M-Audio has actually gotten in touch in response to frustrations about incompatibilities with OS updates — updates which, admittedly, have recently been frequent and sometimes troublesome on both the Windows and Mac sides. Niels Larsen, General Manger at M-Audio, responds in comments with some specifics on where drivers are, some new drivers that were released literally today, and some comments on the OS situation in general.  (I’ve copied it here just in case you missed it in comments.)

I’ve also heard from Digidesign/M-Audio public relations; I hope to have additional updates soon.

This is well worth reading whether or not you own M-Audio hardware.

Speaking of drivers, PreSonus announced today that they’re allowing users to register for open beta drivers. They’re hardly the first to do this — M-Audio has done the same historically, even if I’m not thrilled with their pace at the moment. But this raises an interesting question: could opening a beta help improve driver quality and get updates in users’ hands faster? Do audio users really want to "beta-test" drivers in the first place? (I guess that depends on how mature the "beta" release is.) We’ll have to see how PreSonus fares.

How is PreSonus doing with released drivers? Reasonably well from what I can see — and what I’ve heard. But they do have some blips. There isn’t a Vista driver for their FaderPort or V-Fire, and there’s no Leopard driver for V-Fire though the rest of their product line is up-to-date with Vista and Leopard.

How have PreSonus drivers treated you? I see a number of improvements in terms of stability on Mac OS on their downloads page via recent releases.

There aren’t many positive ways to spin this: if you’re a user of Digidesign and M-Audio products and looking to use current operating systems, very often you’re out of luck. In some cases, this isn’t so surprising — given issues with Leopard, I actually suggest running Mac OS X Tiger if you can until some issues are resolved. And while I have one machine here running Vista happily, suffice to say Windows XP remains the choice for many, as drivers from a variety of vendors mature.

Still, I think it’s bad to see drivers missing altogether this late in the game — especially in the case of Windows XP SP3, a minor update to a six year-old OS. Maybe some of this isn’t M-Audio’s fault — maybe OS driver development needs to be easier. But either way, when a major music hardware vendor is this far out of sync with the software shipping on new machines, it’s a problem. And while their loss may be good for their competitors in audio hardware, it’s not terribly good for the music tech industry in general.

(Okay, Digidesign/M-Audio — before you start throwing things at me, I’m not saying this to be mean or to single you out, I’m saying this because I hear this all the time from your customers. I think if there are problems on the Apple/Microsoft side, then that’s worth examining, too. But I do think this is a situation that could stand some improvement.)

Background: Many laptop-based Mac OS X users are experiencing significant audio issues on Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard. On Tiger, the culprit appears to be the AirPort Extreme Update 2008-001 released earlier this spring. One workaround on Tiger is to simply turn off AirPort. On Leopard, the problem appears to be slightly more complex, but generally linked to 10.5.2; several software vendors are recommending music users avoid that update for now. (10.5 / 10.5.1 appear unaffected.) The issue is not universal on Leopard (some laptop Mac users report no problems), but if you are experiencing issues, the only current solution appears to be downgrading your entire system to an earlier release (via Time Machine or reinstalling).

Fortunately, on Tiger there’s a more specific temporary fix.

Tiger Fix: Musician Georgi Marinov has posted step-by-step instructions for reverting the AirPort Extreme Update to the previous release (2007-004). This fix will work only for Tiger users, apparently on specific MacBook Pro and Mac mini models.

tiger airport audio dropouts fix

I’d personally like to see Apple add some facility for uninstalling updates on all releases, as some other operating systems do. (Yes, you can use Time Machine, but that’s more of an argument for building this feature into Software Update.) But regardless, with any OS and any update (and certainly with this unsupported procedure), be sure to backup before applying any update to a critical machine.

If you do apply this, let us know if it works for you.

Previously:

Mac OS X 10.5.2: Music and Audio Problems on Apple Laptops? (Or Blame AirPort?)

Mac Audio Glitches: Serato Reports; Avoid 10.5.2, AirPort For Now

Photo: Telstar Logistics. (Hey, it was either that shot of SFO airport or another apple or tiger or something silly.)

Update: via Kris on comments, it appears the newest ("Penryn") Apple laptops are unaffected, presumably a side effect of using Broadcom chips. (That’s not to say the chip is to blame, but the software support for the different chips might be.)

