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.

WARNING: Extremely geeky details of the inner workings of Windows 7 follow, in keeping with our “never dumbed down” policy. If you’re a developer, you can likely get some leads on how to better support Windows 7 in a single point, something even Microsoft doesn’t provide as completely. But if you’re willing to dig, you get a rare view of the OS from a developer view – no marketing speak, no cheerleading, no fanboyism, no platform wars, no writing for the lowest common denominator.

What Actually Improves Audio Performance

Peter: In terms of performance for audio production, what are the significant differences in Windows 7?

Noel: Windows 7 on the surface is very similar to Windows Vista. It has the same audio driver support and same audio system infrastructure as Vista. However, it’s some of the under-the-hood improvements that are more significant for audio production. There are some interesting innovations and optimizations in the Windows kernel, making the OS more scalable for concurrent processing. This makes it attractive for highly multithreaded applications like SONAR. Additionally there are various new API’s/SDK’s that may be of significance to developers. Some highlights are below:

Multi-threading: Removal of the kernel “global dispatcher lock”

In Vista and earlier, on a highly multi-threaded system (e.g. SONAR running on an 8 core hyper-threaded Intel Core I7 PC), you have many threads all processing tiny audio buffers at low latency. All these threads are ultimately waiting on the dispatcher lock when it comes time for them to be managed by the Windows scheduler. This global lock becomes a bottleneck in the system and prevents efficient multi-core workload distribution and scalability. This problem gets magnified as you increase the number of cores since they are all gated by a common lock. In Win 7 the kernel team changed the logic in the Windows scheduler to abolish this global dispatcher lock and use per object locks. This effectively removes this age old bottleneck and allows Win 7 to scale better even under workloads of 256 processors.

This change means a lot to applications like SONAR that rely on multithreaded processing of very small workloads. Initial benchmark results have been promising in this regard. SONAR performs more efficiently at low latency on multi core machines.

Improved Memory Management – PFN database lock

The PFN (page frame number) database lock was used by the memory manager to lock pages of memory in the working set. Like the dispatcher lock above, this would gate memory access from different threads causing resource contention. Work in this was first done in Windows server 2003 SP1 and Windows 7 has now has this optimization as well, improving asynchronous access to memory.

Power Optimization: Core Parking

Windows 7 has a new feature called Core Parking. Core Parking is a power saving optimization that shifts processing load to one or more cores and puts other less busy cores to “sleep”. The objective is to let other cores idle if workload levels allow for it. This optimization had us scratching our heads when we ran a benchmark test on a Quad Core I7 machine. At any point in time, we would notice that some cores were idle in task manager. The reason for this turned out to be Core Parking. Core parking can be useful to save battery life while running projects on laptops.

Better WaveRT Performance

Unlike Windows Vista, Win7 now uses event mode internally. This is good news, since it will help guarantee that HDAudio drivers in Win7 support WaveRT event mode properly. Additionally event mode is now part of WHQL logo certification for driver vendors, so any WAVERT device must support this to get a Win7 compatibility logo.

Ed. note: The plain-English translation here is that WaveRT, Microsoft’s own real-time audio driver facility, now is more likely to work the way you expect. Cockos, makers of REAPER, actually provided the ability to turn off WaveRT Event Mode at the end of last year because of unpredictable results. Windows 7 should resolve these issues.

Other Improvements

Peter: Noel also assembled some other improvements worth noting in Windows 7. They’re subtle, but useful: you may finally be able to avoid installing QuickTime/iTunes just to play some video files, interfaces with audio and MIDI jacks don’t have to show up separately any more, there’s improved FireWire support, usability improvements, and multi-touch on mainstream computers is now nearly here.

Noel:

Additional File Format support

Windows 7 adds native playback support for media in MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVCHD, ADTS, M4A, and WTV multimedia containers. It has native codec’s for H.264, MPEG4-SP, ASP/DivX/Xvid, MJPEG, DV, AAC-LC, LPCM and AAC-HE

Yes you read that right – QuickTime MOV file support is now natively available in Windows 7 so you don’t need to install QuickTime. Another big plus is that this is supported under the X64 version of Windows 7 as well, something you cannot do with Apple’s native QuickTime itself!

All media files using these codec’s should play in Media Player. It appears that these new codec’s are exclusively available to Media Foundation applications and not via other legacy API’s such as DirectShow etc.

File format transcoding

File format transcoding of many popular formats is now built into the Windows 7 shell. I.e. dragging and dropping files onto a device automatically performs the necessary format transcoding if the format is supported. This was primarily done to copy formats to portable devices like cameras but should be useful in other scenarios as well.

Multi-function devices and Device Containers:

Prior to Windows 7, every device attached to the system was treated as a single functional “end-point”. While appropriate for single-function devices (such as an audio interface), this does elegantly represent multi-function devices such as a combination audio/MIDI interface. In Windows 7, the drivers and status information for multi-function device can be grouped together as a single "Device Container", which is then presented to the user in the new "Devices and Printers" Control Panel as a single unit.

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/Device/DeviceExperience/ContainerIDs.mspx

Note: this should not be confused with device aggregation as is available with Core Audio on Mac OS. On the Mac, you can treat multiple audio interfaces as though they’re one interface, so, for instance, you could get extra outputs by combining a couple of audio interfaces, and your software will see them as if they’re just one box. But SONAR provides this capability on its own, so if you’re a SONAR user, you can get the same functionality.

FireWire/USB

Windows 7 contains a new FireWire (IEEE 1394) stack that fully supports IEEE 1394b with S800, S1600 and S3200 data rates. According to reports, USB 3.0 may be supported in a future Windows Update. It was initially planned for Win7 but is not supported in the shipping version of Win7 due to delays in the USB 3 specification.

Multi-touch

Windows 7 includes integrated support for multi-touch displays.

Libraries

Libraries are user-defined collections of content including folders. It’s a handy way to categorize and create shortcuts to samples, music, etc. Special shell folders (Documents, Pictures, Music, and so on) are now Libraries.

Accelerators for Windows

Windows 7 Accelerators provide a way for learning more about selected text, optionally using voice control.

Virtual hard disks

The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 incorporate support for the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file format. VHD files can be mounted as drives, created, and booted from.
An installation of Windows 7 can be booted and run from a VHD drive, even on non-virtual hardware, thereby providing a new way to multi boot Windows.

Leaner Footprint

Win7 has a leaner footprint and has been tweaked to work well on less powerful PC’s, laptops and Netbooks. I have heard reports of Win7 working more smoothly on machines that would be slow under Vista.

Listen Mode

Another nice touch in Win 7 is that they now have a listen tab in the audio properties. Turning on "listen mode" basically routes input to the default output device allowing you to monitor an input device in Windows itself. Sadly this runs via the Windows audio engine which is always running in WASAPI shared mode, so it’s subject to a 30 msec delay. Of course you can always load an application like SONAR and route the audio inputs to an output for low latency monitoring.

Compatibility: What to Watch

Upgrading from Vista

Peter: Relative to Vista, are there any changes that are likely to introduce new compatibility issues with hardware or software?

