You know how much I dislike Tape, the only program to print cuesheets for Pro Tools sessions, right? Well, I still don’t like it but I did get it running in Classic in OS X. (And finally getting it running really did prove what a piece of shit software it really is.) Here’s how:
- Download the latest version of Tape. (1.5.2b47 as of this post)
- Download a copy of Pro Tools Free if you don’t have a version of Pro Tools 5.x installed.
- Run the Pro Tools Free installer. If you already have Pro Tools 5.x installed you can skip to step 5.
- A folder called “Digidesign” will be created in the root level of your hard drive. You can put this where ever you like. Your OS 9 Applications folder would probably be a good choice.
- Run the Tape installer.
- Select “Cue Sheet (USB)” and click “Install”.
- Choose a good place to install Tape like /Applications (Mac OS 9) and let it do its thing.
- Run the installer again but select “OSX Support” this time.
- Choose the same install place you did last time.
- Open the newly-installed “Tape Folder” and run “Install OMS 2.3.8”. If you already have OMS installed and configured because you have a working Pro Tools 5.x on your computer, you can skip to step 19.
- This will put a folder called “Opcode” in the root level of your hard drive.
- In /Opcode/OMS Applications run OMS Setup.
- Go through the standard setup options for OMS, scanning the ports and whatnot. You will probably just end up with three items: IAC Driver, Studio Patches pgm chg, and QuickTime Music.
- Save this setup in an appropriate place like in the same folder as OMS Setup.
- In OMS Setup, select “Prefereces” from the “Edit” menu.
- Uncheck “When AppleTalk is on, ask about turning it off” and click “OK”.
- Quit OMS Setup.
- You can move the “Opcode” folder to your OS 9 Applications folder if you like.
- Go back into your “Tape Folder”. Open the “Utilities” folder and run “OSX Activator”.
- This will install HASP drivers for OS 9 and OS X.
- Drag “OSX Activator” to your Dock or put an alias to it on your desktop. You’ll be using it a lot.
- In /System Folder/Preferences/Tape Preferences Folder/Tape Translators, take out the Listener application and put it in the Tape Preferences Folder. (This is part of the full Post Utilities spotting program and not necessary for cuesheets. If you’re using the full Post Utilities, don’t do this step.)
- Restart your computer.
You are now setup to run Tape in Classic under OS X. Any time you want to actually run Tape, you have to follow these steps:
- Plug in your Tape dongle to an open USB port.
- Run Classic.
- Run the OSX Activator.
- Run Tape.
Rick Steele, the guy who wrote this wonderful program, told me that you had to set Classic to “Start Classic When You Login” in your System Preferences. I did a bunch of testing on my laptop and found that I didn’t need to do that. If your copy of Tape is only running in Demo mode after following the steps above, I would first try restarting your computer and doing the 4 steps above. If that doesn’t work, you can try setting the preference that Rick suggested and restarting.
The biggest problem that I’ve encountered so far is that it doesn’t work with older dongles. I don’t know at what point Rick changed the software on the dongle but if you follow all the steps above and my restart and “Start Classic” suggestions and it still doesn’t work then I think it’s the dongle. Rick told me that some dongles might have to be flashed to work. I’ve encountered 3 so far where this is the case. Only the one that I just bought from him 2 days ago works for me. (I know. I hate this program and I still spent money on it. Like I said, there’s no other option right now.) I don’t know what the process is for flashing the dongles. I don’t know if it’s something you can do yourself or if you have to send them to Rick. I emailed him about this yesterday and I’m still waiting to hear back.
One other point that Rick strongly suggested: make a copy of any session before opening it in Tape. As he said, “I don’t want to be responsible for my program ruining your session.”
I think you can see why I hate this program. The process that you have to go through to just to print out some lines and characters on some pieces of paper is utterly ridiculous. Having to not only have a full version of Pro Tools 5.x but also OMS installed on a computer that quite possibly doesn’t even boot into OS 9 (like my laptop) is the most retarded software requirement ever. This is obviously because he has two levels of functionality—cuesheets only and then the full spotting, assembling, yadda yadda mess. They need to be separated. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to print cuesheets on a computer with nothing on it but OS 9 or OS X and a print driver. Open the file, give it a name and editor, change some font settings and go.
And this whole business of having to reinstall the HASP drivers every single time you want to run the program is foolish. If you go to Aladdin’s website, the makers of HASP, you can see quite clearly that they fully support running Classic applications with HASP4 dongles in OS X. Soundminer and all the new Gallery software uses HASP4 dongles. The letters “HASP4” are clearly printed on them. Tape’s dongle says “MacHASP”. Obviously Rick is still using an old HASP development kit from 4+ years ago and is too cheap to upgrade to the latest release. Consequently there is only partial support for these dongles in HASP OS X driver and we as the tormented end-users have to rerun the installer every time.
And his warning about not wanting to be responsible? That’s utter crap too. When he told me this he actually said the problem is because Digidesign has released a buggy software development kit. Now I can’t speak to whether or not Digi’s SDK is buggy or not. But here’s a novel approach for your damn Tape code: open the file as read-only! And then if you want to give support for editing the text of the regions in the Pro Tools session, write a temp file to the drive for this. Never change the original! I’ve never had a single day of formal programming instruction and even I could have figured that one out.