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.
Last fall, Steve Ball, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Vista, posted a blog entry explaining some of the reasons why Windows audio can be glitchy. (That was supposed to be "Part 1" of a series; we're still waiting for Part 2.)
(Credit:
Microsoft)
Today, Guardian writer Tim Anderson picks up the thread with an article called "Why Vista Sounds Worse." In addition to citing Ball's blog posting, he talks to the CTO for Cakewalk (a division of Roland that makes consumer and professional audio software) and an engineer at Steinberg (which makes the popular Cubase and Nuendo digital audio workstation programs). The basic story: Microsoft changed the audio architecture for Vista in some fundamental ways, introducing new APIs and driver models for audio devices. Some vendors didn't have time to adjust to the new technology, but continue to use older technology that Vista still supports through emulation software. Emulation equals worse performance. That tends to mean more audio glitches. (If you want to go much deeper, Create Digital Music posted an excellent in-depth interview with Cakewalk CTO Noel Borthwick a couple weeks ago.)
Interestingly, two of my audio production teachers are longtime PC devotees who prefer Steinberg's Nuendo software (they use v3). I didn't expect this, given that I've often heard that Mac+ProTools is the default platform for pro audio. But even with their PC preference, both of them have said numerous times that there's no way they'll move to Vista until some underlying issues are resolved. In general, because the interplay between pro audio hardware and software is so complicated, there's little incentive for engineers to replace systems that work well--if it ain't broke, don't fix it. But in this case, even if their PCs went belly up tomorrow, they'd stick with XP.
Yesterday, Microsoft's program manager for sound in Windows Vista (what a great title!), Steve Ball, posted a blog entry explaining why audio playback sometimes gets glitchy in Windows.
There's an air of post-facto justification about the posting--it basically reminds us that a PC is doing a lot more things simultaneously than, say, a $20 CD player--but toward the end of the post, he notes that it's common for certain older device drivers to lock out the CPU for 10 milliseconds to 50ms, causing an obvious problem.
I'd be curious to know what some of those devices are. Perhaps he'll give us hints in his follow-up, in which he promises to explain some of the work in Vista that is meant to address these audio glitches.
As with many blog postings, some of the most interesting information comes in the comments. One user claims that WinAmp automatically moves its priority to "High," so it "wins" any competition for certain computing resources; there's also the beginning of a debate over buffering, which would solve some glitches but might cause greater latency, a problem for communications applications.
Yesterday, mobile phone giant Nokia announced it would license PlayReady, a new digital rights management (DRM) technology developed by Microsoft. This is the first win for PlayReady, and represents a pretty major shift for Microsoft.
Until about two years ago, Microsoft's DRM strategy was tied up with the Windows Media platform. Microsoft invested considerable research and development into improving Windows Media DRM. For example, in 2004, Microsoft rolled out a new version of Windows Media DRM that made it viable for content owners to allow music from subscription-based services to be transferred to portable devices. With Windows Media DRM 10, if users stop paying their subscription, the content is disabled from playing on the portable device the next time users connect it to their PC. Prior to this DRM advance, content owners simply wouldn't allow subscription-based content onto portable services, rightly reasoning that users would download to their device's capacity, cancel their subscription, and end up with a huge library of very cheap music.
The point was: for content owners to take advantage of Microsoft's DRM technology, they had to offer content in the Windows Media file format. However, for the last couple of years, Microsoft's slowly been divorcing its DRM technology from the Windows Media platform. First, in Vista, Microsoft included video copy protection technology that had no requirement for nor dependency on any Windows Media technology. Now, it's created a DRM technology for mobile devices that, once again, has nothing to do with Windows Media. Rather, PlayReady lets mobile device manufacturers and carriers protect nearly any type of content--AAC audio, H.264 video, even games. Microsoft promises that it'll be forward-compatible with content that's already been protected using Windows Media 10 DRM, but other than that, there's no connection between the two technologies.
What does this all mean? It means that Microsoft's efforts to make Windows Media the de facto format for compressing and protecting digital media content have failed. Subtly, the company is acknowledging that Windows Media will coexist alongside other formats that, for whatever reason, are favored by end-users and content owners. (A lot of this has to do with Apple's runaway success with the iPod, which has popularized AAC audio.)
Leaving aside the format wars, can DRM succeed at all? Microsoft certainly continues to push ahead, but there are many in the technology community (including some Microsoft researchers) who argue that DRM is doomed--it's technically flawed from because the system eventually has to allow the "attacker" (the end-user) to access the protected content, and it's flawed from a business perspective because it asks consumers to bear the extra cost (in terms of processing requirements, hardware and software incompatibility, and higher prices for DRM-protected content) of something that does not benefit them. Those two problems lead to a large amount of readily available pirated content.
The Nokia deal's also interesting because Nokia's using PlayReady in a line of Symbian-based phones. Symbian is a mobile OS that competes directly against Microsoft's Windows Mobile platform. This is typical Microsoft: the company often plays multiple sides of a market, occasionally even competing against itself, until a clear winner emerges.
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