PC Notes
Technique : PC Notes
The 64-bit Windows XP x64 edition is on
the shelves, but musicians should stick with their trusty 32-bit OS for
the moment. PC Notes explains why, as well as offering some constructive
soundcard feature suggestions to manufacturers.
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is now freely
available for between £90 and £100 from various UK suppliers. As with
previous OEM releases, however, Microsoft stipulate that you have to buy
it either with a "fully assembled computer system" or with a
"non-peripheral computer hardware component" — which basically means
something like a RAM upgrade, motherboard, hard drive or CPU.
There's been plenty of anticipation about Windows
64-bit computing, but in practice it's still proving a far from
pleasurable experience for many users, due to the continued lack of
64-bit drivers for so many hardware items. By way of example, Dell are
selling some of their PC systems with 64-bit Windows pre-installed, but
you get the following warning when you try to buy them on-line:
"Peripherals you currently own or plan to purchase in the near future
(cameras, printers, MP3 players, handheld devices) will most likely NOT
work on a system purchased with Windows XP Professional x64, and some
software applications may not work on the x64 operating system."
It may be available, but is it yet desirable? Catch up with the current Windows x64 situation in the main text.
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Windows XP Pro x64 is clearly not a mainstream
product, nor for the faint of heart, and one mainstream PC review stated
that "only software developers and high-end workstation users will see
real benefits from Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; everyone else
should stick with 32-bit Windows XP instead." This is hardly surprising,
given that the 64-bit version has basically the same look and feel as
its 32-bit cousin, and provides roughly equivalent performance when
running 32-bit applications using its WOW64 (Windows On Windows 64)
translation layer. For once, even gamers aren't too impressed, because
until 64-bit game versions appear there's little practical benefit from
the move, and a few 32-bit games won't even run on Windows x64 at the
moment.
Unfortunately, musicians are one of the groups who
can definitely benefit from a totally 64-bit PC once everything is
compatible, because having a fully 64-bit system can boost the
performance of typical music applications by 30 percent or more, and for
anyone who needs more RAM to hold samples, a fully 64-bit system
removes the 4GB ceiling of 32-bit systems. However, while some music
developers have been super-keen to 'go 64-bit', there others who haven't
committed themselves yet.
Leading-edge users have been quick to voice their
opinion that no company should have released any product requiring
Windows drivers over the last six months without including 64-bit
versions. However, it's possible to see it from the other side: a tiny
percentage of users have so far moved over to x64, so smaller companies
must find it hard to justify the cost of developing new drivers that
they will have to supply as free updates to such a small number of
customers.
On the corporate front, some businesses are also
avoiding the move to 64-bit Windows because their favourite security
applications, such as virus checkers, won't work with it yet.
Conversely, while some developers have released 64-bit updates for the
corporate versions of their applications, they won't say whether or not
64-bit versions for home and small business users are planned.
Some early adopters have already given up,
reformatted their hard drives and reinstalled their 32-bit version of
Windows XP, just so that they can continue to use their printers,
scanners and soundcards. Meanwhile, musicians who can't wait for the
dust to settle are better off running a dual-boot setup with both 32-bit
and 64-bit versions of Windows: they can then get up to speed with all
the new stuff without losing the use of their favourite hardware or
software. The 64-bit Windows revolution may have happened, but I suspect
that the majority of users may wait until Windows' 64-bit 'Vista'
operating system is released before taking the plunge.
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PC Snippets
 With
many PCs now relegated to 'under the desk' status, where their
front-panel indicators may end up difficult to see unless you're a
contortionist, Lonewolf's tiny Hard Disk Indicator utility may
prove very useful. It adds an 'LED' to your system tray, displaying
drive load and save activity. Read and write activity on up to five
drives or partitions (including CD or DVD drives) can be monitored on a
single LED, or you can launch several instances of the utility, each
monitoring a different one. You can also choose between six colours of
LED, and control the duration of each 'flash', so that you won't miss
it. This is certainly handy for spotting unexpected activity on a
particular drive, monitoring background tasks (such as defragmentation
kicking in) or keeping an eye on the progress of software downloads.