It’s been almost a year since Windows Vista was released to consumers. We know that nearly half of our readers use Windows, so the future of the OS is something we take very seriously — even if many of you, for now, are staying cautious and working (happily, in many cases) on XP. We’ll be examining Vista from various angles over the coming weeks, both measuring the OS and telling you how to make the most of it if for music you are giving it a go.

To start out, we’ve again caught up with Noel Borthwick. Noel CTO of Cakewalk, and one of the most knowledgeable experts on Windows technical details. (He’s also a veteran Linux developer, so his perspective on operating systems goes beyond those from Redmond.)

When we talked to Noel this time last year, a lot of what was new still hadn’t been tested in the real world. Now, Vista has been in the hand of users, and there’s both some good news and bad. A year of Vista has meant a year of improvements, both from Microsoft and third parties. In my own testing, for instance, what began as a disastrous experience running Vista earlier in the year has now become more comparable to XP. (I’m currently on Vista SP1 release candidate on a modest PC desktop.) But there are still areas that could use improvement — and while general Vista improvements were welcome, I think there’s still the real question of whether Vista offers enough that’s unique to compete with its real rival, XP.

We’ll revisit some of those broad issues, but first let’s actually get the technical story, and clear up some misconceptions.

Updated: A PACE Anti-Piracy official has officially requested that we remove an image of the iLok product. While they asked not to be publicly quoted, they have challenged the technical accuracy of Adam’s blog post, saying they don’t believe their product caused the Blue Screen of Death. If PACE chooses to release an official reply, we will share it.

The debate over copy protection in music software and anti-piracy tactics continues to heat up. Now Adam Schabtach of Audio Damage, the popular plug-in developer, has fired off a call for a boycott of products that use PACE and the iLok hardware dongle. And that means that Waves is again a target, in this case because Adam himself had technical difficulties resulting from the copy protection scheme. But here’s his argument: the problem isn’t copy protection per se, it’s that developers have to cede control to a third party when the technology breaks.

This points up the biggest problem with PACE: if something goes really wrong, the maker of the PACE-wrapped product can’t help you. They didn’t invent PACE, they can’t fix bugs in PACE, they often don’t even know enough about PACE to troubleshoot it (which is not so much a reflection of their ignorance but of the sheer arcane complexity of PACE and the amount of information about it which its makers do not release even to their customers). Their only recourse is to tell you to wipe your hard drive bare and start again. This is one of many reasons that Audio Damage doesn’t use PACE: we want to help our customers make music, and we don’t want to be in a position in which we have to say “sorry, can’t help you” if something goes wrong with one of our products. Of course, unlike Audio Damage, Waves doesn’t offer a money-back guarantee for their products, so in the end I was stuck with software I’d paid for but couldn’t use.

Adam just doesn’t like copy protection, right? Well, no, in fact. The issue is that while PACE fails to stop piracy (something admitted by Waves themselves as they sue studios around the world for millions of dollars), PACE did succeed in stopping Adam from using his software:

I went to the Waves website, logged in to my account, downloaded the latest installer, and retrieved my iLok from the shelf upon which it was gathering dust. I backed up my hard drive (”once bitten, twice shy” and I’ve been bitten way more than once by PACE), launched the installer, and held my breath. The installer almost immediately informed me that it had to restart my PC, so I let it. It launched itself automatically after the PC rebooted, started the installation process, and then my good faith and efforts were rewarded with [a Windows Blue Screen of Death].

… A PC running Windows puts this up when something goes really, really wrong and the OS makes the unilateral decision to bring all proceedings to a halt in order to prevent further mishap. Seeing this screen is the computer equivalent of seeing your car deploy its airbags.

The final analysis:

PACE doesn’t stop piracy; any copy-protection system can, and will be, defeated. What PACE does do is prevent legitimate users of software products from using products which they’ve paid for.

Why I Boycott Products That Use PACE/iLok (and Why You Should, Too)

PACE/iLok is the leading provider of this kind of copy protection, so I expect we may hear a response. If I can get a statement from them, I’ll post that soon. But I will say, Adam is not alone in his frustration. Developers will continue to make the choices they feel are right for their business, which is their prerogative — but it’s likewise the choice of their customers to vote with their wallets. I do know users who are perfectly comfortable with iLok. Let us know how you feel, and whether copy protection has influenced your purchasing decisions.

