Why Vista sounds worse: Changes to how the latest version of
Windows handles audio playback has caused unexpected
quality issues for musicians and consumers alike,
reports Tim Anderson: Vista music
The art of noise: professional musicmakers tend to bypass the
Windows audio engine, creating a further problem if they are
using Vista Photograph: Getty Images
Just what does a glitch sound like? That's easy, explains Steve
Ball: "Glitches during music playback can sound like a loud 'pop'
or like a brief slice of silence where your music should have
been." As the senior program manager for sound in Windows Vista,
Ball knows that nobody wants that.
So it must have been difficult for him to author a blog post
explaining why Vista suffers from precisely that problem -
glitches on some systems during music playback or composition.
Boiled down, his explanation (tinyurl.com/ywgm5t) is: because
Windows has to do lots of things at once. His best news? "Windows
developers have made significant progress in reducing glitching.
For example, music playback on an otherwise lightly loaded system
can be generally as smooth as [a] $20 (pounds 10) CD player."
But that's hardly what someone using a pounds 1,000 computer wants
to hear. Among the scores of comments, one remarked: "My mobile
phone can play MP3s, while I surf the web, on a call and text
message; all without any glitches."
So what's gone wrong? Our investigation suggests a combination of
wholesale changes to the way Vista handles audio, late bugfixes,
and problems in drivers written by the makers of soundcards.
For music professionals, though, it's a dealbreaker. Will Benger,
a musician who also works at Making Waves Audio, a music
technology retailer, advises his customers to stick with XP.
"Vista is riddled with issues with existing software packages and
existing hardware," he says. "If you've got problems with
recording audio, you might not get a second chance. You can't
sell a system to a professional studio if you don't know for sure
that it's going to work."
That's a problem in the professional music market, where Apple has
a significant share - one-third or more - of the market. Apple
went through similar struggles with musicians in the shift to
OSX; but that was more than five years ago. Now it's Microsoft's
turn.
No cakewalk
Not everyone has problems with audio in Vista, but it is still
perplexing. How could Microsoft set out to improve the audio
system, yet end up making it worse?
Noel Borthwick, chief technology officer for Cakewalk, which
creates music software for both the consumer and professional
markets, recalls his company's first involvement with Vista - in
2003. "Microsoft had a Vista audio summit - it was called
Longhorn at the time - and invited several vendors for private
meetings to put forward the specification for audio in Vista and
try and collect feedback."
Fundamental changes were on the way: many of Cakewalk's products
used a programming interface called DirectSound, which was being
phased out. "We went back and re-invented all the stuff that we
did in our applications," Borthwick says.
In 2005 there was another conference. "Microsoft presented Vista
as it was going to be released. We found some fundamental flaws.
WaveRT [see panel] is a new mechanism by which audio drivers
would perform really well. There were a couple of flaws in the
design. We pointed out the flaws before Vista shipped."
Microsoft made changes - but they came so late in Vista's
development that a number of companies released drivers for
WaveRT used the old, inefficient model. "So there's a fundamental
flaw right there for consumer audio," Borthwick says.
In fact, Vista's new audio setup lays numerous traps for driver
authors. Most off-the-shelf PCs have integrated soundcards,
produced by companies such as Realtek and Analog Devices, makers
of SoundMAX. Borthwick says these tended to have older WaveRT
drivers.
Users of add-on sound cards such as those from Creative Labs
suffered different problems: those drivers often required an
emulation system to work in Vista, a sure recipe for poor
performance.
"The end-user experience on consumer audio devices is pretty bad
on Vista for the most part," says Borthwick. (Creative Labs
describes its own struggles with Vista's new architecture at
tinyurl.com/qhzyy).
Professional musicians face different issues. For performance
reasons, professional audio drivers tend to bypass the Windows
audio engine, using de facto standards such as Steinberg's ASIO
(Audio Stream Input/Output).
"Nothing really changes in how you talk to an ASIO driver in Vista
as compared to XP," Borthwick says. "The problem under Vista is
overhead in the operating system itself. It takes more CPU to
achieve the same result. You tend to get clicks or pops or noise."
Things can only get . . .
Vista's audio is getting better. Drivers are improving, and the
imminent Service Pack 1 apparently fixes some bugs, such as one
that affected timing on MIDI (used by professionals to integrate
sequencers).
Experts agree that Vista's audio has potential. "The WaveRT driver
architecture can produce better performance," says Robin Vincent
of Rain Computers, which builds PCs for musicians. "However, no
one supports that. That's the problem."
Steinberg's Lars Baumann believes Vista will improve. "We think
Vista is going to be the future platform for audio applications,
but it will take more time."
Another promising area is 64-bit computing. "A 64-bit operating
system breaks down a lot of the barriers to RAM and performance.
It just seems to be really hard to move people to it," Vincent
says.
"Vista still has promise," Borthwick says. "Microsoft needs to
clean up the loose ends in Vista to make it deliver. I still
think it's possible."
____________________________________________________________
Copyright (C) Guardian Newspapers Ltd, 1984-1997
Regards
Gordon
From glorious Devon, England