Noel: With any new OS there is always the potential for compatibility issues. Win7 is built on the Vista foundation and one of its goals was better compatibility. As such most applications that are Vista compliant should work as well or better in Windows 7. UAC in Windows 7 has been improved so this might also help with general compatibility problems with some applications.

We have run into only a couple of compatibility issues in Win7 during the course of our development/testing of SONAR 8.5.

The MMIO API in Win7 (typically used for writing RIFF wave files) has a compatibility issue with the mmioDescend API with LIST ‘WAVE’ chunks. This caused our code that reads audio bundle files to fail and read scrambled audio data. We worked around this problem in 8.5

In WASAPI exclusive mode under Win7, the minimum latency you can achieve is now unfortunately 3ms and the code reports an error if lower. The fact that Vista has no such limitation has been reported to Microsoft. Hopefully its a mistaken fence in their code and this issue is fixed via an update, since it’s a step backwards for low latency in WASAPI mode.

Ed.: That last issue is an interesting one for anyone really pushing the envelope with low latency, so I’ll keep in touch with Noel if there’s any update.

Upgrading from XP

Peter: What hardware and software compatibility issues should users be aware of if they’re thinking of migrating not from Vista but from XP to Windows 7?

Noel: The compatibility issues that typically affect users migrating from XP to Vista/Win7 are:

UAC problems: Many applications and plug-ins are not built to handle the newer security settings in these OS’s. For example, if an application relies on something that requires administrative access it will fail when running as a limited user in Win7. This is a serious issue since in Vista/Win7 even if you are running from an administrator account; programs are launched by default with limited user privileges. Unlike XP, you have to explicitly run as an administrator to use such programs. To be Win7 logo-compatible, all applications need to should support running as a limited user.

Drivers: Although for most practical purposes audio drivers in XP and Windows 7/Vista are similar (you still need to write WDM drivers) there are sometimes quirks in specific drivers may cause problems. Most typical driver issues here are caused by installers that make assumptions about the OS version. In many cases this issue can be solved by the end user by setting the “compatibility mode” to Vista in the file properties for the appropriate driver installer file. (Right click the setup exe file to set its properties)

Ed.: I don’t feel either of these is a deal-killer, as I’ve been living with Vista for some time, but they’re still worth watching out for if upgrading from XP. And it means if you have an older machine that’s still working properly, you’re just likely to leave it on XP and worry about sorting the upgrade on a new box.

Less Nagging?

Peter: We talked when Vista came out about User Account Control and particularly audio-specific tasks that required elevation or different handling of permissions in Vista. I know UAC has been streamlined in W7. Do these changes impact audio apps at all? Are there corresponding under-the-hood changes?

Noel: The UAC changes in Win7 are primarily to allow more customization over the UAC elevation prompting process. There are no changes to the fundamentals of how UAC itself works that I am aware of. The classic problem with audio applications with UAC is when programs or plug-ins write to areas of the registry or file system prohibited from standard user access. Even when you are running as an administrator, by default when you launch a program (or the program itself launches a secondary process) Windows 7 will run that process with standard user privileges. If a program or plug-in attempts to write to an area which it doesn’t have write privileges for, virtualization will kick in. While this may allow the program to work, in general it is bad practice to rely on virtualization, since it can cause many unwanted side effects and behaviors in applications.

There are now four customization settings for UAC:

1. Never notify (least secure). The user is not notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is not notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

2. Only notify me when programs try to make changes to my computer. The user is not notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is not notified when they make changes to Windows settings. However, the user is notified when programs try to make changes to the computer, including Windows settings.

3. Always notify me. The user is notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is also notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

4. Always notify me and wait for my response (most secure). The user is notified when a program tries to install software or make changes to the computer. The user is also notified when they make changes to Windows settings or when programs try to do so.

Customization and Tuning Advice

Peter: How much customization would you advise people do to their OS? That is, you’ve just installed a build of Windows 7 for working with SONAR on a test machine. Do you run the stock configuration, or start turning off services, disabling disk indexing, etc.?

Noel: Optimization and customization is a topic that can’t be fully discussed in the scope of a brief article. In general you need to optimize a system when you have known bottlenecks. Otherwise you can spend a lot of time tweaking things that have little effect on the end goal. In fact, you may even end up destabilizing a perfectly working system. A stock Win7 machine is not optimized for audio necessarily but it appears MS put some thought into trimming out unwanted startup tasks to cut down on startup time. For example there are now “Triggered start services” in Windows 7, so out of the box you can have fewer services running after a fresh boot. There are probably many background services in a modern DAW that could be suspended if you don’t need them but they should be evaluated on a case by case basis depending on what you use the machine for.

Peter: A lot of users were advising running Vista with Aero off, certainly in the early days. Do you think it’s now advisable to leave Desktop Window Compositing switched on for audio work? (Note: I am aware that there’s actually no way to *completely* disable the Aero windowing environment in a way that it reverts to XP, as even in Class mode with no compositing settings the engine has been altered.)

Generally speaking, turning off Aero will free up some resources on your system, since it uses more costly 3D graphics rendering and transparency a lot. However on any modern graphics card, Aero offloads a lot to the GPU so unless your DAW is also competing for the same GPU resources, turning it off may or may not make an appreciable difference to performance. Most applications that are not graphics intensive use GDI for rendering to the screen and since GDI doesn’t take advantage of DirectX hardware acceleration it’s normally not contesting with the GPU. If you are using plug-ins that use Direct 2D or Direct3D, you are probably better off disabling Aero.

Launch Party, After All?

Thanks, Noel. So, the big news behind all of this is that a move from XP to Windows 7 is finally advisable.

I would still caution, as I did recently with Mac OS Snow Leopard, that you typically don’t want to upgrade to a new OS the day it launches. You’ll want to verify compatibility with your software and hardware before making the jump.

That said, this is an unusual upgrade in that it appears to resolve more issues than it introduces. I actually haven’t been able to find a single user out there testing Windows 7 who has found any issues with audio or music production. Of course, when it launches, we’ll have a much larger test base, so I expect we’ll find something – even Windows Service Packs and point releases of Mac OS have been known to create some issues. As we get closer to launch, I’ll review how you would backup your existing XP or Vista system to ensure that if you do choose to upgrade, you can revert to a previous version.

I am, however, cautiously optimistic. And now is an especially good time to make the jump to 64-bit. It’s easier on Windows than any other OS at the moment, and easiest in SONAR, because SONAR allows you to easily migrate 32-bit plug-ins into the 64-bit environment. You’ll need a 64-bit machine and enough memory to make 64-bit worthwhile, but if you’re building a new workstation, as Noel is, the timing could be perfect.

I also think there’s plenty of room left to talk about issues that go between operating systems, particularly how audio software can better support multi-threading and processing on the GPU, multi-touch, as well as emerging I/O standards like USB3. (OpenCL, much-touted in Snow Leopard, is also supported on Linux and Windows, and Linux actually beat both Mac OS and Windows to the punch in providing a first implementation of USB3.) Correction: I should also add that the excellent Reaper has also added this feature. With full 64-bit support in Cakewalk’s own Dimension and other instruments, NI’s Kontakt sampler, and the bundled 64-bit-native plug-ins in Reaper and SONAR, that means you can build a really capable 64-bit rig on Windows.

