Comments on: Developers: How Goes Developing Drivers and Software for Vista?

By: Rasmus Kaj

Rasmus Kaj — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 14:40:14 +0000

How come you all assume you can require vendors to release stuff for Vista? If they decide that vista sucks and they can deliver a better product on another platform, they are of course free to do so.

On the other hand, you are of course free to buy their products or not. I for one would much rather have vendors support FreeBSD (or Linux) than Vista. But I’m aware that I can’t demand that they do so.

Isn’t the “premium content” features of Vista going to be a big problem for anyone trying to work with hi-end audio (or video) on that platform?

By: Digby

Digby — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:58:54 +0000

Personally I would never buy a new OS in its’ first year after release.

I just bought a new PC and I made sure it had XP. If you say to the vendors you won’t buy if its’ not got XP it seems to persuade them!

By: poopoo

poopoo — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:59:49 +0000

Goes to show that incremental OS updates are a good thing.

Writing Vista drivers is most likely awful, but that wouldn’t make it any different from XP or any other windows version. The code signing stuff is probably an added hassle. However I think the hardware companies are probably to blame.

My guess is this is a human resource issue at the hardware companies side. The guys who wrote the XP drivers left years ago. Someone else replaced them and only understands enough of the code to tweak it a little. Vista comes along and suddenly they need someone who understands the XP drive code. Right about this time every other hardware company realizes they need good driver developers too.

By: Chris Randall

Chris Randall — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 06:33:10 +0000

I’ll tell you what: when a small company like Aurora Audio can make nice, firm Vista drivers, and M-Audio and Creative can’t, despite the fact that Aurora’s products are far more sophisticated, I think that I’m gonna have to call “bullshit.”

Laziness and/or lack of leadership, plain and simple. There’s a point up to which you can blame Microsoft for any and all problems. However, when we’re four months in to public release, and it’s not like M-Audio is one guy sitting in his basement or anything, it’s time to draw the line.

By: Defyer

Defyer — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 16:40:05 +0000

Hi Peter,

I’ve been using Vista for about 4 months. I got it with the Toshiba laptop I bought. The OS didn’t please me at first and during the first two weeks, I was thinking of going back to XP. The reason I didn’t do it was because I didn’t have drivers for my graphics card on XP (being optimized for DX10).

Anyway, I kept Vista. I’m a long-time user of FL Studio, Ableton Live and, most of the time, Propellerheads Reason. FL 6 and Reason 3 worked out-the-box. Ableton Live 6 had an issue involving the Aero theme (which was corrected in a later release).

The thing that really made me mad was the fact that my audio card (Audigy 2 ZS Notebook) didn’t work on Vista and the beta drivers caused some serious crashes. I managed to work without my pro soundcard. Seeing that Creative still hadn’t released the drivers for Vista yet, I bought an E-MU 0202 USB which I currently use.

My MIDI Interfaces (M-Audio Evolution UC-33e, Yamaha PSR-295, Fatar SL-990XP) worked with no problems (the UC-33e and the Fatar didn’t require any special drivers. As easy as Plug & Play).

Now, to answer your question, I consider the effort should come from both Microsoft and the third-party developers. I think Microsoft should consider making a more memory-friendly OS to make room for future multi-track DAWs, while the third-party developers should try to optimize their applications.

Sincerely,