A challenge to efficiency brings some terrific results. We’ve got tracks for you to hear, a few quick tips on production with Renoise, a place to go talk about the tracks and how to optimize them for netbooks, and a new extended deadline. And if you’re curious what kinds of music can be made with trackers, now’s a perfect chance to give folks from this community a listen. You may be surprised by the breadth of what you hear.

The forward march of transistors has led to maximalist ideas in music technology. The only problem: musical composition often benefits from efficiency. I remember in the early days of Cakewalk for DOS wondering what I would do with their thousands of promised tracks – and that was before digital audio, soft synths, 64-bit, and the like.

The Creative Commons-licensed Indamixx + Renoise + CDM music competition we introduced last month returns to that idea of efficiency. You use a tool with a different creative approach (Renoise, a modern tracker), then work to conserve computer resources instead of squander them. The music can then successfully run on – and you can win – a lovely, ultra-compact Indamixx Netbook.

And while you’re doing more with less, we’ve decided to give you a little more … time. We didn’t want to exclude anyone from getting in entries, so the deadline has been extended – meaning if you submitted already, you have a chance to revise and polish or respond to feedback (including, importantly, CPU optimization feedback).

New deadline: SUNDAY, OCTOBER 25

New full-blown entry + discussion site (with audio, full XRNS files, and plenty of chatter on improving production quality and optimization):
http://www.renoise.com/competitions/indamixx/

Need help with testing? Once you’ve got an entry in, Ronald Stewart of Indamixx has offered a free download of their Transmission OS (based on Linux), which you can run on your laptop for testing purposes. Contact him via the inquiry form, and be sure to mention you’re entering the contest!

And folks, so far, some brilliant work. The contest organizers (myself, plus the folks from 64 Studio, Indamixx, and Renoise) have been going through entries and are blown away.

What happens when you mix technical chatter on the Cakewalk forum, Samuel Beckett, and The Matrix? I’d wager you get something like the surreal video above. Prompted by the posting of technical details for a new update to Cakewalk’s SONAR production software for Windows, and empowered by a strange, new tool that generates eerie virtual reality from typed text, we get banter like this:

The arpeggiator is now on every track, so you are supposed to use it. It is one of the new rules of recording.

Yes, I came from the days of one-finger piano playing. This is a total blessing to me.

I’m going to take that as a challenge and base my review of SONAR 8.5 on using an arpeggiator and step sequencer on every track. And I’ll have to pronounce all those hard g’s in the voice over, clearly.

And no, this is not some twisted viral campaign on the part of the folks of Cakewalk; I’ve been assured that this came from a user.

Okay, what was this post originally about? Oh, yeah – the actual technical details of the SONAR 8.5 release. Noel Borthwick talks about all the details of the new SONAR release on the Cakewalk forums. Apparently, some people care deeply about whether this is SONAR 9 or 8.5 or some conspiracy theory there, but what interests me is the technical details of the software itself.

SONAR 8.5 Fine Print

Noel goes down to a code level. Interesting tidbits: working with Intel, Cakewalk was able to do a demo of SONAR running an absurd number of tracks, instruments, effects, and live video without pegging the CPU, with a tiny 2 ms of latency. The Cakewalk engineering effort also has put together what may be the most highly-optimized VST support and richest 32-to-64-bit bridging on any platform, anywhere.

Whatever the opposite of “marketing speak” may be, I think that’s what Noel has achieved, getting into a sort of developer-to-developer level discussion. It is still readable, and worth digging through.

See also: Intel Developer Forum details and video on the Cakewalk blog

I could talk more about that, but let’s just leave it at step sequencers and arpeggiators on every track, okay?

Windows matters. It’s what roughly half of CDM readers use, and – for all the attention Apple gets – it’s a big part of the computer music world. Windows today also faces many of the same under-the-hood challenges that other operating systems do, so even if you’re a die-hard Linux or Mac user, you may want to pay attention.  You don’t need to love Windows, and you certainly won’t be hosting a Windows 7 launch party. You want to know if the OS will get out of your way and let you get to work.

Windows Vista proved what happens when an operating system’s many interconnected pieces are out of alignment. Even a graphics driver out of sync with underlying changes in the OS could render audio unusable, because just one missed sample can produce an audible glitch or dropout. Part of why I’m optimistic about Windows 7 is that Vista today is a radically different picture, thanks to many, many fixes delivered by Microsoft in updates and more mature audio and video drivers. But that means not just whether 7 is better than XP, but whether 7 is also better than Vista.

Vista wasn’t entirely alone: Mac and Linux have all had their share of growing pains in recent years. The devil is usually in the details. So, I again turn to one of the best guys in the business for sorting out all those technical details. Noel Borthwick, the CTO for Cakewalk, probably has a better big-picture view of how music and audio work in Windows than anyone on the planet. He’s a person hardware and software vendors outside Cakewalk often rely upon as a resource. Noel kept us technically honest on Vista, and he’s doing it again on Windows 7, with some exclusive information for CDM.

