PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic "Stupid Deal," indeed

When someone announced that Musician's Friend was selling a full version of Tracktion 3 Ultimate Bundle for $20 I jumped on it, mainly for the plugins and samples, although I was curious to see how "the most powerfully easy-to-use music production software ever" would work. Joke's on me, I guess. I just tried to load it and discovered that I have two blank DVDs. Ha, ha. I've got a message in to MF; be curious to see how they handle it.

I'm going for a new world's record. It'll be called "4' 34"."

I think you actually have many hours worth of no music.

I've done 4 33. Then I saw a stunning blonde in a skimpy dress do it and I liked her ability to interpret it better. I think the phrases were more rounded, and the first figure was more rondo than mine. The allegro had my heart going and when she got to the finale I'm sure breasts rose in sympathy with the crescendo. I was enthralled. Her heel fell off and her toes curled in a pentatonic moment as she struggled to get it back on. The final note was the bench, now an aerophone in itself, scrapped a perfect D, doubled by the other leg, as the audience realized that her bow revealed D's in unison...

oh, well. It was poetry in motion...

Our adventure so far: E-mailed MF. They said contact Mackie for a download. Called Mackie. They said too big for D/L, but send copy of receipt and they would mail disks. Called MF for copy. MF sent electronic invoice. E-mailed to Tom at Mackie. This all happened in about half an hour.

So far so good. I just hope Tom doesn't choke when he sees the $19.99 sale price.

for the Tracktion bundle you should be receiving, disc 1 is 4.27GB and disc 2 is 4.19GB. That's probably why they didn't want to give you download links. Don't know which discs you'll get, but after you install and register, you should be able to download the 3.0.4.8 update (only about 36MB).

Good luck!

My experience with Musician's friend over the last three years.

1. ordered three Behringer 8500 mikes, and cables and 1 AT 2020 condensor mike

results - came new in the box and in perfect condition

2. Ordered a factory reconditioned TC Helicon voiceworks.

results - came in a factory box, not a scratch, and in perfect condition

3. Ordered a Tascam "Stupid Deal" US 800

results came in a factory box, un opened perfect condition.


Just a little note, MF is owned and operated by Guitar Center. They do get rid of a lot of used, reconditioned and slow to sell items, but they sell new and very high end stuff as well. Side note i ordered a TC Helicon Harmony G unit before the Voiceworks, and i wanted to send it back, and had no issues what so ever, not questions asked.

Not trying to discount Keiths experience, just say my personal experience has been superb.

Ryszard - curious indeed!

Blank DVDs!

My $19 Ultimate Bundle Tracktion from Musician's Friend is two discs and no issues except for the following - when installing the included Garritan Personal Orchestra, the installer file for GPO never exits, even though it installs completely. You have to manually break it out of the GPO installation.

Other than that, the DVDs that came bundled have installed multiple times with no issue.

Years ago, I bought a combo deal from MF consisting of an 'OLP' guitar (a musicman copy) and a guitar port from Line 6. Couldn't get the OLP guitar to stay in tune worth a darn. They bought it back without issue, even paying for return shipping if I recall correctly - though I had to take it to a local regional FedEx depot to get the free shipping.

No issue with the Tracktion Ultimate Bundle for $19 (which is a ridiculous steal) of which you have 2 blank discs. (I'm sure you have tried reading them in a different computer or tried reading other DVDs in that drive - from your other post, it seems you have a new/used build.)

And make sure to download the Tracktion 3 update referred to by jford above. It will only require a few minutes of DSL speed download time. It's all the bundled extras with the Ultimate Bundle that make up the size of the DVDs. Also, to get your feet wet with Tracktion, the included instructional video is VERY good. That is, once you get your non-blank DVDs.

That's the first I've ever heard of, amongst the complaints about Tracktion - it's the first I've ever seen in paying close attention to the product for about 8 years from generation 1 to 2 to 3. Most of the complaints have centered on the user interface, which is a love it or hate it situation.

More recently, my US-800 purchase has been problematic, not because of MF for the most part, but because of what I am guessing are dodgy Win7 drivers or USB compatibility.

