Thanks Pete, actually the problem was as usual Microsoft’s buggy code. I thought let’s try and see what happens if I change my Microsoft account password, and that worked. After that, I have no problem accessing my PC shares on my Mac.
Well, erm, that’s quite a bold statement 
Pete
Microsoft
Especially to someone who actually works at MS!
Not necessarily…Daisy Chain…
You could ad-hoc a direct connection from the Mac with one port to the PC with two ports.
If/when the Mac needs to get to the rest of the LAN/Router, or out to the internet it could go through the PC>Router>Modem.
If your router can do it, that’s great though
I might be advocating overkill, but I’m thinking since you have the hardware and you’re using massive orchestral templates, you might enjoy hosting instruments on the PC, and doing the Composition/Mixing on the Mac. You can still host plugins on the Mac too of course…and nothing is stopping you from running a DAW on the PC when you like as well (can even sync both instances of Cubase).
If you want the Mac to be ‘portable’, put some lighter instruments that don’t push all the fancy articulations and 3 or more ‘samples per sounding note from multiple mic positions all going at once’ on that machine to compose with when you’re away.
You can do heavy duty mock-ups when you get back to the studio.
Personally, when I’m working on portable rigs I do alot with Dorico/Sonic Selection/Sketch/HSO/Note Performer. I don’t worry with the big/fancy libraries until I’m pretty much done with the compositional stuff I’d want to do when on the go. I think it’s a waste to get too fancy with the mock-up away from my own listening room/monitors anyway (I suppose headphone mixing is possible, but that’s still something else ‘expensive’ to try to pack and carry).
I sometimes need to play ‘live’ as well. I usually go for a very different set of instruments and host for that sort of thing. Rarely need huge sample-based libraries. For lush ‘backing tracks’ and such, I’ll usually have those pre-rendered into simple stereo files to play or trigger. For live stuff…the simpler the better.
Well, I don’t have an obligation to know where everyone here works. But I’ve been using both Macs and Windows PCs for about 30 years and in my experience Windows has a lot of bugs and still has them to this day. Quite a lot more than macOS. That’s not to say that macOS is perfect, but Windows is a lot buggier.
And Microsoft doesn’t exactly get on my good side when it tries to push on me Microsoft 365 and Game Pass all the freaking time. I just built a PC, for which I had to pay Microsoft $170+tax for the Windows 11 Pro OEM version, which comes in a very outdated DVD from 2023 that needs hours of updates on a very fast machine and a 500 Mbps internet connection, plus several updates during the following days, and after many of those updates, for absolutely no reason, I’m presented once again with the steps to setup the system again, during which I have to decide if I want to submit all my privacy to Microsoft, and tell them twice that I decline Microsoft 365, because when you click on decline the first time, they treat you like a stupid child that will say yes if you ask a second time, and after declining that twice, I also have to decline Game Pass.
I was actually thinking about getting Game Pass for a couple of months, and that outrageous push over and over convinced me not to get it.
Then there’s this: https://youtu.be/eYVPThx7yss?si=cUWV8CcV3cT5s6xX
So I’m sorry, but people hate Microsoft for very good reasons. Unfortunately you can’t build your own PC and install macOS, unless it’s a hacked version that besides being illegal, I doubt it’s very reliable. And Linux is great for specific cases, but most of the software I use only has two choices, macOS or Windows.
Personally I think most criticism of Windows is just rubbish. And when users complain about Microsoft it is again mostly rubbish and the things they deserve criticism for don’t come up.
Well, I don’t spend much time reading other people’s criticism of Windows, I just do my own based on my own experience. Microsoft made good progress with Windows 11 when it comes to usability, but it’s far behind macOS on so many things. I bought a Macbook Pro in 2015 after a few years of not having a Mac, and right off the bat, I was able to send and receive text and SMS messages from it, just by signing in to my iCloud account. Contacts, calendar, and so many things, synced all the time between all my Apple devices.
With Windows 11, 10 years later, I can only send and receive text messages, forget about SMS or group text messages. It’s pathetic.
But most of all, Microsoft to me just seems lazy. They came up with a pretty good looking interface finally, but there’s all these traces of the old ugly interface all over the place. Right click on a file or folder and choose Properties? Get the old white panel that dates back to Windows 95. And you see that awful GUI here and there all over the place. Why don’t they make an effort to have a coherent GUI all across the OS?
And not just visually. If you want to create a 5.1 project in Cubase for example, and you want to send the output to your home theater via HDMI, you can’t enable 5.1 with the new sound settings panel. You have to open the old Control Panel, then double click on the Sound icon, and only then you can configure your HDMI channel output to 5.1, and do it with a “wizard” type of thing that you have to repeat every time you want to enable 5.1 after going back to stereo.
With macOS you have a consistent, coherent GUI across the board. It’s not perfect, and in a few things Windows does a better job, but if you add up all the things in both OS, macOS wins by a landslide.
The complete list you mention here contains not a single bug description, it is all just about usability issues.
Look, when it comes to Windows and MS there is no “win”. There simply isn’t.
It’s a huge OS that dates back decades. The ability to run legacy software and hardware has at least until recently been absolutely incredible. I think one of the drawbacks of that is that’s it is a huge task to overhaul the entire OS in one go. Apple has a different philosophy where it just does things and then if you’re not on board they don’t care, and if you do you pay the literal price for it.
The result of this is that when you complain about things being in an old GUI someone else is going to complain about things having been moved. Seems clear to me that it’s a slow migration that’s happening and MS is getting complaints from both sides.
