My Vista Voyage

Just sharing what I found on my voyage to Vista. I took the plunge (second time) now that the M-Audio firewire drivers are out for Vista. Alas 32bit only.

Overall summary: its is working very well perf is snappy, couple of wierd things. I can do 98% of what I did on XP. I can understand why true pro's might need to wait a bit, but for us bleading edge hobbyists's, I am all well and good with it. Here are the bits and pieces.

Vista itself. A-. Upgrade took a while, about 2hrs. Its a fairly new machine, Core 2 duo and all, and a nice new hard drive, but I have a fair amount of software on my machine and that may have been taxing it. Upgrade itself went fine. I have a triple monitor config, and hence two video cards. One of them was older and not compatible with Vista, so a trip to Fry's and $60 was required to fix that. Took the opportunity to go from a hybrid ATI/NVidia solution to a complete NVidia solution. That was worth the $60 itself as there are fewer drivers on the box and the video seems snappier. All my pure midi stuff (M-Auido 02 keyboard, Yamaha S80) worked just fine under Vista with SONAR. Couple Vista tips: turn sidebar off. Turn Areo off, at least transparency.

Sonar itself. A-. I had Sonar 6.2.1 PE installed before the upgrade, so it should have put the Vista aware bits in place beforehand. And low and behold it did. Cake did a great job of working out the details and getting them in the right place. No wierdness with folders or anything. Nicely done. There are still a few bugs here and there...2 I hit right away. 1) I have a couple of "MONSTER" projects that have every synth/plug/vst I own in them as a track or in track. It seemed to have trouble loading a couple of those, but no probs with my "real world" stuff though. 2) Dunno why I did this cause I usually never bother, but I went to set the track icon for one of my synths, and poof, SONAR just disappeared. No errors, no warnings, no nothing. But when running my projects SONAR is doing just fine, CPU utilization seems to be on par with what I had with XP, some glitches with the M-Audio drivers, which are beta and to be expected somewhat..see next item.

M-Audio Drivers. C+. The Vista drivers for M-Audio are in beta, and they are indeed beta quality. A minor firmware upgrade is incorporated into their installer, which is kind of funky. It is still a flaky install and everyone who uses theses should reboot 5 or 6 time to be sure they are stable :-). But there are a few nice things to be had here, there are a lots less "resets" of the audio system. I've always used ASIO mode, as this seemed to be the mode that M-Audio builds there stuff for, and ASIO works fine here on Vista. I tried WDM and got a LOT of dropouts, even on simple stuff consisitng of only a couple tracks. Beta driver problem, maybe, but M-Audio doesn't seem to do due diligence to WDM so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for those drivers to work well here. The WDM stuff never really worked all that well under XP either.

Line 6 POD-XT, Bass POD, Toneport UX2. A+. Everything works great here. Gearbox 3.1 and all other Line6 stuff in my collection was flawless on Vista. These guys are ahead of the curve. I hear some folk are waiting on their 64 bit offerings...me too.

EZDrummer. A. Seems to be excellent so far. Good sounds, no latency, pops or other issues. Only reason it isn't an A+ is because I haven't tried the 8 channel version in SONAR with different effects on each channel. Decent CPU utilization as well, although load times could still be faster (known issue even on XP).

Battery3. C- Lots of pops, crackles etc. I've had a love/hate relationship with this software for 3 years, and right now its on the hate side. If I pare it down to a minimalist kit I can get it to work, but its still chewing lots of CPU cycles.

TruePianos. B. A few pops, crackes etc. I had to turn the "Multi-CPU Engine" off on the settings and then everything is perfectly smooth. I had a bit of the crackling problem under XP, but it was more noticable with Vista. Was tempted to give this rating an A- but I hate leaving CPU horsepower on the floor...

Rapture and Dimension Pro. A+. Not a hiccup of any kind. Worked great in a couple of my "MONSTER" configurations.


Stuff in my kit that I haven't tested yet, but I will post a follow on to my voyage include: Stylus RMX, Jamstix, Cakewalk Studio Instruments, Project5, EZPlayer.

Stay tuned...

You could have a very good point. Time for some more testing...

ORIGINAL: Boogie

If I'm reading this right: Did you upgrade/install Vista over an existing XP install? If so, you're braver than I.

Indeed. I've never seen an upgrade install work even half as well as a reformat/reinstall.

@ the OP; I'd reinstall Battery if I were you. Update to 3.0.2 and run it in standalone at least once before trying to use it as a plugin. Battery in Sonar on my machine (I'm still XP) takes 2% CPU unloaded, and up to 8% or so with the larger kits and 16 mono outs with 32 voices playing at once.

