it's past my bedtime (you can laugh. i'm ridiculous.) but i think i can declare victory with this ad-hoc setup. it's ad-hoc, mind you. but it should be functional.

i had to go up to cubase 5. iirc, i didn't do that in the first place because it wasn't playing nicely with my interface. i'll have to see if this version is better. no dongle emulator running in the background. that's definitely nice...

i also went up to guitar rig 5. i'm picky with tone. so, i'll call it an experiment for now.

i was hoping i could use the soundcard in the laptop for playback, but it's turned out to be useless. i had to get asio4all for cubase to even recognize it, but it's not actually working. it's probably a minor fix, but looking at the difference in specs is embarrassing to the hd chip. i'm way better off just headphoning directly out of the pod, even if it's a little awkward, cord-wise.

besides that, the bare minimum (pod drivers, cubase, guitar rig, cool edit) installed properly. and that's all i want running for now. i'll take more things in as i need them (i do use izotope as an effect processor, and there's a few secret plugins i won't mention), but this is meant to be a minimal environment.

if i were to play this live, i'd need a second usb to 1/8th inch out. that hdmi out isn't connecting to cubase. then again, i'd need to move to sonar to route the signal from the usb in, through guitar rig and back out again to the mixer, anyways.

it's not a worthwhile thought right now....

....and the pod provides the option of a clean or wet send in the drivers (as well as to turn the amp sim off and on). i knew that, but it's been a while since i've used it...