Our questions about Windows Vista have largely been the same as yours: Should I upgrade now or take the wait-and-see approach? Will my host program, soft synths, and audio and MIDI hardware work with it yet? What’s involved in getting those up and running successfully? And what makes Vista better than XP, anyway? We talked to several developers of popular music hardware and software, then tried Vista for ourselves.
NEW DRIVER TECHNOLOGY
“There was a healthy back-and-forth between Microsoft and the developer community about what makes our lives easier or harder when we design professional music software,” says MOTU’s Jim Cooper, “and the result of that dialogue was WaveRT.” Jim’s talking about a new driver architecture, based on WDM, that has several benefits. Noel Borthwick, chief technology officer of Cakewalk, elaborates on its inner workings:
“While ASIO and WDM were pretty good at low-latency streaming under WinXP, if you dialed your interface’s buffer setting way down, the CPU hit went up. This was because user mode, which is where your DAW lives and takes commands from you, had to constantly alternate with kernel mode, the area in your computer where the driver actually talks to the hardware. WaveRT drills right from the DAW to the hardware, eliminating the middleman.” Translation: on a fairly recent system, you can expect lower latencies and less CPU usage, especially at high sample rates, once WaveRT drivers become available for your audio hardware. At this time, it’s possible to implement them only for PCI-based interfaces, not FireWire or USB.
Right now, manufacturers are taking a wait-and-see attitude about WaveRT, so when they say their products have “Vista drivers,” they’re probably referring to drivers in an established format such as ASIO, WDM, MME, GSIF, or DirectX — all of which Vista is compatible with — that have been signed so that Vista will allow them to be installed.
SIGN IN STRANGER
If you’ve ever installed an audio interface or drivers for a synth’s USB port in Windows XP, you’ve seen a dialogue box that warns you that the drivers haven’t cleared Microsoft’s signing hurdle, and prompts you to “stop installation” or “continue anyway.” This is to block drivers that might have a hidden agenda involving viruses, adware, or spyware; a signed driver is one that Microsoft has determined is safe.
In any Vista edition that’s also 64-bit, you don’t get the dialogue — drivers must be signed for installation to proceed. If you have administrator access (if you’re the one who installed Vista or ran it for the first time on a computer that had it pre-installed, you will), there’s a back door to turn off this requirement: Run the “cmd.exe” window in Administrator mode, and type in “Bcdedit.exe –set nointegritychecks ON” without the quotation marks. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, especially if your machine stays connected to the internet. The nasties Vista is actually very good at protecting it from could cost you more downtime than waiting for a proper driver would. If Noel Borthwick is right, that wait shouldn’t be too long: “Microsoft’s signing process is actually more relaxed with Vista than it has been in the past,” he comments, “They want to know that the driver came from a reputable source, and that it does nothing more than it’s supposed to.” Insiders at M-Audio and Digidesign, neither of which were Vista-ready when this article went to press, confirmed to Keyboard that they’re on the fast track. “It’s our top priority,” said M-Audio’s Amanda Whiting. MOTU has had drivers (not WaveRT yet, though they’ll likely be one of the first) for all their hardware out since last December, and Jim Cooper offers another reason to be optimistic: “While I can’t speak to other developers’ experience, porting stuff over to Vista wasn’t nearly as painful as the transition from Mac OS 9 to OS X.”
ME-FIRST MULTIMEDIA
Even if your DAW/sequencer and soft synths are the only programs open, any operating system has a ton going on behind the scenes, and these processes all compete for your CPU’s attention. While XP could recognize different priorities, Vista adds a level of first-class treatment specifically for the streaming- and processor-intensive threads your musicmaking software generates, called Multimedia Class Scheduling Service, or MMCSS. Applications must be written to tell Vista “I’m throwing some heavy-duty content at you, so look sharp!” (see Figure 1). If so, their processes go to the front of the line. In practice, audio and video recording and playback will be less susceptible to glitches and dropouts, especially with several applications open at once. The more tracks, soft synths, or I/O going on in your tune at once, the more this matters.
