Thumbs down on Vista
A friend of mine stopped by last night so I could help him set up his new laptop to record. It is a decked out HP worstation with 64-bit dual core AMD, 1GB Ram, you know. . . stacked. The one thing that made me a little wary was that it had Vista running. I figured, "hey I'm a pro ain't I?" and jumped right in anyway. We were installing his Sonar 6 Producer Edition and the initial install went just fine.
So I open Sonar and it doesn't see any drivers for the internal soundcard. I mess with the settings a bit and no dice. I am a heavy Sonar user so I know Cakewalk has said that the latest version 6.2 was the one they labelled as "ready for Vista." So I download the appropriate updates and start installing.
As I install the first update I get some warnings telling me that the software may not be safe and it needs permission to continue. Ok I remember those from the early days with XP, no big deal. Then during install the OS starts to go a little crazy. 9 alert windows popped up all saying that the program may not have installed properly. I press ok on all of them and get back to the installer which prompts me saying "update complete." WTF
So anyways after both updates the program still doesn't recognize the drivers. After some tweaking, and putting it in a mode I assume would not work. I at least get it to play (the transport would not move before) but the sound is extremely low during playback, almost to the point of inaudability. Also while in this mode windows that Sonar would open up acted strangely and would sometimes not let me change certain options.
So at this point I've figured out that it is the soundcard drivers. I'm fairly confident that it will work for the ASIO drivers his interface uses so he's not out of options just yet. Hopefully the the sound card company will update their drivers soon so he can use Sonar on the go.
My main beef was with the breakdown in useability of the preference windows in Sonar and the increased amount of warning windows. These are problems with the OS. Windows Vista --- boourns, get fixed.
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