Moment of Panic

Posted by Troy

March 28, 2006

So Ive been combing the web trying to find a PC equivalent to the Mac’s GarageBand3., thanks to Allen’s in-person demonstration on how it works, making me very, very jealous… After much looking, I finally came upon CastBlaster, that appears to somehow be tied (even if its just a picture) to The Podfather himself. I downloaded the software and ran the installer and it said something about upgrading to Windows Media Player 10 to provide MP3 support. Well, I already have WMP10 and MP3s play fine, so I was a little confused. But, I went to Microsoft’s site and downloaded the reinstalled for WMP10 and began to unpack/install it.

It finished with the usual reboot now message, but when Windows started up - no opening fanfare. Nothing. So I went back into CastBlaster where it told me “no wave out devices found” - I went into my control panel and sure enough my sound card now had a yellow exclamation mark next to it.

Great.

For those un-PC saavy, that means basically my computer is mute. No sound comes forth onto thine speakers, and more importantly, no podcast can be recorded either.

I tried to reinstall the sound card drivers a few times to no avail. They kept saying “this device could not be started.” Over and over and over. So I removed the device from the control panel and instead of reinstalling it, rebooted.

Windows started up, without the startup sound, and I was about to go crazy. But then I booted up an audio app and everything was working. So I booted up Cast Blaster and began playing around. It is a pretty good program, it puts a lot of sound effects and loops at your fingertips. However, it doesn’t do multi-track, it just kind of mixes everything on the fly. Which means if you make a mistake, you have to redo all of it.

The trial version is limited to 10 minutes, which is probaly a good thing as I will probably do my double digit special in chunks rather than all at once. Still, until GarageBand is ported to the PC (yeah right) CastBlaster is a very good alternative.

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