Windows 8 & C6.5

Steinberg Lounge
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Trialling C6.5 on Windows 8 & might I say very nice.

Refined, excellent customization of the OS UI and C6 is very stable.

Even the cursor tracks well across the screen!

Will not go back to Vista & hopefully can skip W7 since I believe once it is RTM it will support all Windows 7 drivers natively.

Update: Windows installed my (native) firewire driver and I was getting crackling audio when scrolling (hark back to early Vista days, this even happened when you moved the mouse over the application) but upon installing the Legacy driver, stability is now obtained and I will likely be good to go until RTM.

No graphical glitches or weird inconsistencies on the Cubase side and because it’s Win8 you get all the advantages of full RAID support, OS imaging and even system restores via the internet.

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Thanks for reporting, good to know Cubase is futureproof :smiley:

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Microsoft have also done quite well in this 3rd iteration of Windows 8.

Multi-monitor handling is vastly improved in Windows 8 (never mind metro you can delete all those widgets) as are many of the general windows functions such as the taskbar and process handling.

If you are game you can even remove previous Windows installations via drive cleanup which previously required complex setting of permissions and commands.

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mute, it sounds like you’re going from Vista straight to Win 8, am I right? In that case, I’m sure Windows 8 is an improvement for you. Vista, while it had some great ideas, was critically bloated and in dire need of streamlining.

I just wanted to note that in my own tests on Windows 8 I’ve confirmed that it’s actually a little more RAM and resource intensive than Windows 7- which shouldn’t be a surprise, but a lot of people have been saying “Wow, Win 8 is so fast and lean!” when it is actually slightly less so than Win 7… it’s still a lot better than Vista, though.

However, in my own tests, I uncovered something really odd (and possibly concerning). The DPC Latency checker that many folks use to diagnose their PCs for latency issues reports that a computer running Windows 8 has an average latency over eight times greater than Windows 7 running on that same PC (with both configurations running at “high performance” mode).

I had been hoping my tests were an anomaly, but I’ve been hearing on other forums that my findings were consistent with others. I’ve also heard this may have to do with some power saving changes in Windows 8 (and power saving in Windows generally means reduced performance). This difference has been observed by others in tools other than the DPC Latency checker, but I still haven’t seen any real-world DAW performance tests yet between Win 7 and Win 8 on the exact same hardware.

Also, driver compatibility, in my own experience, is better on Windows 7 than on Windows 8. Again, shouldn’t be a surprise, as Win 8 architecture has changed a bit, and they’ve also pulled some old drivers and OS features for housekeeping. There are even some really weird (likely accidental) omissions on Windows 8, in the FireWire and optical drive areas. I’ve been working on Win 8 for nine months and I can’t tell you how many times it installed on a PC and it didn’t even install the driver for the SAME OPTICAL DRIVE THAT WAS USED TO INSTALL THE OS. I had to set up network shares if I needed to install anything from a disc after initial setup. I am hardly the only one who experienced this, either.

So anyway, for maximum compatibility and performance, Windows 7 is probably still objectively the place to be. Speaking purely subjectively though, as someone who’s actually had to develop software for Win 8, it is my least favorite desktop OS that Microsoft has ever produced. They have removed a bunch of features and introduced a lot more clicking and hovering to the workflow. If Windows 8 is seriously the way Microsoft is going with their desktop OSes… well let’s just say I’ve been making sure to download the Mac OS versions of all VSTs I’ve purchased this year.

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Anything to get away from XP as far as I’m concerned and I know there’s people who still only use their computers for single tasks but that ain’t me.

The only thing good about XP in my view is NTFS.

So, as for Windows 8, I totally dig Metro actually, but saying that I can imagine a relatively poor experience might be had for single monitor users.

Most of my apps have installed and as for drivers only one audio card worked (the rest will only install as UAA devices) but my video card managed to slip through being supported by Microsoft (AMD have said that my series can be optimized no further).

I just can’t help but be excited by the prospect of painless system restores and secure boots via UEFI. Heck, it even allows you to image and restore your system natively!

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As an aside, can you believe when Gorden Letwin proposed the predecessor to NTFS (HPFS) he was poo-poo’d in Redmond because no one believed people needed another file system for Intel based OS’s?

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What about XP setting the precedent for consumer Windows not being “OS in an OS”?

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The past is now the past, the future is evidently here and it’s awesome what MS have done.

Although my work is not as a recording engineer (MIDI programming only) which admittedly does make things easier, as I can set the system up for maximum latency in order to avert potential hiccups.

My firewire stack is operating with the same efficiency as it would under Windows 7 (a supported OS for my interface) via legacy 1394 and Cubase is performing as you’d expect in a supported environment without any interruption from either the network or OS.

Idle processes are consuming less than %1 CPU and 200MB of RAM, with a browser, broadband connection, instant messenger, GPU manager and host processes.

Update: I set latency to 4 milliseconds (lowest my device can handle) and no cracks or pops with the TC Virus synth and a Saffire 26 i/o @ 44.1Khz on separate connections. Even better there is barely any glitch when changing between presets, which may or may not have occurred under Windows 7.

There is a bit of crackling on save whilst playing, which when compared to the first iterations of LongHorn bodes very well in my view, since back then it would crackle even when moving the mouse to the point where it would bring the system down.

DPC shows 1000 micro seconds of latency whatever that means but after a while the audio can garble meaning you must restart the DAW (not computer) which could be resultant from reflections in the firewire cable so it’s a production machine of sorts, at least for what I use it for.

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Its geek hour!!! :ugeek:

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I was roundly criticized in a previous thread, so I thought I’d make an effort to be on the money in terms of syntax.

As it relates to Win8 and C6, there is still the usual issue of waking to a different sample rate, which I guess could be due to Legacy 1394 but my personal suspicion is Windows Sounds :imp:

I have found that if using the machine for tasks other than a DAW, it’s best to have a second audio interface for Windows Sounds and Communication Devices, since the audio stream may be interrupted with a nasty burst of white noise coming from the Kernel Mixer but this is not so different to previous versions of Windows however I’ve not had to be so vigilant in turning things off (or on) in order to avert a potential catastrophe or otherwise access the audio stream and/or save my ears, speakers or both.

On the whole Windows 8 is very nice to use. A taskbar for each monitor is excellent and active corners of each screen make it easy to access functions of the OS. Also, you can “peek” at the desktop from Metro and vice versa.

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Windows 8 is getting some bad press in some circles:

“> Too many cooks” — “an unmitigated disaster” — “the worst thing since fried Vista”. Oh dear. Some people really have it in for Windows 8. Wait, so do I. And there are good reasons.

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This:

type of system
although for use with mixers in a live environment could be the future of a sort in studios where the engineer can walk around with his virual mixer (i-Pad) and chat about details to musicians.
Having had a little experience with the Presonus stager mixing system on a few recent live gigs I found it quite a communicative way to do things although it might not be quite that handy in a studio I can see uses applicable to engineers / producers who work with large ensmbles.
The Presonus system didn’t do away with the desk though. As technology usually takes one task away only to replace it with another, or two.