Another handy utility in this freeware range is Indicators,
which displays the current CPU load and free memory, in terms of
percentage, on your System Tray — just the job when trying to shoehorn
yet another RAM-based instrument into your soft sampler. You can
download both the utilities I've mentioned from www.lonewolf.gr/software.I mentioned Rightmark's CPU Clock
utility in September's PC Musician feature, to help anyone with
unexplained laptop audio problems to find out if such problems were
related to CPU throttling (automatically switching processor frequency
to save power, which can sometimes cause audio clicks and pops during
the transition). However, it seems that there's another possible culprit
for these gremlins. SOS Forum contributor Olafmol managed to
cure an annoying problem with CPU spikes and audio drop-outs with his
laptop and PCMCIA audio interface by disabling Microsoft's Smart Battery
devices inside Device Manager. Sometimes these smart devices aren't as
clever as they think they are!Just
two months after Apple announced that their Mac OS X operating system
will be able to run on Intel's x86 architecture from 2006, but only on
x86 chips used in Apple-developed hardware, hackers have posted
instructions on several web sites for how to bypass the security chip
and run the developer's version on any PC. The hack isn't legal, since
you need to download two modified files to get around the security
technology, but it proves just how keen many PC users are to try Mac OS
X. |
The Perfect Audio Interface?
I know that a lot of audio interface manufacturers
must read this column, at least on an occasional basis. So here are a
couple of feature suggestions for future products that I hope someone
will act on.
First, and most important, over the last year I've
heard of lots of musicians plugging their new audio interfaces into
their PC laptops and experiencing the annoyance of a host of background
noises related to hard-drive activity, mouse movements and graphic
redraws.
These problems are all related to ground loops, and
solving them often requires the user to place a DI (Direct Inject) box
between the audio interface's output and the amplifier or mixer it's
plugged into. Suitable stereo DI boxes start at about £20, but those
with full galvanic separation (ie. using an output transformer) to
guarantee that the problem will be cured tend to be more expensive — and
if you've bought an interface with eight outputs, you'll need a DI box
on each one, which is not an elegant or cheap solution. So the market is
crying out for a manufacturer to launch a reasonably priced USB or
Firewire audio interface with transformer-coupled outputs.
The second feature that I feel many musicians are
crying out for is an analogue monitoring output with a hardware level
control, so that the interface can be plugged directly into active
monitor speakers. More and more musicians are finding that they don't
need a full-blown analogue or digital mixer to handle their inputs and
outputs, since these are all directly connected to the interface. So the
sensible solution is to connect the main output of the interface
directly to the power amp and speakers, which has the added advantage of
keeping the signal path simple, After all, most small mid-priced mixers
(£500 to £1000) colour the signals passing through to a small extent,
while budget ones can make even more of a difference, as you'll soon
hear if you temporarily bypass them.
The problem with direct connection at the moment is
that the only control you have over output level is generally from the
software Control Panel utility of the interface. Such level controls are
almost always in the digital domain and therefore degrade the audio
signal once you turn them down. You also run the risk of this software
control accidentally defaulting to its 0dB level and damaging your
amplifier, speakers or (worse) ears.
Many interfaces already provide a headphone output with an analogue level control, but these are not only unbalanced (giving rise to possible ground-loop problems again, if plugged into mains-powered speakers), they also often use a lower quality output stage than the main one, optimised for low-impedance headphones. You can, of course, buy dedicated DAW Controllers with large knobs, extra talkback functions, a clutch of switched stereo inputs (for adding CD players and the like) and switched studio monitor outputs for listening to the mix on several speakers, but many musicians don't need all these, or the extra expense. No, what we want is a handy, high-quality analogue output-level control on the interface monitor outputs, and preferably a stereo/mono button as well. These would cost very little to implement, but I guarantee that they would be a big selling feature. Over to the manufacturers...
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