Updated: Note that we’re talking about two different kinds of copy protection offered by PACE. One is the PACE software protection, which does not use a hardware dongle (or “hardware key” as PACE prefers to call it). The other is the iLok.

Already, readers are split: we’ve got Max/MSP users (myself included) who haven’t had problems with PACE software protection, and even some iLok hardware users who haven’t been bothered. But there are some strong arguments against the hardware dongles, to the point of cutting into sales, something developers may want to watch closely. Keep the feedback coming.

Much of the OS discussion tends to devolve into generalities, philosophical debates, and religious wars. We’re going to try something different: wherever possible, squash the bugs. Here’s a tip for Windows Vista that finally allowed many of my USB devices to work properly.

Many music devices, including simple audio interfaces and (in particular) USB MIDI keyboards, don’t require drivers. These are sometimes called class-compliant devices, as they’re covered by standardized classes that describe what they do. There actually are drivers for them, but they’re provided by the operating system. And that’s a good thing.

Unfortunately, many people have found that Windows Vista has problems finding the drivers for these devices. Here’s a fix that works for me (and, apparently many others):

Ah, YouTubers. While the rest of us pontificate endlessly, the unfairly-maligned YouTube community painstakingly assembles evidence to prove their point. Lonely girls need outing? YouTube is there. Can’t tell what’s wildly out of tune in a botched Van Halen “Jump” performance? Let’s just listen, shall we? (Too bad, as I had just worked out a really great theory about sun spots, Greensboro’s atmospheric pressure and relative humidity, and a freak wormhole.)

Thanks, Wilfred Fumbly. (video’s gone now … more in a moment)

So, the original theory holds: most likely a sample rate issue. Well, unless Van Halen is really old school, run their backing tracks on reel-to-reels, and had that set to the wrong speed. Sample rates it is.

More importantly, we’ve definitively proven Eddie is a “great guitar player,” which I know is what was really bothering everybody about this clip. He demonstrates this greatness with true vigor, by playing as loudly as possible for five minutes completely out of tune with the backing track and the vocals (which were matching the backing track) as if he’s completely deaf. If you had any doubts about what a true Guitar Hero is, now you know. (And yeah, unfortunately, I do think that really was his only choice. Guess the techs couldn’t get the clock rate set back to normality.)

Speaking of Guitar Hero / Rock Band: Activision / Harmonix, if you’re listening, I think you know what my request for an Easter Egg in your game would be.

Updated: The video is gone. So now we can not only speculate about what happened to Van Halen, but what happened to the video. Perhaps WilfredFumbly noticed that, while the keyboard part in Greensboro was pitched higher than the original album recording, so were other gigs on the tour. That means the guitar is far from absolved. And it lends new credence to my “Wormhole Theory.” Maybe Eddie’s guitar was temporarily replaced with one from the past, in which the song was in a different key, or even an alternate universe where this is in tune.

Okay. I got nothing.

Okay, let’s just get this out of the way now: my initial experience with Windows Vista was hideously awful. Like, smoke and flames awful. Shuttle, the maker of my small form factor PC, pointed to an old version of the NVIDIA nForce driver for the chipset which repeatedly corrupted the device database, so eventually nothing worked. And even on other machines, countless bugs made the whole OS virtually unusable. Some of the problems have been clearly Microsoft’s fault; others are clearly third party support issues, while others are just countless little interactions between the OS and other software. I tried Vista once shortly after launch, then once again early this summer. By the second time, things were slightly better — ironically, Vista ran perfectly on a Mac Pro I had on loan. (The reason, I think, is that Apple put a lot of effort into its drivers, and the Mac Pro itself is spec’ed out like a dream system, ideal for Vista just as it is for OS X. Where you get into trouble is not necessarily older or cheaper systems, but systems that contain parts with problematic drivers.)

But even after that initially suffering, I’m now making Vista my primary OS on my PC. Why? Because, while some fixes are in fact waiting on SP1, a range of hotfixes and third-party driver updates is slowly making Vista livable.

Here’s the best news yet: Microsoft has just made available a series of hotfixes provided badly-needed improvements for USB operation, one of the shakier components of Vista — and something that musicians rely on more than just about anything else.

Cumulative update rollup for USB core components in Windows Vista

Via: October Set of Fixes Available for Vista [Paul Thurrott's SuperSite Blog]