…

See if you need a fast natural solution to your wrinkle woes.
Take…

Best regards,

Goran Ilic

I don’t currently know of anything *specific* to pro audio in any of the different Vista flavors. What we’re describing is in all of them. So you’ll make your decision based on other factors and how you use the OS, probably jumping for either Home Premium or Ultimate. I like Ultimate for the Windows Remote Desktop inclusion and backup features alone. (Also in Business, but then you lose some of the consumer stuff.)

The Whippinpost story is interesting, but it’s important to recognize that some of those features are intended for “consumer” audio — i.e., audio listening and general-use applications (even a lot of the surround, mic config, and “high def” audio specs included). These functions are still likely to be managed by your music apps separately, because the needs for musicians are a little different than the average consumer. Of course, if you then want to go watch Star Trek II or run audio in Skype, you may wind up benefiting from both.

Also, I would take issue with the claim in that article that there’s “nothing more you can do with MIDI.” (That’s the author’s opinion, not Microsoft’s; I think Microsoft just made a pragmatic decision to focus mainly on general-purpose improvements.) MIDI is still an enormous part of almost everyone’s music production workflow, and I find Vista — like XP — to be deficient in some key areas. There’s no integrated MIDI setup, no unified mechanism for managing patch names, and no built-in means for routing MIDI between applications (which is a more common need than many people think, sometimes just to run a MIDI utility and a MIDI app at the same time).

There are still lots of good things about Vista, but they primarily include the improvements listed in the other article with Cakewalk. You’ll benefit from these other features when listening to music, but production is all about the new audio driver (WaveRT), the new means of handling kernel access (no longer “kernel exclusive”; I think that’s now been renamed to the MMCSS described in the other story), and more protection from drivers. This general package was called “glitch-free”, then renamed “glitch resistant”, and now has all these ugly acronyms (MMCSS doesn’t quite roll off the tongue), but that tells you that this got out of the hands of the marketers and into the hands of the engineers. That’s a good thing; you shouldn’t have to know about this stuff — you should just have everything work!

These are all major improvements. There’s still room for improvement in all three major OSes, however — Linux, Windows, and even Mac OS X. But I can cautiously say many if not most users will want to upgrade; we’ll be testing Vista and the other gear to give readers advice on which systems will make sense to upgrade and when.

There’s also a good overview at http://www.thewhippinpost.co.uk/news/vista-review-for-musicians.htm which explains a bit more.

We’re a minority market so i guess M$ are leaving it to others to explain. If everything i’ve read is true though, i’m actually quite excited.