Comments on: Audio in Vista: more hell than heaven

By: gail

gail — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 19:03:58 +0000

I have a dell with 64 bit windows vista I suddenly cant play a cd on wmp 11 nor can i listen to internet radio without terrible static

By: Joe Gunning

Joe Gunning — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 03:23:50 +0000

I have an asus mobo and i had extreme stuttering in vista and max load on my cpu when trying to play video or music.

The windows sounds would stutter and make the pc lag, audio, movies, windows sounds, you name it, it stuttered and was making my pc unusable.

I tried two different hard disks, one IDE and one SATA with 3 or 4 fresh installs, still no change,

Tried loads of different versions of my audio and graphics and wireless/lan drivers…still no change.

Disabled LAN and my wireless adapter, installed new sata/ide onboard raid drivers and also disabled sata and raid in bios.

Checked for device conflicts which there were none, no change.

I then stumbled accross HPET in the bios which is media event timer and something to do with High def audio in vista, this apparently is only supposed to be on in X64 systems and i have X86 Vista installed, so i promptly disabled this and…

KAPOW!!!

No more audio stuttering, my audio is still High definition onboard and works perfectly and crystal clearly, no more constant stuttering and no more cpu spikes to 100%

Happy days, hope this helps for anyone with a Asus mobo.

By: tosha

tosha — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 04:28:33 +0000

Hello. I’m programmer.

My story:
1. Download WINDDK
2. Build and install virtual multistream audio driver from examples. Multistream hardware mix audio streams.

So XP using it. Every capture\rander stream in aplication is separeate stream in driver.

Vista use ONE stream for render and ONE stream for capture It’s mixex/resampler/peekmeter/volume/mute all software emulation! Except master mute/volumes.

So if ever device and driver can support hw acceleration Vista just not use it

By: Grayson Peddie

Grayson Peddie — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 02:56:44 +0000

What I’d like to say to Microsoft:

Move the audio stack back to the kernel in Windows Vista (I wish I could say “RIGHT NOW,” but…), or I will revert back to Windows XP. I get the feeling that I’ll set the deadline date for Microsoft to January 31, 2008, but that’s just silly and pointless to force Microsoft to do this…

Emulating older API in Windows Vista is a bad ideal… That will also get me back to Windows XP.

Anyway, I have a Conexant audio sound card in my HP Pavilion zv6130us notebook and since I currently have 512MB of memory, even if I upgrade to 1GB or 2GB of RAM, I’ll still get audio glitches…

Excuse my whining/complaints, but Windows Vista is a resource hog…

By: Kevin T

Kevin T — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 11:24:32 +0000

I’m another professional recording guy. I too have a large investment in audio recording interfaces. Just to add weight to what Bill said above, Vista is a total non starter for serious audio work. I think he hit the nail on the head regarding Vista’s audio driver stack (moving from kernel to user mode). Low latency ASIO drivers have particularly suffered. Vista has planted the PC solidly in the consumer audio camp. I’m afraid that the PC’s ability to be a professional creative tool has been severely compromised.

After months of struggling with Vista, I have now completely removed it from my quad-core, purpose-built audio recording PC. With all the same hardware, XP 64 bit edition is working as I had hoped Vista 64 would. The machine now records and plays back flawlessly. It’s also many times faster to boot and just feels more responsive. I don’t see a return to Vista for me any time soon.

With XP becoming obsolete, if my hardware/software vendors stop supporting it, I will have to do what I never thought I’d ever do… Buy a Mac.

By: Uncle X

Uncle X — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:18:48 +0000

Since a week or 4 I have audio problems, I did not have these before and I have the latest drivers.

Since a few updates my sound is popping clicks and glitches. EVEN WHEN I DONT PLAY AUDIO!

I home MS fixes this soon, its terrible!

By: Tim

Tim — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 18:44:59 +0000

I’m not convinced that it is to do with the DRM and protected media path, though I guess it could be. I know there are sites out there, but they are not all reliable.

Tim

By: N1nji

N1nji — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:11:03 +0000

These problems have an effect on proffesionals as well as the basic user that likes to hear the highest quality of sounds. If you google vista and DRM there are many “doomsday” sites that dissect the terms and the DRM features of vista and quite frankly they are fairly disturbing on how vista handles video and audio content. It is not really much of a scare but many of the problems in vista can be related to the built in protection mechanisms. Every day becoming a switcher is becomming more and more “appealing”. Just one day when all my apps will work on mac os will I be happy

By: Bill

Bill — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 22:49:22 +0000

I’m a pro audio user with thousands of dollars invested in MOTU audio interfaces and many years of recording experience. For most of us who use our computers to record, Vista has been a painful lesson. Often we need to run much smaller audio buffers to get lower latency than gamers or home theatre enthusiasts. This is something that was no problem on a well tuned XP machine. Unfortunately Vista has proved itself to be a very poor alternative. Even pro audio apps that register with MMCSS to guarantee CPU time to critical audio threads perform poorly. My feeling is that the move of most of the audio driver components from kernel mode to user mode is at the root of the issues we’re seeing. This move was made to reduce the likelihood that a bad audio driver could cause a BSOD. The trade-off however, has been much worse audio performance at low latency, regardless of how much money you spend on top-shelf audio interfaces.

I find it difficult to see how MS can fix this in a service pack. The basic foundation of the audio stack is fatally flawed. IMHO this could be the end of the road for the PC as a viable pro audio recording/editing platform.

Unfortunately, I believe the Mac will fill the void left by Vista. Apple place a greater emphasis on their creative community, evidenced by the number of Macs in recording studios around the world. This situation would never be allowed to persist on that platform.

By: Aavatar

Aavatar — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 16:09:48 +0000

For most of the post here I see all of you have sound problem with SB Creative X-FI Soundcard, but for my side now I don’t have any problem now.

I’m using a SB X-FI Platinum Edition, at first I’m having nightmare with this card, When I have first installed the updated driver since I don’t have the Driver CD for vista everything works fine with the driver testing, but when comes to music playing or movie playing, it only drive my 5.1 speaker system in 2.1 mode only.

So I try to source for the CD that bundle with the newer shipment (Platinum Edition) I did found the installer CD from my friend It’s for Vista Edition, so I’ve install it and the problem there so I updated the driver to the newest driver I downloaded from creative website, after installing and rebooted the 1st time the problem solved, everything works fine and I thought thank god it works finally but after I’ve shut down my PC and on it the next day OMG the problem back so I was quite disappointed at this moment.

I don’t give up yet so I accessed the divice manager and check for the driver section and update the driver and point it to browse my computer for driver and select let me pick a list of driver from my computer and I select the newest driver from there and restart my PC, the problem solved again but after I shut down my PC Vista temps to select the earlier driver again and the problem arise again.

So I uninstall the driver, Application and remove all the installed directory and reinstall the driver again from fresh, thistime I install from the CD using custome mode, I install everything accept the driver from the bundled SB X-FI CD Driver(Check off the driver installation) and after install procedure completed I restarted my PC, after the restart I install the newest Application update that I’ve downloaded from creative Website and at last then I install the newest driver downloaded from creative webside and this have solved my problem till today, bottomline there’s only 1 driver can be installed in vista for what I’ve experienced for X-FI in Vista.

So I hope this will help a lot of X-FI User out there and it does work for me.