With fixes getting the OS out of your way, we can return to issues that really matter, many of which apply to every OS.

Music is, as always, the perfect place to talk about these issues. We push our machines harder than just about anyone, and in ways that are the least tolerant of timing discrepencies and glitches. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: if you want to look into the future of computing, ask a musician.

And that calls for a party.

Previous coverage:

SONAR 8.5 and how it can smooth the transition to 64-bit (8.5 is the build that includes Windows 7-specific improvements)

Vista Tweak: Use the Audio Profile Cakewalk’s CTO Uses

Optimizing for Vista: Inside the Mechanics of SONAR 8 with Cakewalk Engineering

Adieu, XP; How Vista SP1 is Doing, and Why This OS Generation Has Been So Tough

Vista for Audio, 1 Year Later: Talking OS Plumbing with Cakewalk’s CTO

Vista for Music + Pro Audio: Exclusive Under the Hood with Cakewalk’s CTO

And yes, I think Noel deserves an Honorary Contributing Editor position for all he’s done giving us absurdly-precise inside details for how Windows works.

Microsoft product screen shot(s) reprinted with permission from Microsoft Corporation.

Friend of the Site Gustavo Bravetti is back, getting the young Brazilian boys and girls on their feet with his virtual reality glove and Wiimotes and gesturally-controlled electronica. Gustavo sends us this video from the 2009 Tribaltech SC Edition in Campinas. Having seen a lot of DJs take the easy way out at festivals in front of throngs of people, it’s great to see someone really play his laptop – and while some of us, ahem, look goofy waving Wiimotes around, Gustavo makes it look good.

Gustavo also gives us the scoop on a new track release, orange. It’s inspired by … wait, Henry Purcell? (Indeed; see also: Wendy Carlos.)

I did produce this track specially for the Tribaltech 2009 SC edition, it was inspired on the classic piece by the baroque composer Henry Purcell (century XVIII), “The Funeral Of Queen Mary”. As usual all synthesizers and fx was made using only Ableton stuff, this time Operator, Analog, and Tension was used to create all synths and effects.

Gustavo also gets a rather eloquent review by our friend David Cross.

The incredibly simple melody of the short ‘Bocuma’ becomes a lump-in-the-throat meditation on man’s place in the universe through subtle pitch shifts and just the right mist of reverb. The slow fade-in on ‘An Eagle in Your Mind’ is the lonesome sound of a gentle wind brushing the surface of Mars moments after the last rocket back to Earth has lifted off.” Why not listen to, Only the Proletariat Floss’s by Screaming at the Mirror. With a truncated syncopation and approach that rivals only Tosh Guarrez pre “FartFlap”, “S.A.T.M” has taken steps to dismantle what was previously only dared mantled by the great Gilda Thrush when she fronted “Cycle Clause”. It’s as if Genghis Kahn got together for breakfast with Oliver Wendell Holmes and Virginia Wolfe and ordered just a bowl of homemade granola and then skipped out on the check. RATING: 11.-111 -David Cross

Previous Gustavo action on CDM:
Live + FM8 = Drum Kit Love: Free FM8 Drum Kit Download
Weekend Inspiration: Ableton Live Follow Actions, Dummy Clips, Making Snares
Gustavo Bravetti Show Us How To Glitch out Ableton Live
Interview: Gustavo Bravetti, Playing Music with Light and Interactive Gloves

Rain Recording make audio-ready notebooks – that is, they’re pre-tested to function well with audio software, with Windows tweaks, driver selection, and configuration all chosen and tested for music and visual production, and no crapware installed. They’re one of a handful of music-friendly vendors that does that (see also: PCAudioLabs, etc.). Given that the PC music making experience can range from awesome to awful depending on which hardware and (particularly) drivers you’re on, that’s no small matter.

Rain has always styled themselves a premium brand. But the latest Diablo really does go to extremes spec-wise. It’ll cost you – base price starts at US$4000, though that’s not as high-end as these sort of desktop specs commanded more recently. Intel and AMD/ATI really are economizing, even at the high end. But cost aside, this machine really maxes out components. You have to admire the results:

• Quad CPUs: up to 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Quad 12MB/1066 MHz “Montevina” Centrino 2 — the most powerful brain you can put in a laptop right now
• Up to 8 GB DDR3 RAM (and if you boot a 64-bit operating system like Vista x64 or – cough – Linux, you can use all of it)
• ATI Radeon MR HD3870/512M DDR3 RAM — just about the most powerful GPU (and some people do prefer ATI to NVIDIA), giving you up to two discrete GPUs
• 17″ display at 1920×1200
• Optional dual 320GB 7200RPM SATA drives with 16MB cache
• 1x eSATA, 3X USB2, 3xFireWire (yeah, you read that right – one onboard FireWire, plus two more using a bundled, TI chipset PCI ExpressCard that pops into that slot, also standard on the lower-cost LiveBook)
• 1 x HDMI, 1 x VGA, card reader, headphone out, mic in, gigabit RJ45 Ethernet, fingerprint scanner

The key specs, of course, are the quad CPU, that ATI GPU, and the maxed-out-res 17″ display. Given those specs, the weight actually isn’t all that bad – 8 lbs. with the 12-cell battery (which you’re going to want, as this machine is likely to suck up electricity in a hurry).

You can put audio on a dedicated chipset (the TI, which isn’t currently available from Apple). You can run two drives in RAID-0, or opt for solid-state drives (which have been improving in performance and value at a pretty impressive rate). And the ATI chipset means this is a pretty powerful visualist / visual production workstation – that also happens to be faster than a lot of high-end gaming laptops, for your off-hour enjoyment..

This is usually the point where someone says, “but do I need all that power to –”

No. You don’t. This is a bit like buying a souped-up supercar — and likely to be about as fuel-efficient. You might “need” this if you want to play Crysis between Pro Tools sessions. (I’ll let you bend the definition of “need” there.) That’s not to say you won’t get a lot of performance out of this, though, and it’s nice to know you have this option if you want it. The GPU only really impacts visuals at the moment, but with the push to do more processing on the GPU, that could change soon even for audio.

Actually, maybe the reason Rain keeps misspelling the GPU as “discreet” is that you can “discreetly” buy one of these and hope your significant other / the IRS / your conscience doesn’t notice you just bought a killer gaming rig as your (ahem) pro audio machine.

For mere mortals, I like the $1999-base-price LiveBook from Rain. It actually gives you a fair amount of this performance, all of the same I/O specs, and compares favorably on specs against Apple’s rival (including offering some serious FireWire and expansion the Apple lacks). And, incidentally, it isn’t a bad gaming machine, either, in case you want to join some of the CDMers the next time they fire up Left 4 Dead.

