out.