Comments on: 10 Free Non-Musical Windows Software Every Musician Should Use

By: Create Digital Music » Optimizing for Vista: Inside the Mechanics of SONAR 8 with Cakewalk Engineering

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 16:19:56 +0000

[...] 10 Free Non-Musical Windows Software Every Musician Should Use Build Your Own Game of Life Sequencer in Processing: Video Featuring rwmidi [...]

By: Louis Muloka

Louis Muloka — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 04:28:18 +0000

got a list for mac users?

By: Amaury

Amaury — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 08:42:24 +0000

Not exactly softwares but well worth the read:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep06/articles/pcmusician_0906.htm

and the old famous Tascam guide: Optimizing Windows 2000 and Windows XP for Audio
http://www.tascam.com/products/computer_recording/W2k_XP_Optimize.pdf

Although this latest link seems to point to a document it appears empty… If anyone has a better link.

By: Create Digital Music » 12 Free and Cheap Must-Have Music Utilities for Windows

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 18:05:40 +0000

[...] my favorite tools for just that job. For the first part, I looked at the unpleasant stuff — tools for troubleshooting your system and keeping it operating at maximum [...]

By: Mikaels blogg · Tio program för att fräscha upp Windows

Mikaels blogg · Tio program för att fräscha upp Windows — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:56:09 +0000

[...] Enligt titeln är det program som varje musiker ska ha men tipsen lämpar sig för alla som kör Windows. Läs mer på 10 Free Non-Musical Windows Software Every Musician Should Use [...]

By: Farhan

Farhan — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 20:16:48 +0000

Thanx a super lot!A low end laptop producer like me really needs that!Thanx again!!May god gift u an access virus ti

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:50:36 +0000

@Hyram: “A music production computer should not even have the internet” — well, up to how you want to handle this.

But if you’re going to go to that extreme, then you’ve got some options. You could run VMware or virtualbox or other virtualization with Linux or Windows as your browsing machine. You could also dual-boot Linux, given that you’re dual booting.

I’ll say this, as well: I think it’s perfectly possible to run a music machine that’s connected. To me, I’m willing to put in the (relatively small) amount of work to make that functional so my music/life workflow isn’t interrupted. But your route is another way to go, and it could be a productive one — especially via virtualization so you don’t have to completely reboot. I’m not sure I’d find either “laughable” necessarily, but that’s your prerogative.

By: Hyram H.

Hyram H. — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 04:05:14 +0000

Honestly, the issue of running a firewall or antivirus software on a music-production computer is laughable. A music-production computer should not even have the internet!

I’ve got one Windows machine here that I use occasionally for musical purposes, but I have it set up as a dual-boot system with two installs of Windows XP that I can choose from when I (re)start the machine. The first one is for everything — net duties, software checking, the occasional game, and it has all the usual CPU-hungry protection software added. It does have Reason (for quick scratchpadding) and Cantabile (for quick VST testing) but I don’t use it for anything musically serious.

The second is a trimmed-down XPSP1 that is *just* for music — no AV, no Windows updates, nothing, I’ve even disabled the ethernet in the hardware profile, it just has my music apps and plug-ins. If I need to download anything for music-making, that happens on the normal install where it’ll get the usual anti-malware once-over before I copy it to the music partition.

If you make music using Windows-oriented software, then using a dual-boot arrangement like this is the only way to do it properly.

By: Kyran

Kyran — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 10:56:20 +0000

My issue with vista is that it thinks it’s smarter than you (this goes for osx too, to some extend)
It’s one thing to hide configuration options, it’s another to take them away entirely. If you’re trying to do something which vista thinks is unsafe, but you know is good, then you have to do a lot unsafer things to get it working (if you can get it working at all)

By: Peter Kirn

Peter Kirn — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 16:24:27 +0000

@Kyran: Totally agreed on nLite, and there’s now a Vista version, as well. It does seem to be generally possible to disable things post-installation, though of course it is nice to have a reusable image.

I’m definitely switching back to avast! after all this advice. Maybe I’ll do a similar configuration guide to the AVG Free one above. (I do find that using the AVG Free advice, even AVG8 is fine — as the poster on that forum says, the results are at least predictable.)

One bit of bloat I’ve had trouble disabling is the Media Center crap in Vista Ultimate. Even turning off the services seems not to stop a misbehaved service called mcupdate.exe. I might just recommend Vista Business instead, but I’ll keep trying…