Darien's Dialog.. : Audio

Professional Audio on Windows Vista with Cakewalk Sonar et al.

darien — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 13:17:00 GMT

After watching the Cakewalk: Making Music with Sonar video on Channel 9, I was once again inspired by the state of professional audio on Windows, and in particular Windows Vista. Audio engineers and producers alike now have a wonderful, robust, glorious-looking operating system that just fits into any musical studio environment.

And with software tools such as Cakewalk's Sonar 7 Producer Edition that take full advantage of Vista's capabilities such as new multicore architectures, WaveRT, x64 memory addressing etc.. super-high-end audio and MIDI production (formerly reserved for high-end ProTools installations) are now available for every small studio or even the "weekend warrior" in the home. If you're a Mac user on ProTools or Logic (or whatever) and you're looking at giving the power and flexibility of the Windows Vista platform a try using Cakewalk's Sonar, they have a competitive crossgrade offer available here.

Also, beyond Cakewalk, there are plenty of other audio application which are already running or are targeted to run on Windows Vista. Another favourite company of mine for the Windows Platform are Rain Recording which specialize in developing hardware specifically for Digital Audio Workstations (DAW) on Windows. They maintain a cool list of applications tested to run on Vista called their Rain Recording Vista Watch. It's cool. Check it out.

So, team, there's no excuse not to run Windows in recording studios anymore, don't you think? ;-)

The enhanced state of audio in Windows Vista

darien — Sat, 09 Sep 2006 15:19:00 GMT

We're doing some very exciting things in Windows Vista concerning audio. As an Audio Engineer, I can happily say that audio is no longer a second-class citizen in Vista. From the consumer perspective, just take a look at some of the features we're adding:-

Loudness Equalization DSP (single-pass loudness EQ with a fast "attack", slow "decay")
Forward and Reverse Bass Management
Speaker Fill
Room Correction (using a calibrated microphone - amazing!)
Virtual Surround
Speaker Phantoming
Headphone Virtualization using HRTF (Head Related Transfer Functions) - can't wait to try this one out!
Bass Boost
Support for Microphone Arrays

You can read more about them here:-

Sometimes, you don't get these capabilities, even in high-end domestic digital A/V receivers. Good job audio team! Can't wait to start using these new audio features on my home machine.

Microsoft Zune: A snapshot of the recent announcements

darien — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 07:38:00 GMT

It's great to see so much buzz around our new music project, Zune. To be honest, even I don't know much about it, but whenever I see us take another step in the music business, I always get excited - once an Audio Engineer, always an Audio Engineer ;-). Here's a snapshot of the recent links:-

Vista Audio Stack and API (and other Vista video goodness) on Channel 9

darien — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 14:16:00 GMT

Being an Audio Engineer myself I found this video really interesting.

Vista Audio Stack and API

Check out these other really interesting Vista videos too. Good job, Channel 9! :-