I do find all of this interesting, though, on two points. One, if any had doubts that you could buy a pre-configured PC and know that it’ll work reliably on audio tasks, Rain ought to put those doubts to rest. I’ve tested the previous Diablo and LiveBook, and out of the box they were ideal audio machines – no tweaks required. It’s absolutely possible to build or buy a mainstream PC that does that, but the luxury of knowing someone at the other end has actually tried running Ableton Live and SONAR sure is nice. (Heck, that’s not necessarily true of Apple – as people found out the hard way during some buggy early releases of Leopard, happily since fixed.)

This also demonstrates that said PC vendors don’t have to fall behind the “enthusiast” custom builders who cater to gamers – if you want to push the envelope on your laptop for audio and visuals and not just games, you can do that, too.

I certainly know not everyone can — or should — spend $4 grand and up on this particular machine. But just like that supercar, it’s sort of nice to know it’s there. And hopefully it can start to serve as a wake-up all that there are communities pushing their PC to the bleeding edge who aren’t primarily gamers.

Diablo Product Page [Rain Recording]

Diablos don’t hang around long, but I do hope to get my hands on a current-generation Rain soon; stay tuned.

I’ve been waiting for the near-ubiquitous ExpressCard slot on laptops to see some audio goodness, so one of the more welcome announcements of NAMM is that there’s now finally an ExpressCard-enabled version of the Universal Audio platform. The UAD is a DSP platform for computers, with an emphasis on high-quality, boutique mastering and effects plug-ins, including some recent, familiar emulations of classic Roland and Moog gear. UA’s stuff really does sound great, and host support has been improving (look for the key words “latency compensation” in your host of choice). So it’s about time that laptop users get in on some of the fun the desktop users have had.

The surprise is, the UAD-2 SOLO doesn’t cost that much – $500 includes the card plus the “1176SE Compressor/Limiter, Pultec EQP-1A Equalizer, RealVerb Pro Room Modeler, and CS-1 Channel Strip.” That’s a premium over native plug-ins, but then you have access to other UA plugs later on. In other news, Antares and Manley Labs signed onto UA’s platform, so more stuff is coming.

And by the way, while the forums rip into the choice of DAW, this stuff will work everywhere – even, via RTAS, Pro Tools.

Universal’s stuff isn’t for everyone, but I’m pleased that laptop users are getting something more out of a slot on their machine. (You’ll find ExpressCard on most PCs and the MacBook Pro, as well.) I hope this is the first of more hardware to come.

http://www.uaudio.com/

Mastering – spoiled for choice? This means in mastering choices, you’ve got the UAD, IK’s T-RackS 3 announced at the end of last year, and iZotope’s Ozone 4 announced at NAMM. I’ll be talking to some folks in New York who know something about mastering (i.e., are not me). (One of them is a big Cubase fan, so I expect he’ll also be all over Cubase 5 – and he makes records that make real money, whereas I make records that go nicely with experimental modern dance.)

Each of these products goes a different direction, but the honest truth is almost any DAW will start you out with a pretty great selection of effects tools, and for a small chunk of change, you can add on with something like the UAD, T-RackS, and iZotope. None of this changes your actual skill level or the quality of your ears, but it does help keep your wallet from being the major barrier.

Yes, for the record, that is a young woman screaming to the sounds of AudioMulch. Believe.

Jordan Harris was able to snag some screenshots of Girl Talk’s rig. There’s not much to tell: a laptop, a mouse, and in a sign of the growing stature of Girl Talk (Gregg Gillis), some very practical plastic wrap to protect the machine. What’s unique about Gregg’s work is that this computer doesn’t clear out the room: it attracts screaming throngs of fans. Especially lady fans, proof that this does not have to be a sport for boys. (As it happens, I find they also like watching American NFL football. Poor girls; everyone is convinced they know what they want but don’t ask.)

Every music tool is supposed to have celebrity users, right? Well, AudioMulch definitely can claim Girl Talk. This $89, currently Windows-only tool (yes, Vista-compatible) has long had an underground following. It’s a real-time modular synthesis, composition, and performance tool, which you might suppose would put it in the same category as the likes of Reaktor and Max/MSP. Unlike those tools, though, its modules are laser-focused on certain sonic capabilities. There are ready-made objects for live performance control, and unique, handy tools for setting up envelopes and sequences. It’s got fantastic pre-built effects like a delay line granulator and live looper. And because AudioMulch is also a VST host, it could be your one and only environment.

AudioMulch is the software equivalent of that deceptively cute little rally car that blows more impressive-looking cars off the road.

Version 2.0 is due early next year with new features and Mac compatibility.

GearWire did a fantastic video tutorial series on AudioMulch last year.

PCs are computers that look ugly and don’t have slick ads with popular songs playing in the background. People believe they’re not used for music, but they are, often by musicians who actually play stuff life (yes, even with a mouse as a controller) rather than playing backing tracks from inside space-alien props.

Plastic wrap, according to Wikipedia,“is a thin plastic film typically used for sealing food items in containers to keep them fresh.” Going by the popular brand name Saran, the 1953 invention was not originally designed to protect computers from beer. But if you play music that people like to dance to and you typically see beer bottles around (note the unprotected shot below), it may be an important music technology accessory. Update: According to an interview, the Saran Wrap is there to protect Gregg’s laptop from .. Gregg? So, either he’s lying about the sweaty hands to sound extra awesome, or he really does have some sweat issues. I can’t say I’ve ever worried about my hands the way I’ve worried about beer. (And I tend not to have those screaming, drunken fans, even.) Hot venues? Hot laptop, powered up to full crunching audio signal? Gregg, if you’re out there, inquiring minds…

Two more photos of AudioMulch after the jump…

Updated: more details from Jordan:

He did have one more spare latop on the table next to him, although it stayed closed the entire show.  No idea if it was the Toshiba in the other pics.  Also, the laptop in pics is a toughbook I believe.  The show was at the abercrombie holiday party at the lifestyles community pavilion here in columbus.  This is a pretty large venue with an indoor capacity of 2200.  The guy tore the place up with just a laptop and sheer force of character.  I believe there are a few videos and some pictures posted here: http://thegrip.wordpress.com/2008/12/15/girl-talk-abercrombie-fitch-2008-holiday-party-at-promowest-pavilion-in-columbus-ohio/#more-3776

There are some good shots there showing just the size of the crowd who came out to see this guy use his laptop on a cheap folding plastic table.  This was a private invite only party, but his show at the Newport Music Hall in January is already sold out. 

Let’s start with the important bit: the Traveler really is a mobile interface. It weighs under four pounds and fits into a backpack; it’s actually a little lighter and more compact than a typical 15” laptop. Now, if your input and output needs are limited (a mic in, headphone out, and stereo out do suit a lot of folks just fine), your options are obviously many. But the Traveler manages to be this small and pack an absurd amount of I/O and functionality into that small space.

