Ableton Forum

Because of the latest hardware not supporting XP anymore I'm forced to jump from the good old XP to win 7 and I need you guys to tell me what the hell to expect !!!

I gather Live will function ok in WIN 7?

How about all the hundreds of VST plugins? Are they gonna be fine as long Live is functioning or do they need to be special versions also?

I also got UAD2 and RME FF400 which should be ok I take ...

Help a brother out!

Px

What latest hardware doesn't support windows XP ?

This will of course happen sooner rather than later, I just wasn't aware that this was the case ?

In terms of DAW, make sure that all of your audio and MIDI devices have working win 7 drivers (and check their efficiency, most XP drivers are stable because the vendors have had years and done many updates to the drivers, whereas many win 7 drivers are first 'gold' versions barely out of beta in some cases).

If you are OK in this area, then you should be fine to upgrade but you might want to open a seperate partition and dual boot if you are a cautious person by nature, just in case.

leedsquietman wrote:What latest hardware doesn't support windows XP ?

In my case ASUS P6T deluxe V2 + I7 980x combo has been toted pretty flaky on many aspects with XP ...

I read from GS that win 7 64 bit running applications in 32 bit would be pretty safe bet all around ...

Px

thats a motherboard. thats not really the kind of hardware upgrade issues mainly discussed here...

FWIW my updgrade to Windows 7 from XP went really well. I haven't had an issue yet installing any of my software. Everything seems to just work (for me). I don't run VSTs though really. I stick with native Live Suite.

Go with Win 7, you won't be disappointed, Live works great, the only software that I've found that doesn't work with Win 7 is my old version of Wavelab 5, I'll upgrade to Wavelab 7 when it is released later in the year, hardware drivers have not been a problem to me and I've yet to find a plugin that doesn't work.

Would u suggest 32bit or going straight to Win 7 64bit ?

Parametex wrote:Would u suggest 32bit or going straight to Win 7 64bit ?

I have two system partitions one with a 32 bit install and the other with the 64 bit install, I've been using the 32 bit partition mostly but as new drivers have been released for my Tascam audio interface I will soon be transferring all my stuff to the 64 bit partition, if 64 bit drivers are available for your hardware I would go with that.

For now, you will probably get more out of installing a 32 bit version of your DAW app (currently Live is 32 bit only anyway) into the 64 bit o/s.

Where 64 bit DAWs are available, they tend to be fine when using stock plugins, but many 3rd party 32 bit *i.e. 99% of plugins currently* vsts/aus which are causing issues because some are not working under the native bitbridging. Sometimes the $20 J-Bridge plugin helps where naive bitbridges fail but quite a lot of big studios still ru the 32 bit version of the DAW because there are less gremlins and some major expensive platforms such as Powercore don't work yet under 64 bit.

You can try both and see where the land lies, you still get some benefit from the 32 bit DAW under 64 bit o/s as the system can access 3.6 GB ram total as opposed to 2GB under win XP.

64 bit everything, from drivers to native plugins not requiring bitbridging should be de facto standard within about 18 months to 2 years, until then you have to do your homework and workaround a few issues in some cases. It really depends, some people are running 64 bit DAWs fine because their plugins are working with bitbridging, or are using stock plugins only.

The other thing to remember is - just because drivers are available for win 7, this doesn't mean they will run better at this stage than XP drivers. For example, Echo made over 20 revisions to the Indigo/IO/DJ drivers over a 7 year period, and the last set of XP drivers was so fine tuned that latency was super low and stability totally rock solid. The Vista and win 7 drivers for that card are not yet as optimized because they haven't had 7 years and 20 fine tuning efforts at them, so some of the speed benefits of win 7 are traded off a bit with less optimized drivers
A mobo which doesn't work well with XP sounds very suspect to me too BTW.

Take a look at the RME forum for posts concerning the FF400 and Win 7, not hunky dory there aparently....

Thanks a lot for all the input guys!

FWIW, my current production machine is an I7 920 (@3.66 on stock voltage) on an ASUS mobo. I've been running XP for music but recently installed Win 7 [64] on a separate partition for some unrelated work. Well, Windows 7 is pretty stable and configurable, and my FF400 mostly works fine. I could probably switch to it for music production. However, XP also works just fine and I am yet to find a single practical advantage to Win7 for audio (using 64bit memory address space would obviously be one, but I still have only 3gb RAM). Sure, it looks snazzier (and feels a bit faster, although that could be due to the distracting effect of the graphics), but when I reboot back into XP, I suddenly feel like a whole lot of bloat has been taken off my UI and that helps me focus more on what I need to be doing.

