Who is using Ableton+ Windows xp on a MAC?

morerecords · Post by **morerecords** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 6:55 pm

I know some folks are, I am about to buy a laptop and I think I might like to buy a Macbook but I absolutely must use Ableton on Windows, ,because I rely on some windows only plug ins....

I know some people are having much success in this way, are you?

I wanted to look and do some pricing online, but I am not sure if people are using Boot camp or Parallels...

nbinder · Post by **nbinder** » Mon Jun 16, 2008 10:04 pm

http://www.ableton.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=92948

timothyallan · Post by **timothyallan** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 1:02 am

bootcamp works great, don't run Live emulated in parallels or VMWare

jonny72 · Post by **jonny72** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 1:34 am

Boot Camp turns a Mac in to a true dual boot machine plus Apple supply the drivers for everything so Windows runs perfectly. I've read some people saying a Mac runs Windows better than a PC but I'm not sure I'd go that far.

For audio applications you have to use Boot Camp. Parallels and VMWare are great, but they have a pretty big processing overheads which will cause you major problems.

Ten Square · Post by **Ten Square** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 12:25 pm

I recently bought a brand new MacBook Pro 15'. Like you, I wanted to use it under Windows XP via Boot Camp because my NI plugins (Absynth 3, FM7 and Intakt) were not compatible with Mac Intel architecture under Mac OS. So I installed Windows, it was done quite easily.

But sound issues started to come when I installed Live 7 and my M-Audio Ozone MIDI keyboard/ASIO soundcard with the latest drivers for Windows. There were lot of sound glitches in Live while playing a simple audio wav file or creating a NI synth in a MIDI track.

I must say that I have exactly the same configuration on my Asus desktop PC (the same softwares, the same drivers and the same hardware like my Ozone keyboard). This is a fact: there are absolutely no sound issues with my PC and my audio latency is about 5ms, which is quite comfortable.

In fact, I remembered a few days after that when I first installed Windows on my Asus PC, I managed to assign a unique IRQ for each internal device (first turning off all of them, then turning on one at a time and rebooting Windows during installation). When I had a look to the way IRQs were assigned in my MBP under Windows, it was of course completly different since a lot of devices (especially USB and FireWire ones) were assigned to the same IRQ number (#20 in my case). I tried to switch off some of them after installing Windows (like ethernet, wifi and bluetooth cards) but there were still a lot of sound glitches in Live and in my other audio softwares.

So, I upgraded my NI plugins to the latest version compatible with Mac Intel system (Absynth 4, FM8), I deleted the Windows partition on my MBP and I started to learn Mac OS because everything was working perfectly under it! Today I'm very happy with it! But I also continue to work on my favorite audio softwares under Windows XP and my Asus PC.

Hope this will help!

Yhtomit · Post by **Yhtomit** » Tue Jun 17, 2008 3:31 pm

jonny72 wrote:Boot Camp turns a Mac in to a true dual boot machine plus Apple supply the drivers for everything so Windows runs perfectly. I've read some people saying a Mac runs Windows better than a PC but I'm not sure I'd go that far.

For audio applications you have to use Boot Camp. Parallels and VMWare are great, but they have a pretty big processing overheads which will cause you major problems.

When Vista was just released, the Macbook Pro at that time did run Vista better than any pc notebook. This was written all over different PC magazines. This was around October last year