Thumbs down on Vista

[dagosto]

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.

[mikegee]

yikes!

i was thinking... a good solution for vista users, is at least temporarily, dual boot xp and vista on the same hard drive. anybody out there know if this is do-able?

[dolivas]

Originally Posted by mikegee

yikes!

i was thinking... a good solution for vista users, is at least temporarily, dual boot xp and vista on the same hard drive. anybody out there know if this is do-able?

I don't think they have to go that far. Maybe if they run it under Windows-XP compatibility mode something like that.

[Matthew]

Just buy a mac.

(This coming from a guy who used a laptop running vista to type this.)

[dagosto]

Originally Posted by Matthew

Just buy a mac.

no

(coming from a guy typing on an iBook)

[Nubus]

Dan, did you get Carson up and running? (typing on Linux)

[Matthew]

Dan got something against apple? Sonar doesn't run in it...that may have something to do with it?

[dagosto]

The problem I have with apple is that you get locked into the brand for everything. Buncha crap if you ask me.

I am currently building up a dual core machine for about $500 that will be able to do just as much as an apple three times the price. Oh, and it will be running XP SP1.

And no Nubus, I haven't had a chance to look at Carson's computer since.

[Matthew]

Oh, I agree with you on the price and getting locked into the hardware. I am not solo with mac. When I get my new mac book I will be building a pc along with that for about 400. It will have more punch for about fifteen hundred less. The main reason I am getting a mac is because I think Pro Tools runs better under it.

[whinylittlerunt]

I'd stay far away from Vista right now if you're in the pro-audio world. WAY too many incompatibilities to list and it's been driving the end users nuts.

However, at the same time us Mac users got shafted too with the intel processors, so all the software has to be upgraded to universal binary. So in a way, this problem along with the Vista problems are related somewhat, though I find that on the Mac the programs run smoothly from the start and rarely crash anyway. I'm waiting for my Cubase 4 software to arrive - it's killing me that i can't run my old version of SX on my new mac for the time being.