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[Ronny]

robdarling@mail.com wrote on Tue, 24 August 2004 10:29

I'm at the flip side on Dell- I recently was setting up a client's system with a couple of Dells and had excellent customer service. As for the toy appearance of windows- just change it. As for the windows organizing audio files- just tell it not to and to not ask again when you pop in a cd.

I did change it.

As far as windows organizing audio files, when you can show me how to drag a .cda song from D drive cd player to C drive Windows hard disk, instead of just getting a shortcut and without having to go through a DAE program, let me know. I like the old Windows where it treated audio .cda as just any other file that Gates didn't think that I was too stupid to organize myself. You can forget about changing file names to full path, that does nothing, the shortcut still shows and that's all that will drag and drop. XP Pro is setup for a consumer, not a professional, but we all know how easy it is to stick the term Pro on piece of shit software. I'm going with a Carillion next time.

[bblackwood]

Ronny wrote on Tue, 24 August 2004 22:16

I'm going with a Carillion next time.

I'm curious, what does Carillion do to access/address audio files that you can't?

[Ronny]

bblackwood wrote on Wed, 25 August 2004 09:03

Ronny wrote on Tue, 24 August 2004 22:16 I'm going with a Carillion next time. I'm curious, what does Carillion do to access/address audio files that you can't?

Can't really say about the file thing, Brad as I don't have that much information on the Carillion. My complaint is with the whole XP system. From what I've been hearing about the Carillion's, if true, they are a much more stable platform for audio apps. Maybe I just got a lemon, not sure, but I didn't have near the problems with Win 98. I'm still running my Dell Win 98 for some apps, but the processor is much slower. Also some of my newer audio apps won't run on the old Dell, so I'm a bit stuck with XP. Many people love XP, but my stand alone editors are much more stable than both my XP and 98 DAW's are and I'd like to see the same reliability/stability in a PC platform. I was expecting more from XP as I went 5 years from the last upgrade and don't see anything that is better.

[TotalSonic]

I'm a big proponent of rolling your own for DAW's.  One of the big reasons is that you can choose all of the individual components to make sure that everything is quality and fully compatible with your pro sound card - and that the OS is configured so everything is as streamlined as possible - so that performance is reliable and glitch free.  Obviously the needs of a multitracking or virtual instrument machine are a lot more than just a mastering DAW - but if you actually want to be able to do some heavy lifting with your DAW roll your own is the only way to go as far as I'm concerned.  The other reason is that by building a custom box you really learn what's going on with the guts of the thing making trouble shooting a lot easier to do than if you have to rely on an outsiders "tech support".  Of course - OMMV.

As far as Win98/Me - I don't think this is a good choice for a DAW at all this OS does not handle threading priorities correctly - in fact it's not really a true 32bit OS but a 32bit shell over a 16bit OS (btw - those bits I'm referring deal with buss throughput and have nothing to do with audio bits).

XP has one major thing that disturbs me: the activation scheme.  To me when I turn on my computer I want it to work - period.  The idea that after I've swapped my C drive 3 tmes I have to make a phone call or go online for an activation code(and I think the best policy is to  keep DAWs completely off of the net) just rubs me completely the wrong way. Even though this is a "tiny inconvenience" if I have alternatives - I'll use them.  For this reason I've stuck with Win2k for all my DAW boxes.

For apps like Sonar, which depend on the Windows Kernel Mixer then you'll get better performance from XP - but for the app I use, SAWStudio, I did a test with a dual boot Win2k/XP system and found absolutely no improvements in it's performance whatsoever from using XP.  I'm sure at some point there will be a reason for me to actually want to "upgrade" - it just hasn't happened yet -

Best regards,
Steve Berson