Those details get mighty technical, so here’s the punchline: Windows 7 is an OS Noel would use himself. It was hard to get anyone to recommend Vista over XP; loyal Windows-using developers I know still largely stick to XP. But would Noel switch from XP to 7?

Yes, absolutely. Windows 7 finally delivers on the stability and performance that users hoped for from Vista. The kernel changes and optimizations for large scale multi-core processors make it very attractive to DAW users who are interested in better low latency performance. I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice.

What’s new in Windows 7?

• Better multithreading: Improved performance of highly-multithreaded software and hardware by removing a significant bottleneck, especially relevant to a tool like SONAR
• Better memory management: Improved memory management when working with multiple threads
• Less nagging: More customization over UAC prompts (meaning they don’t have to nag you more than you want)
• More lightweight: Fewer system services run by default on a stock system, plus a leaner footprint of the OS
• Media support: More native media format support, including QuickTime MOV and H.264, plus drag-and-drop media transcoding
• Composite devices: More logical display of hardware with multiple functions (like audio and MIDI).
• FireWire: Enhanced FireWire support, with IEEE 1394b
• Multi-touch: Multi-touch display support
• Usability improvements: An improved user interface, task bar, and Libraries for managing files

If you’re ready for all the gory details, read on – including a frank appraisal of how all of this compares to XP in real-world performance, and what compatibility issues to look out for if upgrading from either Vista or XP.

Noel Borthwick of Cakewalk effectively wrote this story in response to my questions, so these answers all come from him. Microsoft has not responded to my requests for a review copy, so I’ll be able to evaluate this on my own system – albeit far less scientifically than Noel can – closer to launch.

Earlier this fall, we got an inside look at the various Vista optimizations in Cakewalk’s SONAR 8. It was all fairly technical stuff, but odds are you may have been puzzled by a mention of support for custom “MMCSS task profiles.” Don’t worry – the correct response here is, indeed, “say WHA?” These refer to specialized task profiles, or configurations by which Vista determines how to prioritize access to the CPU. It’s not strictly necessary for end users to ever have to touch these. You can theoretically squeeze some additional performance and reliability out of your system by using them with SONAR 8, but that would require knowing how to do so.

Well, you’re in luck. I convinced Noel Borthwick, CTO at Cakewalk, to share his personal MMCSS profile with CDM. This will only work in SONAR 8 for the moment, as far as I know, until another host implements the same feature. Now, don’t get me wrong — it’s not necessary to use this tweak with SONAR 8 and Vista; I’ve been testing SONAR without it with no issue. This is just “because you can.” Here’s how to use it:

On a purely technical level, how does Windows Vista work with a leading pro audio application? A lot of that depends on just how much the developer does to tune their software, and to hook into some of the new audio technologies in the OS.

I wanted to know more about how Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 DAW was specifically optimized for Windows Vista. SONAR 7 was already out in front with support for Vista’s audio plumbing, but SONAR 8 promises quite a bit more. With the help of CTO Noel Borthwick, we were able to go through internal engineering documents and communication and get the full story. (Noel, who has a resume as a Linux programmer as well as leading the top Windows audio developer’s technical efforts, has been very frank in the past about Vista, walking us through changes before launch and real world experiences one year later.)

As Noel puts it, this is “more minute detail than most sane people would care to read,” but that’s just the kind of detail we like. If you just want to know whether your software will work, this is overkill. But for those of you who, like us, are interested in why some things work, this is a good place to start. I also sincerely hope other developers on Windows will start to invest more time in some of these details.

If SONAR 8’s music features are what interest you, see our first look:

SONAR 8 Preview: Instrument Tracks, Beatscape Instrument, Transient Shaper, Enhanced Performance, Other Goodies

I’ll repeat my current recommendation on Windows. If you’ve got a system running XP and you’re happy, I’d stick with it. But I see no reason to avoid SP1, unless you have a specifically incompatible setup, now that SP1 and driver updates have brought some maturity to the platform. I find the new OS more usable and, with the right software and drivers, even more stable. (This is not what I would have said before SP1, especially early after launch.) In fact, this walk-through with Noel demonstrates why, in the case of a SONAR system, you might be happier under Vista, on a point by point basis. I’ll avoid the “versus Mac” or “versus Linux” arguments, as those tend to get more complex and abstract, but there’s some good stuff here for those of you with Windows experience.

And yes, if any developer would like to do a similar tour on the Mac or Linux, I’m all ears. But just in case you think I’m crazy when I say there is some really robust stuff for audio in Vista, now you’ll know just what I mean.