Audio interfaces tend not to get a whole lot of updates, but MOTU has been steadily upgrading the Traveler. New in mk3:

• Digital I/O expanded for a total of 28 simultaneous ins and 30 outs (including digital I/O), on top of the (existing) four XLR/TRS mic ins. Digital up to 96kHz and analog up to 192kHz – all eight.
• True high-impedance guitar ins
• Hardware limiter on the pre, plus a “soft clip” feature that “engages just before clipping occurs and helps reduce perceptible distortion.” (That’s “soft” as in the clip prevention – the process takes place in hardware. I inaccurately described this as being similar to a compressor; it’s not – it’s a different process, and combined with hardware limiting makes this ideal for live mic input.)
• 1 dB trim increments on all analog ins
• MIDI Time Code support
• Optical I/O: choose 16 channels ADAT, 8 channels of SMUX, or two pairs of TOSLink, or mix and match
• New software: CueMix FX software, which turns the Traveler into a mixer with compression, a modeled version of the Teletronix optical leveling amp, and real-time signal analysis
• … and you can access these features from the front panel

… just to name a few improvements. And lest you think FireWire is dead, have a good look at the Traveler. The whole package is powered by the FireWire bus, or you can add a field battery pack. On the Mac side, this is yet another reason not to get a non-Pro MacBook.

New CueMix FX software, which is also available for MOTU’s other interfaces.

A lot of these features are nice, but to my mind, the major draw is still that you get a ton of I/O in a nice, mobile box, now with four mic ins. For anyone doing surround, you also get front-panel monitoring controls, and enough actual outs to pull off various surround setups, with different setups nicely supported in the software. On Mac and Windows, you get full ASIO, WDM, Core Audio, and Core MIDI support. (Linux has been maturing as far as FireWire audio support, though I don’t know off-hand how this will do.)

MOTU isn’t shipping the new Traveler until Q1, but they promise the same pricing as the current model, which has a street around US$850.

MOTU Traveler mk 3 [Product page, which goes into some of the rather lovely effects in there]

If you own another MOTU unit, you’ll be relieved to know the CueMix software features will be available for download on other FireWire audio interfaces.

Bet this would look fantastic as a pillow, too.

Speaking of Rain Recording, Rain is about the only vendor I’ve found that offers a 2-port FireWire ExpressCard known to work well with audio interfaces. Now, your mileage may vary depending on the chipset in your laptop, but based on what I’ve been hearing, this looks like a good option. I’ve also seen a cheap (US$30) card floating around some random Internet vendors; it’s so cheap, I’m probably going to buy one just to see if it works. I’ll report back.

2 Port FireWire Express Card (formerly ADS Tech PYRO1394a) [Rain Recording]

I get nothing out of this, for the record; Rain actually hopes you’ll get this card with one of their laptops, but I’m just as curious to hear how it works on other machines. Of course, this would be a nice add-on not only for PCs, but also potentially for MacBook Pro users wanting dedicated FW400 ports and the TI controller – theoretically, at least. Let us know what happens if you take the plunge.

If you’ve had experience with different chipsets and ExpressCard slots on Mac or PC, we’d love to hear it. And I hope to offer my own tests soon.

Updated: The StarTech EC13942 also shares the TI chipset and is available from a number of vendors if that’s a vendor you prefer. It’s the only one endorsed by PreSonus aside from this former ADS Tech card that Rain sells — and may give you better results with other, non-PreSonus hardware, based on reports I’ve read. See PreSonus’ official word on the matter:

Presonus Hardware Compatibility: Approved Chipsets [PDF]

Having looked at two examples of what the Lemur multi-touch hardware can do, the videos above illustrate directly what I’m talking about when I describe two different approaches. Metrognome is an insanely-talented guru in the modular instrument/effects-building environment Reaktor. He’s working to build new live performance tools that meld live arrangement / remixing / DJing with a kind of computer meta-instrument. It’s really a great illustration of how software can become a live instrument. It also represents one of two paths in thinking about what touch can do for live music performance.

1. Multi-touch as virtual controller: The Lemur’s design assumes that what you want to do is create virtual hardware, using a stock set of knobs, faders, gestural controllers, envelope editors, and the like. The advantage is, these interfaces are modular and consistent. The disadvantage: you’re limited to pre-built screens and pre-built widgets, so you can’t do anything outside what’s given.

2. Screen as direct controller: The difference with the Reaktor examples is that there’s no intermediary. Whatever is on your computer screen is the interface. The downside: that includes all the usual UI clutter, and the open-ended possibilities could be overwhelming. The upside: as Metrognome artfully demonstrates, you can imagine any interface, build it, and immediately control it – including things the Lemur may not do. The other, not insignificant advantage: you don’t have to buy another piece of hardware, making this route much cheaper. Your screen or projection simply becomes the touch controller surface. Multi-touch isn’t quite ready for prime time on computers yet, but it could be soon.

I’m not saying one is better than the other. In fact, I suspect some people will prefer the Lemur approach even if it means spending additional money, because they want something that has some of the flexibility of a screen, but still behaves more or less like a dedicated controller. But I think it’d be a mistake to miss that we have two very different angles on touch here.

Of course, none of this stops you from building or buying a $50 or $100 knob box and being perfectly happy with that.

For more details on what Metrognome is doing (including an up-close shot of that beautiful ensemble), see our Kore minisite – and expect some more details on this soon over on that site, thanks to our Reaktor contributor Peter Dines:

Reaktor + Touchscreen = Touch Grains, Touch Performances, Wild UIs [Kore@CDM]

If you’re hungry for some patch content, the download-rich PatchArena has you covered, with a massive library of free, user-created content:

PatchArena Downloads

There are particularly large sections for the all-in-one studios EnergyXT, FL Studio, and a number of others. (Correction: Intua BeatMaker for iPhone/iPod Touch is promised, as well, though I got my categories confused — no files there now, so we’ll check in if some get posted! But it could be a great place to upload BeatMaker presets; see the thread on PatchArena’s forum.)

Francesco Silvestri writes CDM to let us know about his latest addition, a huge set for Cakewalk’s awesome soft synth Rapture. He says:

I’ve released Muz3um, a free set of patches for Rapture the virtual synthesizer by Cakewalk.This collection is built on waveforms from vintage synthesizers.

It features:

• 661 presets organized in categories (Basses, Keys, Leads, Pads, Sequences)
• 573 waveforms
• 36 impulse responses, taken from amp sims, cabinets and lo-fi speakers, providing additional colors to the set

It’s great having those impulse responses alone – meaning even if you’d rather program your own sounds in Rapture, this could be a must-download.

Update: This also works just fine with Rapture LE, meaning lots of Cakewalk customers can use the pack. (Thanks, Chad!)

Have a go and let us know what you think, Rapture users!

Rapture Muz3um OS X

Rapture Muz3um Windows

Yesterday marked the official phase-out of Windows XP. That in itself isn’t terribly big news; it’s easy enough to get XP systems for the foreseeable future, and custom builders can even put together an XP machine for you. Heck, you can even boot XP on an Intel Mac. But it seems like the perfect time to talk again about Vista. As with any OS, the branding (“we’ve got a new thing called Vista”) masks the more complex reality evolution of software and drivers. In other words, Vista today isn’t what it was the day it shipped. (That’s a relief.) And personally, I’d like to start talking about real-world performance and dispense with the kind of schoolyard rivalry the platforms have had over the years. I think it’s a safe bet to say none of us is excited about operating systems. We’re excited about actually making music. The good news is, Vista is finally looking like an OS on which you can do that.

