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Hello, Nick Batzdorf here. Taxi Pres. Michael Laskow has asked me to come moderate this forum, and I'm looking forward to this very much. Hopefully I can be of some help to you and vice versa.As an introduction, my background is that I've been a composer/producer/project studio engineer/musician for years. These days I'm mainly working on music for on-air promotion (TV trailers for the networks), and I write for Mix magazine a lot, am going to be teaching a course in advanced MIDI sequencing techniques at UCLA Extension, plus I have some other things up my sleeve that you'll hear about shortly. Taxi members of longer standing may know me from having been the editor of Recording magazine for 10-1/2 years.I majored in Film Composition at Berklee College of Music immediately before the digital revolution of the '80s, so I was able to concentrate on music while I was there - a real blessing, because nowadays there's a lot more to learn all at once. But right away I got involved with music technology, and at this point I know way too much trivia (along with the useful information!) for a person with a life. All the while I was composing, orchestrating, playing (I play about six instruments, depending on how you count them), and so on.But enough about me. Please feel to post anything to do with your productions - questions, techniques, tips, advice, dissent, arguments, recommendations...whatever issues you have with recording, technology, and production. You know the rules: keep your punches up, and no hitting on the break.-- Nick Batzdorf

Hi Nick,Welcome aboard and thank you so much for starting a forum!My name is Jim Thacker, I'm also a Berklee alum..only went for one year however. I then finished my degree at U Maine. anyhow, I am heavily involved in recording and production, mostly my own stuff but I also rent out my small studio from time to time. My question is this, I am moving to Nashville in september. EVERYONE down there has pro tools. I am running Sonar 2.0 xl and am trying to find out about being able to export my sonar files to use on a pro tools rig and vice versa. basically so I could take my projects to another songwriters studio with pro tools and they could come to mine.I've heard about Sonar producer and OMF files being compatible with pro tools somehow. Do you have any knowledge of this or any ideas about cross DAW compatibility. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for joining the forum.JT

Hi Nick,Your introduction struck a chord with me particularly about the 'having to learn so much all at once'. I'm having trouble with the RPPR function on my Triton Rack. I can access and record drum patterns into Cubase on the Control track (Ch 1) but can't see how to set up other patterns on other Channels (e.g. basslines).What is the Control Track. It's not clear in the manual or the parameter guide. Thanks,Paul

Hi JT. I'm afraid I've never tried Sonar->PT and can't really help you other than to say that usually the easiest way to get sessions from one program to another is simply to bounce linear tracks and import them directly. That's what I do when I go from Logic (which I use for composing) to PT (for mixing).Logic is supposed to have improved its OMF exporting in the latest version, and I'll try that when I'm finished with the cue I'm working on.***And I'm afraid I can't help you with the Triton/Cubase problem, Paul.Gee, what a great beginning I'm having here! Hopefully someone else who uses the same gear can help. I use Cubase SX on one of my Windows machines, but only as a host for Kontakt, essentially as an expensive V-Stack; I send it MIDI from a G4 Mac running Logic.

No worries. I'm interested in how you have hooked up to computers via V-Stack.I use an orchestral sample set via Halion 2 and I think it might be efficient to buy a 1U rack mount PC and link it in to my existing Win PC. Might also prove to be a useful place to host my VSTs and free up the main CPU for other duties.How have you put yours together?

Again, I use SX instead of V-Stack (V-Stack loses contact with MIDI after around 12 hours, forcing a reload).I just have them set up like external sound modules, MIDI out from the Mac to MIDI ins on the Windows machines, audio out their sound cards digitally into a digital mixer. But I'm going to try going mixerless in the next week or two when my Pro Tools HD upgrade arrives, i.e. I'll just plug the sound card outputs into it.The other component is a USB KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch. One of my computer monitors is connected to the Mac permanently (using DVI), and the other one (VGA) gets switched between the Mac and the Windows machines along with the keyboard and mouse. It's very slick - you just hit control/option/shift/[1-4 to select machine] successively and it switches in less than a second.One thing I'm going to try soon is FX Teleport, which streams audio and MIDI over ethernet, so you don't need MIDI interfaces or sound cards on all your Windows machines.

Hi Nick,I appreciate you taking the time to reply even if you didn't have the answer! Actually someone contacted me with a pretty in depth answer so posting was well worth it. Thanks again and I'm sure I'll have another question for you soon JT

Well, it would be useful if that person posted the reply here! Someone else may need to transfer a session sometime.

Very true, I'll contact him and have him post it up. Hopefully it'll help someone else.JT

Hi Nick,I've gotten to know you over at the NS forum, so it's good to have you here! Ernstinen