Ableton Forum

Herne wrote:At the moment OSX is actually more restrictive, thanks to the iTunes DRM.

Please explain?

you mean that horrible restriction whereby if you back it up to cd it stops working, oh yeah limiting, just like your computer turning off features that is

Herne wrote: It requires more resources because it is designed for machines 5 years newer than those for which XP was designed

what a complete load of b*llocks!! what exactly does vista give a user that, at idle, requires four times the ram of XP? a glassy looking interface? brilliant. OSX doesnt need 1gb of ram. vista is bloatware, end of story.

i just dont understand why anyone would swap xp for vista when you can run xp on < 200mb of ram but vista needs 1gb? ive got a new laptop, bought with XP, and ive got 2gb of ram to run ableton, reaktor, cubase whatever... i get no pleasure from running my OS, i want it to be as light as possible, unobtrusive, and leave as much system resource for the software i do want so why waste a gb of ram? its a no brainer...

BUT U GUYS, THE WINDOW ANIMATIIONS IN VISTA R RLY COOL!!!

io wrote: what a complete load of b*llocks!! what exactly does vista give a user that, at idle, requires four times the ram of XP? a glassy looking interface?...

Nothing at all, the RAM used is cached system and application files. The RAM is used but NOT unavailable, hence my comment about misunderstandings on the way Vista uses RAM, just as you have done.
To explain further, if you use Firefox after booting every Saturday morning Vista will cache the files required to start Firefox to RAM before they are needed, and they are then ready to start Firefox ASAP. If you don't, but go on to do something else the dynamic caching will reallocate RAM as required. Vista appears to use more RAM, but it actually doesn't. It appears that the RAM is 90% full, but if you look, or research, or read something before screaming out that the sky is falling you will realise that this 90% usage is by design for application and system file caching. Yes the basic requirements are a bit higher, what did you expect, that it would run on a 486?
The Aero interface requires no system RAM at all it uses video RAM, although the WDDM controller process which allocates this RAM will use up to 4096Kb to control this process. Also most modern cards [8800 in my case] will dynamically allocate RAM for themselves as well.

ok.

I understand that Vista is giving many people troubles. I personally believe microsoft to be a huge atrocity of the capitalist market. Most computers though, including apple computers, are made of toxic materials....

So I don't want to debate pcs vs macs, vista vs os x. I'm simply going to provide my experience using live under vista - that happens to be quite good.

I use a macbook pro and love os x (been using it since its release). Live gives me a stable 8ms latency under os x using my x-station as an audio interface.

With the same setup, using asioforall, under vista I get an ultra-stable 4ms latency! And that's without using the new wavert drivers that vista offers (which ableton doesn't support yet). I'm simply using vista ultimate via bootcamp with the new mac drivers and it seems to be working flawlessly, even with my new creative suite package!

I love os x, I repeat, however, I am finding that another thing microsoft has done well (on top of finally optimizing audio interfacing) with vista is to speedup application startup and load times significantly. I can startup live or photoshop in 2 seconds under vista. In os x it takes roughly 12-20 seconds - sometimes longer. I hope leopard improves load times.

Anyways, all I want to add is that I'D LOVE TO SEE ABLETON SUPPORT UBUNTU! I'd love to see live work on an ultra-low latency driver within a audio-optimized operating system. And I'd love to see companies like ableton and cycling 74 support the TRUE open source movement.

I love os x but core audio and live still aren't there yet for me (at least not with my current setup). I perform live, processing vocals, drums and an mpc and need as low a latency as I can get. I can hear a 5ms delay! Don't tell me I can't.

Of course, this situation could be solved by some company (emu!) providing a cheaper expresscard interface to symphony's - which supposedly can provide as low as 1 ms latency!

PEACE>
THOMAS

You can hear a 5ms delay? welp

I switched to OS X and I am not gonna work under bootcamp for a 4ms improvement.

Windows for me is virus, trojan, worms, random and frequent hangs, slowdowns, crashes and reboots... reinstall every 2 or 3 months (winrot)... braindead user interface, wireless going up and down all the time...