The OS Generation Gap

It’s a funny time for operating systems and music applications, in that the most recent generational changes in Windows and Mac were unusually significant. On Windows, XP and Windows 2000 improved both audio and hardware support, and finally saw Windows NT really mature for music. On the Mac side, albeit slightly later, the bumpy transition to Mac OS X finally paid off as Tiger and Panther brought major audio improvements and reliability and performance enhancements. And Tiger got musicians onto Intel x86 CPUs, which helped unleash the live use of laptops we see today. Each of these updates came with compatibility hurdles, but there was a clear payoff. They’re must-have upgrades for music. Many music and audio apps won’t even work with earlier versions.

By contrast, while Mac OS X Leopard and Windows Vista each introduce important features, they’ve proven less essential to the music and audio segment of the market. By extension, I’d say they haven’t yet made major enhancements to real-time performance or hardware support – at least not in a way you can currently experience as an end user – in the way their predecessors did. That’s not to say you won’t find reasons to upgrade; you just may not see a big difference in Ableton Live. That has made the compatibility issues each OS has introduced for music more painful, because the reason you’re upgrading may not always be as clear.

But don’t listen to anyone who says OSes are so mature that there’s “nothing left to do” to them. I don’t think that’s the problem. Leopard and Vista aren’t entirely comparable, but they do have a lot in common – and the common theme, beneath eye candy in the UI, is that both OSes are trying to tackle some very difficult problems.

Both make changes to the driver model, thread scheduling, multiple core support, and (including XP x64) 64-bit support. These are tough challenges for OSes that have years of development behind them and broad compatibility requirements. But these are changes on which computer musicians, even indirectly, are absolutely dependent. Support for better performance, more reliable drivers, and more memory is vital to a lot of the stuff we do.

The issue is, you may not see some of the payoff in these changes right away – or even in this OS build. Even with Apple’s Mac OS X Leopard, which has been relatively positively received, I think some of the real benefits of multiple core support and 64-bit compatibility won’t become evident until the upcoming Snow Leopard at the earliest. Microsoft’s under-the-hood driver model changes may have a positive impact on driver reliability and performance in the long run, but those benefits have been masked by just getting things working.

Microsoft had still-bigger challenges, too: while they jettisoned some much-publicized functionality promised for Vista, they still made massive changes to driver support, the graphics driver model, and the way things on the screen were displayed.

So moving onto Vista: did something go wrong? Yes – at the beginning, that is.

Vista, Take One: Yipes!

For all the over-analysis of what bombed in the Vista launch, I’ve been surprised by how little attention has been paid to what seems to have been the single biggest issue. Vista’s new graphics model just didn’t work for a lot of people out of the box, and that caused other issues to snowball. This is especially true in audio. If the graphics drivers weren’t working properly, just touching a UI element could make the sound glitch. Some people I think misunderstood the source of the problem and blamed DRM or other more dramatic causes. But if anything manages to starve the CPU for cycles, performance suffers fast.

I saw how nasty this could be in my early Vista tests – and was equally struck how dramatically the fix could be when installing new drivers, particularly on my NVIDIA test systems.

Would it have helped if Microsoft had kept its vendors more in sync? Absolutely. Should Vista have held off a little longer to resolve lingering quality issues? I think so. Should Microsoft have hired acrobats to climb buildings and staged other surreal Cirque-du-Soleil style antics to launch an OS before it was ready? Sigh.

Those things aside, though, some of the problems remain fundamental OS issues — and many of you, as a result, were smart enough to steer clear of the OS upgrade until it was fully baked.

Here are some obvious but oft-missed statements in regards to Vista or any other major OS change:

1. Small incompatibilities can cause total havoc. One bad driver can starve the CPU, crash the machine, and generally make performance and stability go awry. Sometimes these bugs come from the OS vendor, sometimes a third-party developer, sometimes a combination of the two that can’t even be fully explained until it’s fixed. And that makes other, arguably more minor incompatibilities, all the more annoying. Problems with video on Vista pushed it out of the “I can live with this” territory and into the panic you saw from a lot of tech users and even press.

2. Music and audio suffer first: Running many apps, you won’t notice sluggish performance. Run video, and you’ll notice a missed frame (about 30 of those per second). Run audio, and you’ll notice tiny timing problems and dropouts and glitches with even a single sample (about 44,100 of those per second). Audio real-time performance is less forgiving than applications like nuclear submarine guidance – literally.

3. If you’re having a problem, who the (*&$# cares how many other people are, too? If you’re having an issue, you’re sad. If  If you have a problem, you have the right to complain about it until it’s fixed. And you get permission to curse at the machine involved and the company who made it – until they fix it, at which point there will be great rejoicing. I’ve seen bloggers complain when people complain about significant problems with both Mac OS and Windows. I gain great comfort in knowing next week, they’ll be the ones cursing because they’ll have the problem. Let my people vent. And fix the problem. Then everyone’s happy.

SP1: What Changed

So, is Microsoft fixing things? The short answer is yes. It may not be a reason to switch from XP to Vista, but I do think Vista is a feasible choice for music production, depending on your environment.

I wouldn’t have said that a few months ago. Vista has changed since where it was even at the end of last year. SP1 is part of that, but changes generally fit into three categories:

1. Internal (Hotfixes): A big portion of SP1 is a big bundle of all the hotfixes that Microsoft released over the first year or so of Vista. It’s just a convenience – you could install all of those hotfixes without SP1 – but it’s a major one. And many of those hotfixes made specific improvements to audio performance, video performance (which also impacts audio performance), and USB and other hardware compatibility.

2. Internal (SP1): SP1 includes some changes that were not released as hotfixes, meaning that in addition to #1 being a big reason to upgrade, this is the only way to get a fully-patched, fully-fixed Vista.

3. External (Third-party): It goes without saying that, aside from what Microsoft has done, third-party vendors have fixed a lot of stuff since Vista’s release. Aside from software patches to music software and plug-ins, that includes changes to mainboard drivers, video drivers, and the like that can in turn impact audio performance and reliability.

We covered some specific Vista audio concerns in the past:

So let’s see how SP1 is addressing those concerns.

Vista SP1 + Music: Report Card

Complaint: Vista’s MIDI Timing is unstable.

Validity: True.

Current status: Fixed in SP1.

Vista introduced some MIDI timing instabilities. It was bad enough that at least some users were able to notice the difference in terms of hands-on experience. Cakewalk, who reported this issue to Microsoft, tells CDM that the problem was fixed as of SP1. (Microsoft previously indicated to CDM that this would be addressed.)

Complaint: Vista audio performance is unreliable: dropouts, glitches, and pain.

Validity: True; not an issue in all cases but reasonably widespread.

Current status: Fixed (at least in many cases). Vista performs like XP — once your video drivers are up to snuff.

Assuming we’re talking primarily about ASIO performance, which requires stability at low latencies, the biggest obstacle early on appears to have been buggy video drivers causing catastrophic audio performance. (If you doubt that incompatibilities not directly related to audio can cause problems with audio, look no further than the bugs gradually being resolved on Mac OS’ WiFi support and Leopard USB/FireWire support.)

