Magic Music Visuals

Hi team,

This looks like a fantastic piece of software and I decided to give the demo a try. I'm trying to install it on Windows Server (2008 or 2016) and while the installation goes through fine, the program can't open!

On Windows Server 2008, I get a DLL missing error. And on Windows Server 2016 the program just crashes on startup!

Is Windows Server not supported at all? Do you know if there's a trick to making it work on Win Server?

Thanks,
Marco

Hmm, I'm not sure! We've never tested on those OSs as they are not officially supported. What DLL does it say is missing?

Ah, that would explain it

If I remember correctly, it was MFREADWRITE.DLL I didn't try looking for it, because I figured once that dependency is resolved it'll ask for other files and I'll just end up chasing my own tail

Do you have any interest in making it supported some day?

This might be because you do not have media player services enabled on the server, try installing “ Desktop Experience “ feature from the server manager, reboot the server after installing the feature and then you will see the windows media player and related services.
Good luck,
David

Hmm yes that sounds like it might be the problem. MFREADWRITE.DLL is directly related to Magic's movie exporting functionality. Try installing what David recommended and let me know if it helps at all.

That was it!!! You guys are geniuses

On Windows Server 2008 I installed Desktop Experience. It took about an hour to update the OS after the install, but once that was done I could install Magic.
I'm going to see how I can do the same thing on Windows Server 2016, if I can get access to a beefier machine.

Thanks a bunch for the quick response. Cheers!

Alright, one more question:

Out of curiosity I tried to see if I could get things working on a VM, so I can get faster render times. For these, I don't have access to the actual machine and it looks like there is no sound-card installed on the physical machine (nor any drivers on the VM).

The software installs and runs fine, but it complains about not having an audio device. I tried loading an MP3 file and assigning it to the 0/1 channels, but even with that loaded, it won't allow me to hit the play button and see the output (and the Export menu item is grayed out). I'm not planning on using Magic for live performance in this type of setup, so my question is: is there a way to get Magic working on a VM for rendering purposes only? Does it actually need to have an audio driver if all I'm asking it to do is File -> Export Movie?

If the Export menu item is grayed out, you have a bigger problem . It means that the virtual machine doesn't support any hardware-accelerated graphics functionality, which in turn means that Magic will be pretty useless.

We don't recommend running inside a virtual machine.