New With ??? About My Set Up Options

[torchsong]

Hi, new girl here with lots of questions about hardware and software.
I've read just about everything I can that is somewhat related to my situation but still have ????

I am a cellist and vocalist and want to make backing tracks to play with live and also make demo recordings on my computer. I come from the portastudio school of home recordings so the MIDI stuff is making me nuts!

Here's what I have:
imac running OS 9.2
DX7
Boss DRmkII
Behringer Eurorack
MOTU Fast Lane
Metro 5
OMS 2.3.8 grrrrrrr.....
cello with pickup (although I usually am miked for studio recording)
guitars
cables

I've tried to keep the basic set up simple but am having problems with OMS I think. Metro doesn't seem to like to work with Free MIDI.
I am also having problems playing back audio after recording a track, how am I supposed to hear what I've played to do over dubs?

BTW, I downloaded Pro Tools Free to try it out and just can't get the thing to open (memory error 1,010) so I gave up and went with Metro instead because it was inexpensive to start.

Thanks for any help, this is a great site!

[Levon River]

Girl, you got more than MIDI problems. But I've been there, and I know it ain't funny. Have you broken anything valuable yet? Make sure you get all the pets out of the room before you have another go at it.

Okay, seriously: you've just got to be sitting on some pretty dripping-fang system-related issues. There are some methodical de-bug steps, though.

One thing you oughta do is zap your p-ram:

1. Restart the Mac

2. When you hear the start-up chime press and hold Cmd-Opt-P-R, making sure that the caps lock key is not depressed. Hold these keys UNTIL the machine chimes again.

3. Reset the date and time, AppleTalk settings, printer ports, etc.

Next thing to investigate is any possible SCSI problems. Do you have any SCSI devices connected? One little thing wrong in that can wreak absolute havoc in all directions. If you have any SCSI devices connected, shut down your computer and disconnect them ALL, and see how things run then. If fine, then you've got to look at SCSI IDs and termination before you reconnect the SCSI stuff.

And: Have you tried doing any of this merry music making with nothing but a basic and stripped-down Apple extensions set, plus OMS? If not, please start there. Just make a copy the most fundamental Base OS 9.x set of extensions in Extensions Manager, and go in and turn off *everything* you won't need for music, and turn on OMS and any of its related extensions, and then press the "Doom" button and see how much blue smoke starts pouring out of the exhaust vents. If none, then you might be on the trail of extension conflicts.

If all else fails, you may need to do a clean reinstall of your system software.

And if *none* of that works, I might have the number for an exorcist...