Ableton Forum

Yea they just let 5000 people go

my wife got laid off this afternoon

leedsquietman wrote:Win 7 uses a ton of the Vista core and is still in beta - I too hope it will be an improvement but steady on there Jeeves !! Vista was flying in beta too.

As for benchmarks - they are an easily manipulated feast and the only benchmarks that matter to audio and MIDI performance are never featured, benchmarks are for gamers. It doesn't always matter that faster graphics can be delivered - Vista always had higher inherent system latency than XP, and that is crucial to a musician. I've never seen a general computer magazine or website publish a test that shows how well an ASIO driver works under an o/s. I've seen them test DX and MME drivers, windows native and poor performing drivers. I've never seen them run a MIDI test.

Windows 7 still is not bringing updates for MIDI (in fact, windows 98 was the last time MIDI was updated in windows). Mac OSX Core MIDI is a much more recent and better defined protocol than MME and Direct MIDI. And finally, what will determine whether win7 flies or not is the driver support. How much effort have Microsoft put into 3rd party audio and MIDI companies, in terms of supplying them with SDKs and developers kits and liasing with them ? Apple have done a great job on this in the recent past, Microsoft failed pretty bad on Vista, which is why a lot of products never got updated to Vista and many others only have flaky, almost beta drivers - not to mention Vista 64, which has little support. The driver support will be key, let's hope they get it right this time ...

1. Vista was never "flying" in beta. It was deemed slower from the start because or aero.

2. I think you have video benchmarks, and actual benchmarks confused. I'm not talking one company or tester, all around, 7 has beat Vista and XP. Rendering graphics, yes in gaming, processor performance, RAM handling, etc. Benchmarks are not only very important, but the specs of a gaming machine and a DAW are usually very similar with the exception of the video card.

3. Driver support for me has been great, no hiccups or problems with internal sound card, line 6 DI, M-audio mobile pre, even when using these with ASIO4ALL.

4. You midi argument is really silly. Do you not use USB midi controllers or an external midi interface? I have had problems with audio latency in the past, but midi problems? Seriously?

5. How has Microsoft done with SDKs and developer kits? Well some of the companies I beta test for got theirs a few months ago and the Beta is now.....public! Not to mention, that virtually all of the drivers for Vista run seamlessly on 7. (And no 7 is not just a "better Vista". It is full of vast improvements in almost every area of the OS, from start up, shut down, crashes, performance, etc....)

I know you think you understand, but try it out....test it....work as a beta tester for a company, realize the importance of benchmarks.....which were run on audio, video, gaming and photography software, and then hit me back.

Geebag wrote:Yea they just let 5000 people go

You're point being? .......recession anyone? Who hasn't let people go? Apple? Maybe it's because they charge 5 times the actual value of their products leaving plenty of overhead to stuff cash in the employees pockets.....and the future will tell if it affects them as well...it's just not affecting them at the moment.

I can give you references to hundreds of people who will attest to Vista working better in beta than it did in RC.

System latency was always higher - run the DPC latency checker and compare with XP. Many others have done and the result was always better in XP. Then stuff like better memory handling gets somewhat negated !

Many manufacturers made their products obsolete rather than support Vista - many examples include the very expensive Midex interface by Steinberg. Vista 64 particularly has dire support - just because you got YOUR drivers working OK don't assume that is the case for everyone. Obviously XP in many cases is going to have better, more stable drivers, it was around for 7 years and to be fair most XP drivers were bad in the first couple of years too.

Companies like Echo Audio's last XP drivers for the Indigo DJ and IO (which they updated about 15 times over the course of the product) were significantly better than even the ones they wrote afte the product had been 2 years on the market. ASIO4ALL should not come into it, you should be able to use the native driver for your audio card. ASIO4ALL does not always work so great and no surprise, given that it is a generic driver.

I use MIDI controllers, and MIDI devices externally. Many tests have proven that Core MIDI delivers less jitter and less latency than either of windows protocols, especially bad is 'emulated' direct MIDI. That usually requires the infamous ignore midi port filter setting to work properly. It helps if your program allows system timestamping (such as Cubase) to minimize MIDI timing and jitter errors. I'm not saying you can't get good MIDI performance in windows, but whatever your performance is in mme or direct MIDI, it will be even better under CoreMIDI. And you have no need for stuff like Midi Yoke. Seriously .....

I want Windows 7 to be a success too, but I wish Microsoft would address some issues that work for the pro audio / DAW world, which they seem to give no regard to at all and some would say have already conceded it to Apple. INstead of concentrating on adding crap stuff for gamers, such as waveRT which no-one supports anyway ...