Turning off Aero, Vista’s shiny, new UI, doesn’t necessarily fix things in all cases, either. Even with "Windows Standard" selected, Vista uses a new driver model for graphics. (It can be helpful to turn off Aero or other desktop visual effects on an older machine, however.)

Mainly, the fix seems to be installing SP1 and getting video drivers up to date. For that reason, I can’t entirely guarantee this — there are lots of other variables and different possible graphics drivers. But if you’re having symptoms that seem to relate to UI interaction like moving windows or turning soft synth knobs, starting with the graphics drivers couldn’t hurt.

Complaint: Vista can’t achieve the low latencies XP could.

Validity: Difficult to verify.

Current status: Jury’s out, but unless you’re counting milliseconds you’ll be fine — and very reliable, low latencies are possible with Vista as with XP.

Latency is introduced in various parts of a computer music setup, but generally if you’re in the 10-12 ms range and no higher, most users will be happy. I’ve been able to easily push below that even using a USB interface like my Native Instruments Audio Kontrol 1. (Apparently, they hired a very talented driver programmer, so Native, I’m not giving you that one back! Send a bill over.)

Some users do push Windows latencies well below that, and have reported that Vista isn’t performing quite as well as XP. Now, whether driver updates could resolve this, I don’t know.

I can say this: you can get very usable low-latency performance with Vista, just as with XP. As always, the main variable is getting an interface with solid drivers you can trust, and (unfortunately) controlling for other variables like buggy video drivers. On any system, I suggest testing adding new hardware very carefully. But this issue in and of itself seems to me not to be a reason to avoid Vista. (Now, other compatibility problems that can botch audio? That’s a good reason — meaning you will want to test your system before doing something critical with it!)

Complaint: Vista’s WaveRT can yield better audio performance on built-in cards.

Validity: True.

Current status: Your mileage may vary, but if you can get WaveRT support you’ll be much better off than you were on XP.

Vendors Realtek and Analog Devices, who ship the internal audio cards including on many motherboards and laptops, have each supported Microsoft’s new WaveRT driver model, which is intended to provide lower latency for “consumer” audio functions. We knew this would help theoretically, but from reports we’ve seen, users have been pretty happy with this feature in the real world, too. I’ve even heard reports of extremely low-latency playback (as low as 2ms), which had previously been possible only using ASIO. While we’d need more extensive benchmarks to go into greater detail, there’s no question this is a big leap forward from previous drivers for internal audio cards, so this is very good news for those times when you don’t have a dedicated “pro” audio interface handy.

In fact, I could even see someone making use of one of these cards in live performance or installation. If you have, let us know.

Complaint: My (hardware/software) isn’t compatible.

Validity: Check with your vendor.

Current status: Largely fixed by third parties, and certainly most music and audio developers, but always check first.

I’ve been fairly impressed by compatibility between Vista and current music hardware and software. The first half year was, as always, rough, but things smoothed out after that. If you’re concerned about compatibility with older plug-ins, for the most part, don’t be. Once you have a compatible host, plug-ins generally work on Vista as they did on XP — meaning Windows still has Mac and Linux beat when it comes to giving you ridiculously absurd plug-in variety, enough to distract you from ever getting any actual work done. (Not sure if that’s a plus…)

With hosts and hardware, well, there’s not much I can say other than check with your vendor. But on my machine, with hardware from Focusrite, Roland/Edirol, Native Instruments, Novation, M-Audio, and Korg, and software from Native Instruments, Ableton, Image-Line, Cakewalk, Cycling ‘74, and various other obscure things, compatibility hasn’t been a problem. In fact, I think music and audio vendors were more on the ball than the rest of the industry.

If you do have the rare older software that doesn’t work, you can often get it to install and function by turning off User Account Control temporarily or selecting a compatibility mode before launching.

That said, if you do have a lot of older software, I wouldn’t recommend upgrading. If you’re not upgrading your apps, upgrading your OS is unlikely to be a good idea. (The phrase “if it ain’t broke…” comes to mind.) But if you’re running current hosts and audio interfaces and just want to protect your VST plug-in stash, I don’t think this aspect will be a deal-breaker.

Complaint: Vista requires more memory than XP.

Validity: True.

Current status: Unchanged, but it may not be a deal killer.

There’s not much escaping this, but rather than dwell on this, I’ll say this: on a 2GB system, I haven’t found this to be a problem. On a system with 1GB or less, I run XP anyway. End of story. I don’t see a reason to run Vista on an older system or one with less memory, and likewise on a 2-4GB system I don’t think Vista’s memory consumption is significant enough to impact audio work. On a 64-bit system with 64-bit software, which can easily access well more than 4GB, it’s a non-issue.

Nitpicking on memory availability is probably overkill, but of course musicians — unlike mainstream users — do often push the envelope. But on my custom Vista desktop install, which only has a 2GB system, I’ve been happy.

There are things you can do to "slim down" your Vista install, as with XP (actually, literally as with XP in some cases as some of the services are the same). The new Windows Sidebar, for instance, consumes some memory and can be switched off. (I don’t miss it it, personally.) But that’s a topic for another article.

Complaint: Vista requires more power than XP.

Validity: Vista’s (usually) not the problem.

Here’s the thing: you can see massive CPU consumption when software crashes or drivers aren’t working properly. Many of these are reported under the process explorer.exe, because processes run as part of that larger process. On the hardware side, even a slightly-unseated PCI card can cause major CPU spikes. And if you are getting those kinds of spikes, the power of your hardware won’t make any difference. This isn’t really a Vista issue – if stuff is compatible and working, you won’t see the problem.

So, was this true? Yes, probably — but my suspicion is that a lot of these complaints actually originated from buggy drivers and unstable processes, not an inherently hungrier OS.

That said, I do wish Microsoft had made it easier to slim down their OS, in general. And I have found a couple of things especially annoying with Vista:

Media Center: I’d like to be able to switch off Media Center altogether, especially because a process called mcupdate.exe seems to randomly call the mothership and consume CPU cycles. Updated: Richard Burte wisely points out that you can disable this using Task Scheduler. Type “computer management” into the Start menu and select the first result to bring up the Microsoft Management Console. From there, select Computer Management (Local) > System Tools > Task Scheduler > Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > Media Center. In the top right pane, you’ll see the task mcupdate. It’s set to run at 4:51 pm daily. You can reschedule it, or simply right click it and choose disable. Thanks, Richard!

My recommended Vista version remains Vista Business. If you’re using a machine for music, odds are you don’t need Media Center’s features anyway – especially not with plenty of media playback options elsewhere.

Desktop Search: For reasons unknown, this service can index and churn away at the hard drive even when it’s not supposed to. I prefer to turn it off, but I’d like to see it get a little smarter about indexing more efficiently and switching on more conservatively.

Bottom line, though, is that Vista, like XP, can be tamed and turned into a well-behaved OS. That wasn’t true in the initial Vista driver train wreck, but I’m finding it’s true now – and that’s a good thing.

