Hi,

TL:DR; OS 9 SoundManager is acting weird. Cubase 5 VST audio just stops playing after a few seconds until I restart, Live 4 is not able to preview audio in the left browser panel but then it's fine. Cubase also sometimes doesn't allow me to preview samples when importing.
I'm still a relative newbie to the OS 9 world so I'm having trouble diagnosing/troubleshooting this!


What I've tried so far:

- Trashing Sound Preferences, ASLM Preferences, System Preferences, MacOS Preferences
-Tried using a Edirol US-25 USB OS9 compatible soundcard and it still acts weird!
-Disabling/enabling Sound Extension and restarting
-Disabling/removing ReWire, ReWire.inst and Reason Demo Engine extensions
-Playing CD audio through Cubase, successfully capturing audio, then this outputting a silent AIFF file


I do not remember messing with any audio / system settings prior to this weird behaviour, haven't installed any new hardware. I remember playing around with AppleCD Player and using a light app that records CD input through VST processing.. I wonder if the CD playthrough thing has caused some kind of bug. Extensions Manager reported "REX Shared Library - - shlb ????" missing, not sure if this is related. Other programs that rely on Sound Manager like Reaktor, MaxMSP apps, HyperPrism PPC, Reason 1 work perfectly using the same existing Sound Manager.

I absolutely want to avoid installing a fresh Mac OS 9!

Please help, so confused

 

Last edited: Sep 9, 2024

Currently seems to be okay after a Cubase 5 re-install. It allows me to preview samples in the Import dialog box but Ableton Live 4 still doesn't!

I guess I'll have to re-install Live 4 too. Something must have corrupted between them, though it's strange to think this happened simultaneously. I am suspecting a VST may be the culprit as Live 4's VST folder reference lives in the Cubase folder.

 

Yres the VST solutions is a good idea!

Also to clone the system, I need to figure out how to do this. I know it should be possible by using a native OS9 tool right?

 

Yeah, to be honest, I don't remember what tools I used to clone my drives back then, and given the expense of drives and whatnot in that era being somewhat higher.... (I'm not sure how large your OS9 system drive is.... mine were not big, ~possibly~ , well, hmm, I remember my Mac IIfx having an 80mb drive lol, so hell, you could clone to a very very small thumb drive (usb ports existing with your system or are you running a VM of some sort?).... I might have just done it with disk utility or even just simple drag-n-drop...

But I would just do that, remove all VST's, see how things are working, and bring them over in batches until a problem arises, and then simply narrow that down to what possible offender may be causing the issue... and if they don't, but it still is problematic, then look into the drivers for the Edirol or clean reinstalling OS9 as long as that won't burn your software authorizations as they were done back then (like Opcode did with StudioVision (which is now open source, or at least last I looked), or whatnot....