Curious . . . it hadn't occurred to me to try swapping disks and computers. I put the Tracktion disks in my laptop and it appeared to read them fine. Then I put a movie in my DAW. WMP won't play it due to DRM, but it recognizes it and tells me what it is, and Windows Explorer tells me how much data is on the disk.

Now I'm trying to recall if I had ever loaded a DVD into this particular drive. I have other software on DVD, but I may have loaded it from a earlier DVD-ROM drive. The present unit is a DVD-R/W. They're cheap enough to replace if that's the issue.

To respond to Keith: The only other purchase I can recall from MF was a Planet Waves brand GK cable for my Roland VG-88. I got it cheap as a backup. When I finally opened it up it was horribly crackly and microphonic. I had had it too long to consider returning it, but I wasn't real happy about it. I replaced it with a $20 piece from ebay and threw out the $75 cable.

Now, can someone explain why PCs have a software DVD player if I can't watch anything with it?

In my case I also got the $19.95 deal but I'm on a Win 7 64 bit machine. It's supposed to work but I'm getting the "poof crash" and it's useless to me right now. That so called update was released in 2008, my discs already are that version so for now I'm stuck. I've been all through the Mackie Tracktion forums, there's has not been word one from Mackie about any updates or a new version for over three years. If nobody knows what a poof crash is, it's lots of fun. With no warning at all the program just disappears "poof" and resides in the system tray and that's it. No warning, no error box, nothing, nada, squat. You have to go to the task manager to close it. Go ahead, reboot and reopen it and at some unpredictable point "poof" again. It's a known problem with no known solution and absolutly no help from Mackie about it. I could try calling them I suppose but there's several threads about it on their own forum with no answers. It seems to be a T3 only issue.

This is not a priority for me, I don't really need it it just seemed like a good deal and to be honest it is a good deal for a lot of folks, just not me for whatever reason. It is disconcerting to see no comments at all, much less support from Mackie about this. Nothing on the KVR forum either, they've had a known bug thread going for years including the poof crash and not a comment from anybody about how to fix it. One of the moderators said he forwarded the entire thread to Mackie with no response.

If Scott or anybody else knows about this please post it. I would like to try T3 out and see if it's any good but right now I get maybe 2-3 minutes and "poof"...

Bob

I do not get that error - although I do know about the thread of which you speak on KVR.

For the record, all of my video is commercial product purchased through mainstream outlets. Also of note is that a copy of "The Incredibles" which would play on an older laptop (which has, alas, gone Tango Uniform) will not play on my modern machines.

So, stupid is as stupid does. I scavenged a DVD-ROM drive out of an eight-year-old E-machines PC and Tracktion 3 is loading up a storm. Have no idea what's wrong with the relatively new Sony-LG DVD+/-RW I had in it before. See ya at the top.

Richard - I have loaded the Ultimate Bundle on one XP Pro machine, and 2 different Win7 Home Premium machines. Take note that the Garritan Personal Orchestra portion of the installation went into a non-reponsive hang mode on all 3 installs. It's when the .nkx (I think that's the file extension) is being copied. Wait quite awhile to ensure it has copied over, then kill the installer. Uncheck that item and re-run the installer from disk 1 and it will then soldier through the rest. GPO is in fact installed, there is just some bug that doesn't recognize the fact.

Or avoid the issue altogether at first and uncheck GPO. Do that one last all by itself.

Enjoy...

-Scott

Resurrecting this old thread with an update:

I got GPO to install properly by running the installer as administrator. Some nice sounds in that GPO I'll be putting to use.

Ryszard...

For what it's worth... I had trouble with a dvd - r/w drive a while back. All of a sudden, for some reason Windows Explorer couldn't see it. And so it was off to the computer parts store to buy another one. Installed it and everything was fine - for a while. Suddenly I was in the same boat... WE couldn't see it. I opened up and just wiggled the wire going into it. After doing so, everything was fine. I changed the wire with a new one and everything's been fine since. Looks like I bought a new drive for nothing.

In all my years working with computers I have never seen a CD/DVD wire suddenly go bad. Oh well.

Bobby