@ Antler; I've heard from more than one developer/manufacturer that turning Aero off is the way to go. Sure, it transfers the load to the GPU, but then the GPU hogs up a lot of bandwidth that could be used for much better things such as other I/O tasks.

ew

Been using Vista since Beta 2 ... never seen any advantages to turning iff Aero unless your video cards lack Shader 2.0 (or is it 3.0?) support. What are the two graphics cards you have?

BTW don't expect good performance at low latency.

BTW don't expect good performance at low latency.

My latency settings seem to be fine so far. I did install that KD that CJ mentioned on another thread, maybe that helped. With the ASIO setting its working great. WDM not so much, but again I think thats beta M-Audio drivers not Vista.

steveng57

As far as a fresh install goes I don't think you really have a choice in the matter. I tried to do a clean install. Vista would not allow it. Its not like xp where all you had to do was point it to the install disk. It had to be physically on the disk. Go figure! How do you like Rapture? I saw a add they had it coupled with another software at a reduced cost.

WDM has been flawless on both 2K and XP here with my Audiophile, even down to 1.5ms. I'm not sure what your problem was but you didn't specify what particular M-Audio hardware youre using. I can't vouch for Vista since I haven't tried Vista on my DAW and am not particularly inspired to do so yet after trying it on my net PC.

I am using the ProjectMix I/O. WDM has never really been stable on my box with my gear. Its fine if you doin't load it up too much, but by the third track it has been flaky. ASIO I can really push and not have any problems. Not sure of the technical reasons but I never have to futz too much with ASIO to get the latency to sound right, even if the numbers are higher than WDM.

Can't find "Back and Forth" anywhere? Anyone know where it is supposed to be? Happy to run test for you guys and get some numbers, but hey, its working here. Did some rough stuff on it last night and it all went pretty well, lotsa tracks, synths, EZD, TruePianos, some effects. Only trouble I had was messing with the Melodyne plug demo. It seems to not like Vista much at this point.

hmmm...my ASIO buffers are always at 256 and have a SONAR reported latency of 5.8msec. And there certainly isn't anything that is noticable audibly in terms of latency problems, at least to my untrained ear :-). Just ran a test where I had 8 tracks, same bunch of synths, and tried resizing, moving clips even while playing, and everthing was fine.

However, I set the buffer to 128 which had a 2.9msec latency in SONAR, and things started to fall apart. But then, they did on XP as well, which is why i run the buffer always at 256.

RnRmaChine

Just curious did you buy the upgrade version or did you get a whole new OS? If it was the upgrade version how did you install it? Because I tried to do the clean install it would not let me so I have to reload xp back on again.

It should let you clean install, just you might have to enter the XP key if I am guessing right. I remeber 98se upgrade was that way. I got a computer with XP media center on it and they were offering the free upgrade to Vista, had to mail in and all that jazz. When I got the disc I just did the clean install so technically it is and upgrade. But you can never do a clean install while in windows. It must be done from a "cd boot" what surprises me is that it didn't give you the option and then reboot to it. I didn't bother with it that way cause I know from past experience that it needs to be from a cd boot so maybe it wouldn't have given me the option had I tried to install it while I was in windows... if you are following me here.

You will want to go into your Bios and have CD drive boot option selected BEFORE the hardrive though if it isn't. You want to boot from CD (DVD) and follow the options. So do this... SAVE everything you want to keep. From recordings/audio/drum tracks do not forget anything, bookmarks for your Browser if any.. save it all to another comp or some type of storage. Then put the Disc into your main drive and restart the comp. Enter bios by hitting delete or F2 whatever is your command to go in there, have CD boot as the first option for the comp to boot from, save changes and exit.. then when you see "press any key to boot from CD" or something along that nature, do it. Vista should now start running all needed stuff to do a clean install. [IF your copy of Vista wants you to prove a proper upgrade it will be shortly after you enter the Vista key that it will ask for a qualifing upgrade key (just guessing this), that is when you enter your XP key or maybe ask you to put the XP disc into the drive, I can't remember for sure.] It did not ask me for this but mine was a rebate type deal where I had to send in all the XP info in order to get the Vista.

Hope this helps!

EDIT: Rob801 I am betting that the version changes forced you to do this because of certain criteria causes the upgrade option to not be an option. I read about that on the Vista homepage. Only some XP's can be upgraded to certain Vista's. For instance XP WMC is only 32 bit... ANY Vista OS going to 64 bit would force you too clean install. Also, if I remember right you can't have XP home and upgrade to Vista premium. Must be a clean install. There is more at Windows Vista homepage.