And the exact same thing is true for usability. You complain about less ecosystem integration. Ok, but first of all Apple as a comparison has complete control over iOS, OSX and the hardware, and more importantly you just complained about handing over privacy. Well guess what, you’re not going to get a more fluid user experience unless you give something up. For every person saying “give me more seamless transitions between X, Y and Z” there’s another complaining about “privacy violations” when that violation is basically just the OS sending and receiving the data needed to make those transitions happen.
And it’s the same with the tighter controls and more automatic updates. What did users complain about endlessly before Win 10? Malware. Actual malware. Viruses, spyware, malware… Now MS has tightened up everything tremendously and I basically never hear anyone complaining about Windows being infected. So again, can’t win: Too much restrictions and too many updates / Too many viruses too little security.
I don’t really know what hardware you’re using, but it sounds convoluted to me.
I mix 5.1 and stereo on Nuendo and watch content on the same computer using the same interface and various software players. I have it all set up to play back whatever I want in either 5.1 or stereo, no switching necessary. My hunch tells me that perhaps you either need to encode 5.1 to get it across HDMI in which case that seems like a hardware / protocol problem, or your solution would be to simply get a third party software to handle the i/o at the OS level, like VB-Audio’s solutions.
I’m talking about the HDMI port in my graphics card, kind of like the HDMI port in my Mac Studio. But in my Mac is much easier to change that output between stereo and 5.1, or even 7.1 if I want to.
I’m sure that if you have a dedicated audio card to output 5.1 or 7.1 it has its own control panel that makes that easier. But if you just rely on the HDMI output, Windows can’t even switch from stereo to more channels without using a grossly outdated control panel from the 90s.
And it’s not a matter of whether or not they will switch to the new interface; I read that all of that is in the plans. What I can’t stand is why do they take so long to do it. It’s not like we’re talking about a small company. They can hire as many people as they want to make it happen, so why keep around these crappy looking pieces of old Windows when they can have a good looking new interface all across the board? With macOS, the look is consistent. If you choose dark mode, everything is dark. The only exception is the installer that some companies use for their software, which doesn’t support dark mode. But in macOS, you choose dark, and every single window of every single program is dark. With Windows, that’s not the case.
Does Windows 8 ring a bell?
Yeah, it was the Windows Me of the 2010’s. 
Sure, but I did mention a bug before. The one where I couldn’t access my shares from my Mac until I changed my Microsoft password. And no, I don’t remember all the bugs Windows ever had, and part of it is because since 2015 I mostly used macOS, with my Windows PC as a secondary machine. But every once in a while, a bug emerges, and I’m sure that now that I built a new PC and using Windows all the time, I’m going to start seeing more and more.
Among them, the fact that if I have a window open in This PC (the one that shows all the drives) and I want to map a network drive, I can’t because the menu for it extends upwards to outside the monitor:
And if I right click where the drives are, I don’t have a choice to do that. So if I want to map a network drive, I need to bring the window down, so when the stupid menu goes upwards (when there’s plenty of space to go downwards), I can see all the choices. Now, are you going to tell that nobody at Microsoft spotted this bug? It’s just laziness. macOS has its share of bugs, but you don’t see these kinds of things.
Apple doesn’t allow other operating systems into that walled garden between devices. It’s not something Microsoft can solve for.
Pete
I just replicated that menu bug here. So I checked feedback hub and I see it reported. No idea why / how it made it through, but there are always bugs that don’t make the cut for getting fixed before a release. Yes, they are annoying and look unprofessional. But no, it’s not laziness, and yes, you do see things like that on macOS and iOS/iPadOS as well. For some reason, even in the forums I read, folks tend to be very forgiving of those on mac, even when they are nearly identical issues.
But the problem you had accessing shares from the mac, and it being fixed by changing your password, sounds like it could have been a cached credential issue somewhere. I’ve seen no reports of this anywhere. But it could have easily been on the mac side as well. I’d rate that as undetermined.
Pete
Microsoft
Well I use a PC and keep it very lean. It is after all my studio in a box. Why would I want all sorts of other rubbish like messaging and 5.1 7.1 from hdmi. Best to keep the consumer stuff away from a serious studio machine.
By the way you can log into iCloud on a PC. That’s how I transfer between my iPad/ iPhone back and forth. Very simple.
Of course not, but the guy often signs his posts with “Microsoft”. So, me being me, when I see someone recite their credentials, I check their profile.
Fair enough. But trust me, if lack of integration with my iPhone was my only gripe with Microsoft, I wouldn’t complain much about it.
No. I never found a pathetic bug like the one to map a network drive, even in previous versions of Windows. Mac OS (the classic one) was a disaster, in fact Windows 98 was far better, I know because I suffered a PowerMac G3 (the blue one) and Windows 98 was far more stable even on cheap hardware.
But Mac OS X and its successor macOS (a naming I find ridiculous because it’s like saying mac and then shouting OS!!), all had glitches, and still do, but nothing as ridiculous as this.
Sorry, but that to me is Windows’ fault. I know because the credentials were not even saved in Keychain. The ones for my old PC were, but not the new one. It seems obvious to me that for some reason Windows had created a file sharing password that was not the Microsoft’s account password. So when I typed the latter in the macOS connect to server dialog, Windows rejected because it just wasn’t the actual one.
However, at no point I made the Windows account a local one, or tried to change the local password in any way. To me it’s downright irresponsible for Microsoft to force people to use the same login and password for their machine and their online account. In the Apple world, you have that only in the mobile devices that use iOS and iPad OS, but macOS has its own separate login and password, and you just login to your iCloud account to do all the syncing. But if hackers get a hold of your iCloud account, they don’t have access to your Mac.