On a side note, I am a member of the minority that actually prefers the way fonts were rendered in older OS-s (including XP). The virtual pixel technology now used in OSX and Win7 may look better aesthetically, but for me it's much more fatiguing at the same font size. That actually is a decisive factor here -- wish there was a way to render fonts XP-style in Win7, but it doesn't seem like it.

ilia wrote:FWIW, my current production machine is an I7 920 (@3.66 on stock voltage) on an ASUS mobo. I've been running XP for music but recently installed Win 7 [64] on a separate partition for some unrelated work. Well, Windows 7 is pretty stable and configurable, and my FF400 mostly works fine. I could probably switch to it for music production. However, XP also works just fine and I am yet to find a single practical advantage to Win7 for audio (using 64bit memory address space would obviously be one, but I still have only 3gb RAM). Sure, it looks snazzier (and feels a bit faster, although that could be due to the distracting effect of the graphics), but when I reboot back into XP, I suddenly feel like a whole lot of bloat has been taken off my UI and that helps me focus more on what I need to be doing.

fun thing, when you start xp, you have actually more bloat on the ui.. the ui is much more cpu taxing than the new one, and much less optimized for your system. and xp sucks at scheduling threads to your cores and hyperthreads, and sucks at managing memory >1gb.
and it means another useless partition on your system. and xp has much more places where it can get attacked, and where a bug can directly cause a kernelfault, a.k.a bluescreen.

that all on it's own would be enough for me to drop it.

On a side note, I am a member of the minority that actually prefers the way fonts were rendered in older OS-s (including XP). The virtual pixel technology now used in OSX and Win7 may look better aesthetically, but for me it's much more fatiguing at the same font size. That actually is a decisive factor here -- wish there was a way to render fonts XP-style in Win7, but it doesn't seem like it.

win7 can configure cleartype for your screen. i think typing cleartype into search should allow you to configure it with some simple "which one you like more" pics so that it fits you best. other than that, you can still disable it (but i hate old school. correctly configured cleartype should reduce your fatigue, and enhances your reading up to 20% (done with different independent, rigorous testings).


so i suggest you to drop your xp partition to
gain space
get better thread management for your audio jobs to have less chance of dropouts if cpu usage is high
get better memory management to not have to fear audio dropouts in case of high memory usage and paging happening
have a ui that doesn't touch your cpu, so 100% of the cpu is for your music production
have an os that does not let most of your drivers touch kernel space (ring0), and thus does not allow drivers to crash the os, only maybe the application.

and

have an os that allows you to quickly search for samples directly in the startmenu, and drag'n'dropping them onto live. much faster than the live-internal search (that is one main usability reason for me )

Uh. Yeah, the XP UI runs on the CPU and takes about 0.5% of it. I can run Live with up to 40% CPU load on 48 samples audio buffer/32 samples plugin buffer without dropouts, so XP does something right about thread scheduling. I am not seeing any performance gains in Win7, in fact, dropouts start a bit sooner. While it's true that aero runs on the GPU, not all of UI can be offloaded (still, not a significant tax on the CPU). Cleartype is a separate issue from virtual pixel tech; there's configurable cleartype in XP. You can have indexed search in XP via an addon or 3rd party (google desktop works fine for me). I've been running XP for 9 years and have it optimized and configured with dozens of custom shortcuts, it's very fast and convenient for me. All that said, I am sure for the most part Win7 can be made just as convenient and there is no reason not to use Win7 if your audio drivers are up-to-date.

(As for partitions, I have 8 in total, including two sets of different linux installs. Disk space is pretty cheap these days).

not seeing the improvements doesn't mean they're not there, dude.

and the ui can take much more than 0.1% of your cpu esp. if something hangs.

anyways, people that don't want to learn to improve their knowledge and base their judgment on this, don't want to.

well, disk space might be cheap. but i prefer fast, expensive disks, as they improve the performance of my systems (and their stability in case of drop or vibration, and silence my systems). so while you rock tons of os', i have just one. but that one does all i want, need, and can do, and performs much better than yours. ssd ftw.

what ever. i gave you valid, fact based information on what points win7 is better at than xp, and you deny for personal reasons. off you go. hope you feel well that way.