WHEN I’M 64
You can get any edition of Vista from Home Basic on up in either a 32- or 64- bit version. Your computer must have a 64-bit CPU to run the latter, though it will also run 32-bit Vista. There are two types of benefits to a 64-bit OS. First, applications written for it can address a lot more memory — up to 128GB of RAM compared to 2GB in the 32-bit world. With that much RAM, you can play a huge sampler sound bank, or record an entire multitrack project, without ever accessing the hard disk. Then there’s 64-bit processing, wherein the math behind your music is done at twice the precision. To take full advantage of this, every program that generates, processes, or records sound must be a 64-bit native app, though Sonar 6.2 can run 32-bit plug-ins within its own 64-bit environment. ReWire is an exception — see “Maiden Voyage” below.
Though 32-bit processing offers plenty of headroom, the 64-bit advantage has to do with the quieter, subtler half of your music’s dynamic range, where things like reverb tails or the “air” around a vocal dwell. Will you hear the difference on a demo that has just a few tracks? Probably not, but in a dense project where every frequency space in the mix has something in it, we have experienced a difference. It’s not so much that any given track sounds more hi-fi, it’s that the increased elbow room for all tracks makes for less ear fatigue, better mixing decisions, and thus better results — particularly if your final summing to a stereo audio file occurs in the digital domain.
MAIDEN VOYAGE
I did clean installs on two fairly recent but not completely new machines, both of which had been home to XP Pro: Vista Ultimate 64-bit went on a Spectral model RM-7100 recording PC with a dual-core, 3GHz Intel Pentium D processor; the Windows partition of a first-generation 15" Apple MacBook Pro (packing a 2.16GHz Intel Core Duo) hosted 32-bit Ultimate. Both computers had 2GB of RAM.
Each machine then received Cakewalk Sonar Producer Edition 6.2.1, Ableton Live 6.0.5, and Propellerhead Reason 3.0.4, followed by all appropriate MOTU hardware drivers, with 64-bit versions going on the Spectral PC. I hit an immediate speed bump — the PC wouldn’t see interfaces plugged into the mainboard’s FireWire port or the three ports on its PCI FireWire card, though the drivers showed up in all the music apps’ preferences boxes. I couldn’t track down the card’s maker, but found new Vista drivers for the Intel motherboard on Intel’s web site. No dice — these only helped it mount FireWire hard drives more consistently. I had no problems, though, with a MOTU PCI-424 card, which, along with my legacy interfaces (a 1296 and 2408mkII), worked flawlessly.
Vista on the Mac had no FireWire difficulties, and in no time, I was passing MIDI and audio (at up to 96kHz) through MOTU 8Pre and Ultralite boxes; my aging MIDI Timepiece A/V was recognized just as easily.
I expected that Sonar would scream on both machines, and wasn’t disappointed. Reason 3.0.4, which is not even a Vista-specific release, worked great on both systems, as did Live. Once I downloaded an update from www.propellerheads.se, ReWiring Reason into Live was no problem on either computer; but ReWire only worked with Sonar under the 32-bit version of Vista I had installed on the Mac. This is a known issue that also occurs in Windows XP x64, and hopefully will be a non-issue when ReWire becomes 64-bit compatible.
CONCLUSIONS
If you’re about to buy your first computer music rig, the above shows that it’s possible to get pro-level hardware and software up and running right now, and our sources indicate that developers who aren’t yet on board will be very soon. So don’t be afraid of a computer that comes with Vista pre-installed. In fact, we recommend that first-timers choose a machine that’ll have the longest useful life, and in the Windows camp, that’s no longer one with XP. Just choose your third-party hardware carefully if you’re champing at the bit to make music immediately.
If you’re considering switching from XP, you should get your feet wet on a separate machine, or dual-boot partition of your system drive, especially if music pays the bills. Performing an “upgrade” install won’t blow away your audio files, but with any major OS revision on any kind of computer, you don’t want downtime spent updating software and drivers to interfere with actually doing your work.