Operating Systems

[Torniojaws]

From what I understand, Ardour is supposed to be quite usable for most things as a Linux DAW:

http://ardour.org

Never gave it a shot though as at one point it seemed like development had ended, but it seems to be active now. Version 3 is going to be released officially soon, and it will feature MIDI editing.

Edit:
Here's a video about using it:

 

[Eddy]

My only problem with XP is the latency, I have played on XP and i get a noticable amount of latency, but when i play through the same interface and guitar but on Vista, I get barely any latency at all, so little i couldn't even notice it...

Funny, for me it's the other way round (Fast track pro usb).

Also I'm not sure why, but I'm having serious playback issues with my W7 laptop. Even when I have nothing else running, I can't even listen to mp3 with foobar without clicks and pops like crazy. This with the onboard soundcard & speakers.

 

[Torniojaws]

Also I'm not sure why, but I'm having serious playback issues with my W7 laptop. Even when I have nothing else running, I can't even listen to mp3 with foobar without clicks and pops like crazy. This with the onboard soundcard & speakers.

That also happens with my RME Fireface 400 when I run it with W7 x64 on my laptop, but not on my desktop computer with W7 x64 Even when I disable absolutely everything on the laptop (Aero, all system sounds, all background apps and services, power scheme to High Performance, CPU throttling off, etc) and just playing back a couple of wav files. What is even stranger, is that those pops and cuts only affect playback, but not recording, eg. if I record something and I hear that click/pop/buzz, there is no glitch in the recorded file. That means the audio playback issue is with the OS, not the hardware/HDD/driver.

And what is EVEN more strange, is that Win7 and Vista are supposed to have the exact same audio engine (and different from WinXP), but I have never had any issues of this sort on Vista, ever, on any system. But on Win7, there are two different systems that have these glitches, and one system without any glitches whatsoever.

 

[Eddy]

That also happens with my RME Fireface 400 when I run it with W7 x64 on my laptop, but not on my desktop computer with W7 x64 Even when I disable absolutely everything on the laptop (Aero, all system sounds, all background apps and services, power scheme to High Performance, CPU throttling off, etc) and just playing back a couple of wav files. What is even stranger, is that those pops and cuts only affect playback, but not recording, eg. if I record something and I hear that click/pop/buzz, there is no glitch in the recorded file. That means the audio playback issue is with the OS, not the hardware/driver.

The clicks and pops also affect any youtube etc. videos playback too. But the thing is, it goes away after a reboot. I just installed some updates and had to reboot and the snapcracklepops went away.

But with the FT, it just does not go away. And I'm having the exact same thing with recording as you do.

 

[John_C]

Having tried both very recently:

Linux, specifically Ubuntu and Kubuntu: No drivers for my Profire 2626 = fail, but i had an EMU-1414 lying around and that worked fine. Some companies are prepared to either make linux drivers or release the information to let others do so. M-audio do neither. I was able to obtain stupidly low latencies with very large amounts of processing using Reaper with WINE.
BUT, the main reason why I'm not going to try and get the perfect linux system, Linux OS's are designed based on open source software, a combination of this and a lack of developer support mean NO NON-FREE PLUGINS!!! Including no ilok.

Windows 7: Works fine for the job, get it and start mixing.

 

[StefTD]

Windows 7 works best for me, XP is nice, too because it's just trusted and almost everything works
acceptable. Tried it with Linux once, but I thought it just wasn't worth all the time I had to spend
on it.

About Mac, it depends, not sure why, but I had the best and worst experiences workflow wise and
so on on Macs, most of the time it was about graphic design and not recording, but if I just want
something working, I had better results tweaking Windows 7 to my likings a bit than using Mac.
I think they're hyped up a bit (please don't hate me for this comment guys ).