Complaint: Vista is full of audio DRM that will ruin your life.

Validity: Not true.

This complaint seems to have come from two sources. First, it seems to be partly a misinterpretation of audio protections Microsoft had to put in to support new US digital cable tuners and formats like HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. Those are in fact in Vista, though they’re also in XP, and they don’t really impact music production. (They’re annoying, but that’s a separate discussion.) Second, Microsoft did apparently plan to do more with DRM in Vista than they did, but backed away from the cliff. Some people were still looking at planning documents and seeing things that weren’t there.

Where I think this rumor continued was when people had glitchy, unreliable audio and blamed DRM, but as I said above, I think they didn’t suspect culprits like video driver problems.

Unfortunately, Microsoft did add some additional validation requirements in Vista as an anti-piracy measure. These are softened in SP1, and I think you can live with them. It does reduce your options for virtualizing the operating system using tools like Parallels, VMware, and virtualbox, but if you’re virtualizing an OS, why not Linux?

Why Run Vista?

I don’t want to get into a Mac versus Windows argument here. That’s an easy one. Want to run Mac OS? Do it. Want to run Windows? Go for it. There are enough choices and enough mature software that you’re unlikely to really regret either one. And it doesn’t really matter which is "better" so much as which is better for you.

Instead, I’ll take on something slightly simpler: XP versus Vista. It’s clear why you should run Windows XP:

1. It’s working, and you’re happy: Insert any software here (Windows, Mac OS, your word processor, your MIDI sequencer), and this statement is true, but it’s worth saying.

2. You’ve got an older machine, or are low on RAM, or both: This is doubly true – older hardware is likely to have the most compatibility problems now that newer drivers have caught up with Vista. And XP is a better choice with less than 1 GB of RAM.

3. You need it for specific compatibility reasons. ‘Nuff said.

But why should you run Vista? Believe it or not, I have a few reasons.

1. It can be more stable than XP. No, you didn’t read that wrong. Microsoft has improved the in-box drivers in Vista, and the driver overhaul has forced vendors to adhere more closely to Microsoft’s specs. Now, I have no particular need to believe what Microsoft tells me — but I have seen this make a difference in the real world. Also, because on many modern machines Vista supports more hardware out of the box than XP, you can go with Microsoft’s in-box and device class drivers, which can be more reliable than drivers that come from vendors.

2. The UI is more usable. I don’t mean in a skin-deep way: generally speaking, the UI in Vista is more usable and functional than XP’s in some subtle but important ways. For instance:

3. The audio mixer is great. Click the sound icon on the taskbar, and there’s a mixer that lets you disable applications. It’s a little thing, but worth mentioning.

4. GPU-native UIs are a good thing. If you have a fairly recent graphics card – even a basic one – I think you’ll probably appreciate glitch-free graphics display on the UI.

5. It is prettier. Aero tends to elicit love/hate responses. If you don’t like it, you can reskin it by using a hacked uxtheme.dll, as with XP. (Search for uxtheme.dll and you’ll get some solutions; various minimalist skins are available online, too.) But Vista is generally easier on the eyes, and improves font rendering and such in a way I find easier to stare at all day. I was surprised that even Create Digital Motion’s Jaymis actually warmed to the new Vista UI on a new PC — and he just bought himself a MacBook Pro for Mac OS X.

6. WaveRT. Internal audio systems work better on Vista, so long as they have WaveRT drivers and apps to support WaveRT. That’s a big enough feature that, assuming you can balance other factors, Vista could be worth an upgrade.

7. Explorer is multi-threaded and more better. While early versions of Vista prompted complaints about file copy speeds, those issues appear to be fixed now, and I find Vista’s Explorer to be much snappier. Multi-threading means Explorer doesn’t grind to a halt any more. I also find Explorer far more usable than it was in XP. Some XP loyalists disagree, but I think they’re crazy.

8. You’ve got a new system. Before you try to put XP on a new machine, it’s worth giving a test run on the stuff that matters and seeing if Vista works.

I’ll admit, I wish this list were longer, and I hope that with Windows 7, it is. But is it worth waiting for Windows 7? I don’t think so – not given that past experience, even on the Mac with its more controlled environment and musical focus, suggests that any OS transition takes time. The day Windows 7 ships will likely be a lot like the first day any OS ships – fraught with compatibility problems. Vista is, at least, finally reaching maturity, and I hope that Microsoft continues to ship patches where they’re needed.

Conclusion

I brought up the Mac just to reiterate something that’s obvious but important: musicians rarely upgrade to a new OS on day one, period, regardless of platform. (Even on desktop Linux, in fact, most stable music and audio systems are using distribution releases behind the latest, fanciest, "experimental" release.) The good news is, we’re not alone — Ed Bott observes today that businesses like Intel holding off on Vista are repeating cautious behavior from the past. Frankly, I’m with them. (I’ve had to make a conscious effort to adopt things too early so I can write about them!)

In short, if you held off on upgrading to Vista, it’s paid off.

If you’re happy on XP, there’s really no pressure to leave.

But I can happily say that, at this point, you can at least consider Vista. I don’t think it’s the doomsday release some made it out to be — though, in fairness, the way it shipped in the beginning I was inclined to agree with them.

And, ironically, at the end of the day I don’t really notice that much which OS I’m using. I’ve got some XP, some Vista, some Mac OS. CDM contributors Liz Knight, Mike Una, and Motion editor Jaymis all use multiple operating systems, too. The fact that we don’t notice? A very good thing, and a testament to the work developers have done to make sure that’s the case. And a far cry from the OS-centric turf wars regularly going on on the blogosphere. But then, we have more interesting things to discuss.

A big thanks to Noel Borthwick at Cakewalk and Robin Vincent at Rain Recording for providing some feedback as I wrote this. The opinions expressed are my own, but I encourage you to disagree — in fact, we’re looking for as much data on musicians and operating systems on all platforms as we can possibly muster, so don’t be shy.

Now, back to music.

Previous Resources on CDM

Summing up some of the growing pains OSes have been having lately:

Digidesign Talks Latest Windows, Mac Releases, Compatibility, Drivers

Fix for Mac Audio Dropouts: Roll Back Tiger AirPort Support

Blame Apple, Not Your Driver Maker, But Leopard Fix May Be Close

And specifically Vista-related:

Vista for Audio, 1 Year Later: Talking OS Plumbing with Cakewalk’s CTO

Vista Bug Squash: Fix Driver Installation Problems with Class-Compliant Devices

Windows Sound Glitches Explained, Plus Glitches and the Fight-or-Flight Response

Microsoft Rolls Out USB Fixes for Vista Now; Not Everything Waiting for SP1

Cakewalk Vista Musicians’ Resource Page, Lots of Vista Drivers

How to Kill Windows Vista Bottlenecks: Pt. II, Stop the Disk Churning

How to Kill Windows Vista Bottlenecks: Pt. I, Aero and Display Issues

Vista “Content Protection” DRM Won’t Impact Music Production, Says Microsoft and You

Vista for Music + Pro Audio: Exclusive Under the Hood with Cakewalk’s CTO