Most of the audio engineers I've met--both home and professional--are Mac people, and Avid's ProTools running on a Mac is often cited as the industry standard. But there are Windows loyalists out there.
In late 2007 I took an introductory audio production class taught by David Huber (who wrote one of the bibles on the subject, "Modern Recording Techniques") and Scott Colburn (who has produced albums by The Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Sun City Girls, among many others). Both of them used Nuendo from Steinberg (which is basically the upmarket version of Cubase) as their primary digital audio workstation (DAW), and they ran it on a Windows PC.
Windows 7 should offer better performance for digital audio than Vista.
A Windows XP PC, that is. Both were very diplomatic when discussing software and other gear, but they expressed pretty serious reservations about Vista. Microsoft made a ton of changes in Vista that were supposed to improve performance, including moving certain audio capabilities out of the kernel, but these experts--whose livelihood depends on having a high-performing DAW--thought it was too untested and unknown.
Although they didn't say so, I imagine that the driver incompatibilities reported with other hardware could have been an absolute nightmare with all the gear in a professional recording rig. There were also reports of unstable MIDI timing, drop-outs, latency, and other problems (many of which were addressed by Service Pack 1). They weren't alone: the general advice for audio engineers on Windows was stick with XP. (If anybody had a success story using Vista to build a DAW, I'd love to hear about it in comments.)
In case you haven't heard, Microsoft releases a new version of Windows next week. I've been using the RTM version for a few weeks now and find it far more stable and inviting than Vista was at launch. (Although a colleague did uncover a gnarly power-management problem in Media Center related to a faulty audio driver.) Now, some of the audio experts are starting to weigh in, and it looks like the work Microsoft did to improve performance and compatibility with Windows 7 are paying off in the world of audio production.
Noel Borthwick, the chief technical officer for Cakewalk--which makes a wide variety of audio software for Windows, including the Sonar DAW line--has posted a blog entry describing how the new OS should dramatically reduce latency, particularly on x64 multicore processors. (Borthwick also went into more obsessive detail on Peter Kirn's Create Digital Music blog.) His conclusion: "I will be building a new DAW soon and Windows 7 X64 will be my OS of choice."
The long and short of it? If you're building a new recording system, Windows 7 sounds like a more reasonable choice than Vista. But if you've got a system that's already working well, don't mess with it--there still might be driver incompatibilities with older gear, and upgrades from Windows XP require a clean install, meaning your old settings will be lost and you'll have to reinstall your apps.
Correction, 2:34 PDT: This post incorrectly characterized the audio-related changes that Microsoft made in Windows Vista. Microsoft moved certain audio functions out of the kernel and into the user stack.
Seattle has an overabundance of rock musicians for a city its size, from pure garage amateurs to club bands to touring stars.
Microsoft employs about 40,000 people in the Seattle area today, and there are legions of ex-Microsofties who stuck around after they left the company. So there's bound to be some overlap between the two groups.
I know several serious and talented musicians who have or had day jobs at the 'Soft, but they tend to downplay the connection--showing up sober to work every day to build or sell software just doesn't play well in rock biographies.
(Credit:
Jim Allchin)
Of course, some employees are so famous that it would be silly to pretend otherwise. Jim Allchin, who led Windows development for more than a decade, is among them.
I had heard for years that Allchin is a serious guitarist, and as Todd Bishop reports today, now he's got an album coming out.
After listening to the samples on Allchin's Web site, I will say that he can certainly play. I'd guess that he counts Eric Johnson, Joe Satriani, and Pat Metheny among his guitar influences.
He also produced the record, and his Web site has a bit of info about his recording techniques and gear: everything was recorded straight to hard drive using MOTU interfaces (I'm going to guess PCI rather than USB or FireWire) and Sonar Producer digital-audio workstation software--which is, not surprisingly, Windows-only (though you can run it on a Mac with emulation software). But I wonder if he used Windows Vista or XP?
Although Allchin's fairly famous in the tech community, he's probably the second most famous ex-Microsoft guitarist. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, a longstanding guitar player, released an album with his band Grown Men a few years ago. He's particularly well-known in Seattle music circles for jam sessions that can occur any time, any place.
I didn't imagine there was much room for innovation in USB-recording interfaces, but at the 2009 NAMM show--the annual convention for buyers and sellers of professional music gear (read: music gearhead paradise)--a couple of companies introduced some new takes on this very prosaic, but necessary, piece of gear.
The StealthPedal from IK Multimedia is a USB interface and MIDI controller that looks like a wah-wah pedal.
(Credit: IK Multimedia)For the uninitiated: A recording interface is the bridge between your musical output and your computer. You attach it to the computer, then plug your instrument (or multiple instruments, or output of a mixing board) into it, and voila. There are countless types of interfaces at all levels of price and complexity, but for home musicians who just want a quick way to get their musical ideas down on their hard drives, an inexpensive USB interface is the way to go. M-Audio is probably the best-known brand at this level, although Tascam and Edirol (part of Roland) are somewhat common as well.
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A digital-audio workstation is probably the most important purchase an audio engineer has to make--it's the command and control center for your entire computer-based recording rig, and you'll be spending most of your time in it.
Unfortunately, pro-level DAWs are complicated pieces of software, and everybody's got their own opinion about what's best--ProTools is widely considered the industry standard, but I know several experienced engineers who don't like it at all.
Because of its complexity and importance, choosing a DAW is not the kind of decision you can make from reading reviews alone, or even from talking to fellow travelers. You need hands-on time.
That's why Cakewalk has released a free 30-day trial version of Sonar 8 Producer Edition, the newest version of the company's high-end DAW. (Cakewalk also makes a wide array of audio-recording and manipulation software for consumers.) It's available for both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows XP or Vista (Mac users need Boot Camp or another Windows emulator). Recordings made with the trial version can be saved permanently.
The download is here.
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