I think if you buy an 'upgrade' version, you have to have xp installed on your hard disk before you can install vista. If you buy a 'full' version, you can either upgrade or do a clean install by booting off the dvd.

I just got off the phone with tech support at microsoft AND pre sales support. IF you have a windows XP cd you can clean install the upgrade version... this is the way is was from 95 to 98 to (ME too) XP and now to Vista.. I knew it. ANYONE who says different is blowing smoke up your +++ and can be ignored. YOU MUST HAVE A CD WITH WINDOWS XP ON IT BECAUSE THE VISTA UPGRADE IS GOING TO ASK YOU TO INSERT THIS CD/DVD. IF YOU DO YOU CAN CLEAN INSTALL THE UPGRADE VERSION.

ORIGINAL: kp

Been there with an upgrade version - doesn't work. You need to have XP on the hard drive, *not* a CD of it.

There's a way round it though, which is a bit hacky, but it can be done: there's a piece about a few weeks back on www.windowssecrets.com

You should have stated "Been there with an upgrade version and it did not work for me" because what you stated is not true... you did it wrong or it was NOT a windows OS disc, or perhaps ya burnt out that cd key from too many installs? I just used an upgrade to clean install ALSO I have been buying upgrades since 3.1. and they ALL require you enter the windows disc that you are upgrading from for clean installs. There may be different circumstances that will make each users experiences in this matter differ. Not to mention I called Microsoft tech support AND pre sales to confirm my recolections of past uses to be of help, you obviously have not called nor looked into this subject in ANY depth or you would actually understand why YOU in particular could not do a clean install instead of claiming NO ONE can, generalizing your situation and them slapping it onto everyone is not helpful at all. Tech and pre sales both say the same thing "Can clean install an upgrade but MUST have an actual windows disc, restore discs DO NOT WORK", If you only have a restore disc then you would have to have it on the hard drive to get an upgrade, Just guessing that is why you could not but I bet I am correct. Again, If you try using a restore disc from a prebuilt computer that is NOT valid, it MUST BE an actual Windows disc, even if OEM it still will work. in order for a clean install

I took that link ya put there, it takes me to subscribe page with no info at all on how to get around clean installing a Vista upgrade. I even subscribed, still nada. So I did the grind search and found this. Is this the link link you are trying to show? More on the Vista upgrade secret I thought I would be of more help and link the actual article I think you are refering too. Took me more time to end up finding that article then it took me to start up the clean install of Vista. It was like you pointed east and west and said China is that way. HAHA (not that bad but I couldn't resist the humor of it)

Also, I wouldn't play games if you do not own the proper upgrade path. Guaranteed one day you will log on and find your Vista is not valid, the term "bait and switch" ring a bell? LOL

Oh well there is why... Vista OEM upgrade.. over an XP OEM... and you are making it sound like someone that runs down to bestbuy and grabs a retail version is going to be in the same boat as you are. ABSOLUTELY NOT, the XP can be be OEM but the VISTA has to be a retail upgrade. That is what I thought we where talking about. The ONLY OEM Vista upgrade that is going to clean install over an OEM XP is one of the rebate upgrades that was going on those few weeks around the release time of Vista. There is the reason why YOU can not clean install "legitimatly". I knew there was a specific reason that was situated to your particular case. So anyone reading this. There is a situation to be wary of, isn't awesome how stuff like this comes out in forums that will help other users understand different situations and then proceed accordingly!!!!

By the way that link leads to nothing again but a broken link, probably not your fault but still wrong information. Probably why the link is unavailable HAHA

SO, let's sum this up here. OEM Vista upgrade over an OEM XP, kp has reported you cannot clean install under this situation. Be wary of this.

But I assure everyone that if you go out and buy the retail upgrade and have an actual windows XP disc (retail or OEM) then you can clean install. Here is the presales number at Microsoft 1-800-426-9400. I would recomend calling this number before going out and buying a retail upgrade so you can cover your butt because each situation can be different. Also microsoft offers a 90 day full tech support with their upgrades if I remember correctly. The VERY nice lady on the phone was very helpful to me and gave me TONS of information pertaining to upgrade paths and things about Vista a person in our shoes would want to know. So I can't recall all the different things she said, I wrote it all down but it seems I lost the paper I wrote it on. lol

EDIT: Just remember to "Boot from CD" when you have the RETAIL Vista upgrade disc in the disc drive. You will be asked if you want to delete partitions, format.. etc... go OEM and now ya know what ya get for your money. NO ability to clean install.