Tidal install : dumbproof Win10 tutorial?

Installation help
1

Hey everyone,

I've spent countless hours this week-end trying various processes to install Tidal on a brand new Win 10 Pro partition, on a brand new SSD, and have ran into various bumps.

I've been using Tidal on OSX Mojave for a little while without any issue. Why switching then ? Well, currently it's more of a test, investigating possible increase in performance on my whole set-up (and ease of CPU upgrade etc…). I quite like the idea of a crossplatform set-up too (my DAW and plugins run on both OS).

Now, it once - almost - worked with the Chocolatey automated process. I experienced massive latencies and heavily distorted with SuperCollider though, like a 30 sec gap between line evaluation and sound coming out of the speakers !?! Unfortunately, that was the closest I got to something usable :confused:

In another attempt, I also successfully updated to Tidal 1.6.1 via a cabal command I found on the forum (sorry, can't find the exact post by ), updated SC to v3.10 (and most recent SC plugins). My tunes are made with the most recent TC build on OSX, I figured I need the most recent version as well on W10 as well (Chocolatey includes 1.4.3 instead).

Anyway, close but no cigar : Atom successfully evaluated the pattern… but no sound at all.

Even if I solely use Tidal as a MIDI sequencer (piping SuperDirt’s MIDI to Ableton Live 10), I’d still like TC to output audio reliably.
Now I read most ASIO drivers can be just use by one app at a time, so I suppose SC has to rely on one of the numerous, built-in Windows audio drivers instead. I have no clue which one though.
Besides, my sound card and Live sessions run at 24/96 and long buffers, but I struggle to change SC’s bit depth, SR and buffer size : I can’t help thinking it might add to my issues here ?

So here I am, asking for the most idiot-proof tutorial for Tidal on a Windows 10 Pro computer. Any hints / piece of advice would be tremendously appreciated.

Thanks a billion fellow Tidal Cyclists !

Ps: I’ll certainly wipe the SSD and do a fresh, clean install once I know how to successfully set-it all up.

2

Successful manual install (hooray!). LoopMIDI works as expected too.
Now I have to figure out how to change SC’s server settings.

3

Glad that it worked out. I am a complete beginner (since last week) and I wanted to say that I followed the automated process (Chocolatey) and it just worked out of the box for me. I am using Windows 10 with a MOTU 828MK2 Firewire interface with ASIO drivers.

I'm guessing it has to do with the soundcard drivers and settings?

I also noticed wierd behaviour when I by mistake started multiple instances of atom and connected to SC. All manner of latency and what sounded like jitter.

1 Like
4

Glad you got it working. I think chocolatey is great when it works, but can cause major headaches when it doesnt.... My advice for windows users (as a windows user myself!) is to do the manual install. It can be a bit intimidating for newbies but I think it massively helps you understand what's going on, and troubleshooting chocolatey install probs is a nightmare.

1 Like
5

Compared to OSX auto-install, it was quite trickier. The manual install was super smooth though, for some unknown strange reasons my mind totally occulted that possibility.
TBH I have no clue what went wrong. I still have to investigate audio / SC issues, but as SuperDirt MIDI is super tight and working as expected, I guess it's not that much of a high priority now.
Cheers !

1 Like
6

Hmmm. So, as mentionned, I did a fresh OS reinstall and now it doesn't work, following manual guide. In the words of Jerry Seinfeld : "Why ? Whyyyy ?"

Can't get a simple bass drum sequence to play, nor SuperCollider to complete MIDI set-up.

Following SuperDirt MIDI guide on Tidal blog, last command line to set MIDI out from TC :

````~dirt.soundLibrary.addMIDI(\midi, ~midiOut);```

leads to :

-> a MIDIOut
ERROR: Message 'soundLibrary' not understood.
RECEIVER:
   nil
ARGS:
CALL STACK:
	DoesNotUnderstandError:reportError
		arg this = <instance of DoesNotUnderstandError>
	Nil:handleError
		arg this = nil
		arg error = <instance of DoesNotUnderstandError>
	Thread:handleError
		arg this = <instance of Thread>
		arg error = <instance of DoesNotUnderstandError>
	Object:throw
		arg this = <instance of DoesNotUnderstandError>
	Object:doesNotUnderstand
		arg this = nil
		arg selector = 'soundLibrary'
		arg args = [*0]
	< closed FunctionDef >  (no arguments or variables)
	Interpreter:interpretPrintCmdLine
		arg this = <instance of Interpreter>
		var res = nil
		var func = <instance of Function>
		var code = "~dirt.soundLibrary.addMIDI(\..."
		var doc = nil
		var ideClass = <instance of Meta_ScIDE>
	Process:interpretPrintCmdLine
		arg this = <instance of Main>
^^ The preceding error dump is for ERROR: Message 'soundLibrary' not understood.
RECEIVER: nil

I can live without the audio part, as said earlier I succeeded a few days ago in having super tight MIDI out of Tidal, just like on my OSX partition.

But no SuperDirt MIDI is maddening, as I can't currently play all the tracks I've been working on since early 2019. Win10 seems to be more CPU efficient on some of my projects, hence the determination to succeed here.

Besides, the ever reliable startup.scd file I use on OSX, slighly modified to match Win10's nomanclature (re:MIDI ports I/O names), doesn't work either.

Any pointers ? Thanks a billion for your help !