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A new DAW journey with windows 8

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Samplitude
Submitted by pcrecord on Mon, 07/15/2013 - 17:16

In a recent post, I said I just change my audio interface for a Liquid Saffire 56 and an Octopre and was testing recording at more than 44.1khz.
I had 4 m-audio delta cards and it took me 2 weeks to tweak audio recording and ended up not using asio drivers because it was unstable.

Upon testing 16 tracks at 88.2 and 96 with the saffire, I found my system crashing after some measures (12 at first and 38 after many windows and Sonar x2 tweaking)
So after too many dropouts, I was discourage and did a little search and found this :

http://blog.cakewal… The Cakewalk Blog » Blog Archive » Windows 8 – A benchmark for music production applications[/]="http://blog.cakewal… The Cakewalk Blog » Blog Archive » Windows 8 – A benchmark for music production applications[/]

There's a lot of talks on the page, but the results of the benchmark surprised me.
I was using windows 7 x64 for a while, but I admit I always had doubts and a crashes here and there...

So I tried it, windows 8 pro x64, not driver install other than windows install and saffire software/drivers.
Wow, up to now, it's stable and faster..

I'll let you know in the next weeks how it work out. !thumb

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hueseph

pcrecord, post: 406397 wrote: In a recent post, I said I just change my audio interface for a Liquid Saffire 56 and an Octopre and was testing recording at more than 44.1khz.
I had 4 m-audio delta cards and it took me 2 weeks to tweak audio recording and ended up not using asio drivers because it was unstable.

Upon testing 16 tracks at 88.2 and 96 with the saffire, I found my system crashing after some measures (12 at first and 38 after many windows and sonar x2 tweaking)
So after too many dropouts, I was discourage and did a little search and found this :

[[url=http://[/URL]="http://blog.cakewal…"]The Cakewalk Blog » Blog Archive » Windows 8 – A benchmark for music production applications[/]="http://blog.cakewal…"]The Cakewalk Blog » Blog Archive » Windows 8 – A benchmark for music production applications[/]

There's a lot of talks on the page, but the results of the benchmark surprised me.
I was using windows 7 x64 for a while, but I admit I always had doubts and a crashes here and there...

So I tried it, windows 8 pro x64, not driver install other than windows install and saffire software/drivers.
Wow, up to now, it's stable and faster..

I'll let you know in the next weeks how it work out. !thumb

Yup. Windows 8 isn't just ugly to look at. I've been using it since launch. It's considerably faster than 7. I never use the "metro" interface however. I downloaded Classic Shell to maintain a functional desktop mode. The only issues I have with it are some of the frustrating security gates that may prevent you from installing alternative OSes. But, that's sheer geek. Most people will never encounter this.

Tue, 07/16/2013 - 06:20 Permalink
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pcrecord

Glad I'm not the only one. What surprised me is that it seem much more stable.. I took a fullly mixed project (24 tracks) added 16 tracks and the recording worked, no dropout.
I then added a ampsimulator and addictive drums and recorded while both in realtime : I started to hear some artifacts while recording. But the play back was ok.. And oh, I had t-racks on the masterbus with izotope EQ + voxengo soniformer.. Wow, I never could do this with windows 7.

This weekend I'll have a full band project to record.. Hope everything will run smooth..

Tue, 07/16/2013 - 07:04 Permalink
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pcrecord

Another update !
My recording weekend went very well. The only bug I encounter was a graphic bug (I guess it is) in sonar. With a new created project, when I rename a bus in the mixer (displayed on my second screen) and I click back to the main window, sonar x2 crash.. The weird thing is I did record a few songs without the second screen until I had 5 min to test it and in the fully recorded song it's ok .. but in the empty project it still crashes... anyway I doubt it's a windows 8 bug, rather a sonar one..

Other than that, The Liquid Saffire and the Octopre are HOT !! I like the converters are much better than my old m-audio delta cards and the preamps do the job.
And my Focusrite ISA two did a great job on the electric guitar.. We still have the vocals to record and I'll post a sample for you to here !

Mon, 07/22/2013 - 08:22 Permalink