Specialist support for music technology

[enjay]

Our Music department have PCs with Sibelius, Cubase and such like on. These used to be a totally separate network managed by an external company. When we ditched CC3 and went vanilla Win 7, we pulled the PCs into our main network, but the external company still provided customised base images and give ongoing support. This contract is up for renew/review, so I'm after recommendations for other companies we should speak to.

 

Alternatively, have this company just done a really good sales pitch in the past in convincing us how difficult music tech is, and could we actually manage this ourselves? We have the expertise to manage the Windows environment, GPOs, etc. ourselves but my team is not (and should not be) Cubase gurus.

[Steve21]

There's nothing really to do with it as most the individual settings within a project are changed based upon what device said user is plugging in etc.

 

The default settings can be deployed with SCCM/GPO etc without any manual setup

 

Steve

[enjay]

The default settings can be deployed with SCCM/GPO etc without any manual setup

 

As ours are. The "trick" is knowing what the right default settings are...

[PotNoodleTech]

Run all our music PCs on the domain and have done for a decade. Most music software works ok on a network now (they didn't in the distant past, for sure). Once the software is installed and you've taken care of any weird bits (converting to Mp3 extra software/plugins etc) then it should just work day in day out.

 

You don't need to pay a company to do this it's just like any other bit of software.

[Steve21]

As ours are. The "trick" is knowing what the right default settings are...

 

But I mean if you already have the settings deployed etc there's nothing to change after a redeploy etc or am I missing what you mean?

 

The only bits we tweak after install are the port setups to match the hardware we are deploying to. There's nothing fancy or special you should need to do apart from a few basic bits unless you're doing something particularly fancy with other hardware linking in.

 

Honestly think you should just install a copy on a standalone machine and have a play, there's really not much you can tweak "external of a project" that either will do anything if you don't have the hardware, or will stop things working once the hardwares setup

 

Steve

[bald_pig]

I assume that this company involves the letters cmtc? If so, they like to use their own "solutions" which are prone to break whenever there's an update...

[enjay]

But I mean if you already have the settings deployed etc there's nothing to change after a redeploy etc or am I missing what you mean?

 

Some settings are in GPO, others are in customised user profiles, others again are in the base image. All of this was done for us by the externals when we moved to Windows 7. At the stage we moved, I didn't have the time to spare to think about the complexities of music tech (plus like I said, the company did a good sales pitch to SLT and our systems support company about how difficult it is to get right) so we went with them for a quick win and one fewer thing to worry about. Now we're needing new hardware, we're taking the opportunity to review everything - our music environment is something of a legacy from a previous music teacher who went out and bought 20 PCs, software, installation and support without speaking to IT!! Needless to say, I was not here when that happened!

[Guest obsidianpillar]

You can do everything you require in-house. No need for external support/contracts in this case.