I find the new OS more usable and, with the right software and drivers, even more stable. But I see no reason to avoid SP1, unless you have a specifically incompatible setup, now that SP1 and driver updates have brought some maturity to the platform. If you’ve got a system running XP and you’re happy, I’d stick with it. I’ll repeat my current recommendation on Windows. SONAR 8 Preview: Instrument Tracks, Beatscape Instrument, Transient Shaper, Enhanced Performance, Other Goodies If SONAR 8’s music features are what interest you, see our first look: I also sincerely hope other developers on Windows will start to invest more time in some of these details.

But for those of you who, like us, are interested in why some things work, this is a good place to start. If you just want to know whether your software will work, this is overkill. (Noel, who has a resume as a Linux programmer as well as leading the top Windows audio developer’s technical efforts, has been very frank in the past about Vista, walking us through changes before launch and real world experiences one year later.)Īs Noel puts it, this is “more minute detail than most sane people would care to read,” but that’s just the kind of detail we like. With the help of CTO Noel Borthwick, we were able to go through internal engineering documents and communication and get the full story. SONAR 7 was already out in front with support for Vista’s audio plumbing, but SONAR 8 promises quite a bit more. I wanted to know more about how Cakewalk’s SONAR 8 DAW was specifically optimized for Windows Vista.

On a purely technical level, how does Windows Vista work with a leading pro audio application? A lot of that depends on just how much the developer does to tune their software, and to hook into some of the new audio technologies in the OS. That’s where I want my project studio this winter, for sure. Vista, launched in an ice house in Toronto.

Sonar 8 down