The Vista Forecast
An early preview of what the future may hold with Windows Vista and the challenges for audio production.
Windows Vista fulfills the PC's promise of becoming a multimedia appliance. It will allow the convergence of a growing numbers of computer-enabled devices through the average person's desktop. We'll see more consumer products (many of which already have internal computers) actually running windows. Not just phones and cameras, but lighting, refrigerators, coffee pots, window shades - you name it. This is the Bill Gates' prophecy of the "Smart Home".
Vista will have a great "wow" factor, providing a transparent interface to universally communicate with all these gadgets. You will really be able go nuts. Imagine sitting in your underwear and looking up the internal humidity and temperature of your refrigerator and how many times the door has opened. As a more mainstream function, Vista will be the foundation of next-generation media centers, enabling powerful, unified control over music and video distribution, networking, and playback. In this respect, Vista may be a boon to the music industry by making it easier and more enjoyable for people to find and play music.
Now let's consider Vista for the purpose of pro audio production. The very features that make Vista so promising as a universal hub of all these computer-based products may be cause for hesitation in embracing Vista for audio production. Remember, for audio production, we don't want a universal approach. Rather, we have a specific approach that we need: as much as possible, we want only our audio applications to be utilizing the processing power and resources of our computer system.
While it is still too soon to pass judgment, the overall improvement offering in Vista may not be worth the extra baggage that goes with it. Vista may be too over-burdened with a new flowery interface - maybe not - again, it's just too soon to tell. Let's say, for example, overall access times were improved by a few milliseconds - that would be wonderful. But letís say your audio system was also a bit more clunky under Vista. What good would the access time improvement really be?
For people who need to get work done, stability will be more important than experimentation, so a wait-and-see policy for any new operating system is always a wise approach
Having said that, Vista is certainly an exciting development with immense potential. It looks like there will be half a dozen or so versions of Vista so hopefully there will be one that best fits the needs of the audio professional. It's not hard to imagine how some flavor of Vista in the future, combined with pro audio recording and instrument products that possibly run on Windows, may provide new usability for audio production.
All of the current line of Rain Recording computers (Oct '06) are "Vista Ready" and so upgrading will not be a problem. Make sure, however, that the applications you wish to run and the hardware you wish to attach are compatible first.
The really good news is that in Windows X64 we now already have greatly improved communication with
hardware and optimization of the OS with that hardware. Digital audio systems may not need all the
flexibility of Vista, whereas X64 provides excellent benefits without much extraneous functionality
that's not pertinent to audio. For people who need to get work done, stability will be more important
than experimentation, so a wait-and-see policy for any new operating systems is always a wise approach -
especially given the fantastic benefits and availability of Windows X64 now.
Author
Bill Paschick is the founder and president of Rain Recording. His passion for music and computers and his commitment to demystifying audio production on the PC platform are the foundation of all of Rain's products.