Since my wife switch to mac, I don't have to do tech support at home anymore.

pribeh_tom wrote:With the same setup, using asioforall, under vista I get an ultra-stable 4ms latency! And that's without using the new wavert drivers that vista offers (which ableton doesn't support yet).

Interesting. Just the kind of info this thread needed.

Anyways, all I want to add is that I'D LOVE TO SEE ABLETON SUPPORT UBUNTU! I'd love to see live work on an ultra-low latency driver within a audio-optimized operating system. And I'd love to see companies like ableton and cycling 74 support the TRUE open source movement.

I'd love to believe that linux might be a better audio OS but somehow I can't see this happening (and I mean with the ease of use for audio of OSX). Linux is unweildy even for the expert.

the only problem with vista is microsoft thought everybody wanted fancy graphics on the front end i think once all this is stripped out then we can all move onto vista it is not a bad os just top heavy with wasted memory on the frontend.
bye

I work with mac and pcs since I do a lot of tech support. I only have macs at my place, my girlfriend uses an (core duo) imac (and loves it).

I've installed vista on several different machines and it even runs well on some older machines quite well. All you need is a graphics card with about 128 megs ram and the AERO graphics will run quite smoothly (not as smoothly as osx graphics do on a g4). I had it running on a 1.7 centrino laptop (for a friend) with only shared video ram, optimized it for audio, and it ran really well. Again, for some reason I could get really low latencies using ableton.

For now, I can say that I can get ableton live to run more smoothely under vista than os x - which bothers me since I find os x superior in every other way and still do all my audio work under os x. The only time I boot up vista (on my macbook pro) is to get really low latencies while playing battery.

I do know that you can get ultra low and stabel latencies using logic - but alas, I can't afford it and it's not suitable for live work yet. I can't wait to see this new logic killer apple has been supposedly working on.

io wrote:OSX doesnt need 1gb of ram. vista is bloatware, end of story.

noo? i don't rekon many people are running OSX with 512mb of ram these days, just look at a couple signatures..i heard OSX it's sluggish with 512mb! and it's not leopard yet!

"the only problem with vista is microsoft thought everybody wanted fancy graphics. ..."

You can actually turn off any of the grapihc features, such as aero, and optimize vista just as much as you can XP. Vista really isn't much different from XP from a user perspective. If you want a version of vista that will work on your computer without much of the graphic glut than get the basic version of vista.

Vista really is optimized better for audio. Check out the following link for more info:

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2007/01/1 ... #more-1801

djshiva wrote:quite frankly, if MS stops supporting XP and forces me into that clunky piece of shite Vista, it's Mac for me (although how to afford it is another matter entirely).

i think by the time that happened you'd be needing a new system anyway and dollar for dollar spec for spec a Dell and Mac are damn near the same price so it wont be a problem and you could always throw XP on a partition and run that too if you wanted. I have XP on a partition and have it set so it never sees the internet and I use OSX only on the net.. works great (i use Live in OSX but if i want i have the option of using XP anything)

Herne wrote:At the moment OSX is actually more restrictive, thanks to the iTunes DRM.

Er, iTunes DRM is only a part of iTunes (specifically, only stuff bought from the itunes music store), and iTunes runs on both windows and os x. So the iTunes music store may be more restrictive than [what? emusic?], but it has nothing to do with OSX vs. windows.

Dell and Apple computers at least here in Canada are not the same price for similar specs, expect to pay 30-40% more for an Apple computer.

When I bought my Inspiron 9100 in August 2004, I could have bought a G4 powerbook. Even though the powerbook was using the long in the tooth G4 processor, which the Dell's 3.2 Ghz P4 desktop chip slaughtered for performance, the powerbook cost nearly 400 dollars more, it had 512 MB less ram, only a 4200 rpm drive against a 7200 rpm drive, only ATI radeon 9600 64mb graphics against ATI radeon 9700 128 MB graphics, a 1024x768 screen resolution vs 1680x1050 on the dell. So ... less graphics, less memory, slower hd and 400 dollars more...guess which I bought. The powerbook was cool to look at, weighed less and had a longer battery time but they were not priorities for me.

I love Apple computers, I would readily upgrade to a Macbook Pro if they were 300-400 dollars cheaper.