PC users have to buy Macs — PC users don’t have to do anything. There are some compelling reasons to buy Macs, though, now as always. I regularly hear about people switching. But that doesn’t mean lots of people aren’t remaining on Windows and happy with it (XP and Vista alike).

Microsoft cares about professionals: well, jury is out there. I think Windows music developers care about the pro audio market. On good days, Microsoft listens to them. On bad days, they have other priorities; that’s true of most larger computer industry companies because music production is not that large a market, and we’d be fooling ourselves to think otherwise. I also think it’s a matter of fact, not opinion, that Apple has devoted greater resources proportionally to building the OS for production. That doesn’t mean Microsoft hasn’t put in some effort (particularly on Vista), and it doesn’t mean you have to use a Mac, or that you might not actually prefer Windows. It DOES mean that assuming Microsoft will fix things on its own is a big mistake. They have to hear from us.

XAudio is not the drivers of the future; this is the consumer side, not the pro audio side. On Mac, that’s a non-issue because you have one audio system; for now, at least, there remains a split on Windows for very practical reasons. XAudio doesn’t yet do the things we need as far as latency and feature set. It’s still interesting, though, or I wouldn’t have mentioned it here. And, in fact, the Mac really lacks all of these Direct[Stuff] tools that make Windows a great game development platform. It’s been in transition with Vista, but certainly for games Windows is the place to be, and by extension any game-based music applications.

Microsoft evolves based on its mistakes? Well, we hope so. There are truly brilliant people at Microsoft, some of the best developers on Earth. There are also lots of (naturally) conflicting priorities. Microsoft is really, really, really big. So big, in fact, that I don’t think “Microsoft” does anything. People in Microsoft are sometimes able to steer projects in the right direction. There are also people in the company who steer it in directions we don’t like. That’s really not a criticism of them; it’s the nature of large companies, and the nature of technology.

If ASIO were some kind of unmitigated disaster, I’d probably be upset too. But drivers are starting to catch up, even for slowpokes like M-Audio, and frankly I prefer the Windows method to JACK.

What you’re more likely to notice is hassles with driver compatibility and some much more subtle stability issues that aren’t yet worked out.

Here’s what I would suggest:
Go ahead and get that extra RAM. (Don’t know what you’re running now, but more RAM is ALWAYS a good idea.)
Skip the Vista upgrade for now — not for the reasons you suggest, but because your system IS running well now, and you can spend that money on RAM instead! (Up to the point you can handle, anyway … for more RAM for running loads of samples, then you might think about Vista x64, etc.)

Now I wonder why I should upgrade to it, because all processing power used up by the OS can’t be used by my DAW software. It doesn’t really make sense to upgrade to vista for any computational intensive application.

* You need a WaveRT-compliant card, and there are fewer of these than ASIO
* You need dedicated drivers
* WaveRT doesn’t do anything at the moment for USB (any of the flavors) or FireWire
* Vista still has some kinks elsewhere to get worked out

And Adrian here is talking about some more cutting-edge features like inter-app audio and MIDI that are still lacking out of the box. Both Mac and Windows have some room for improvement, room you can fill to some extent with add-ons (JACK or Soundflower for interapp audio on Mac, MIDI-Yoke for interapp MIDI on Windows). But it’d be great to see this stuff built in.

This wasn’t quite what I meant to get into with this post — XAudio2 is *intended* for “consumer” audio and gaming, not music production. But it does underline the sort of flux audio on Vista in general is in at the moment. And XAudio2 is still relevant to people doing oddball things like building game engines for music making, etc. — we come back to the same issues of needing more robust platforms for music development. You have this enormous amount of horsepower in computers; it’s silly not to be able to take better advantage of it.

I will revisit all the Vista stuff soon, so keep asking questions, and I’ll make sure to cover them in detail (given there’s every chance to get something wrong or leave something out talking just in comments)!