Let's talk about Windows Vista

I just read this article on Microsofts decision to snub the Audio card developers such as Creative by getting rid of hardware audio support in Windows Vista. I was thinking of getting Vista but now I am not so sure.

I use my audio cards for music composition and I have my own custom sound banks that I have spent months building for this purpose. Now all my work could be potentially ruined by Microsofts decision to do this. Here is the link to the article I read this in.

http://pc.ign.com/articles/759/759538p1.html

Can anyone confirm this that owns Vista?

I am currently using my Audigy 2ZS and the most important functions are the soundfont bank loading utilities. I own one of these cards mainly so I can build soundfont banks and use them in conjunction with my synthesizers and pre-recorded artists. As long as these functionalities still work I will not be completely pissed. Because then I can just keep my audio card in there for the Soundfont functionality and use whatever Vista uses for everything else.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Well Creative is the only company to have made a card that lets me craft my own set of soundfonts that dwarf thousand dollar keyboard's sounds. So as a composer and performing musician I would be pretty angry to lose that functionality.

My reason for switching is as follows: In XP you are limmited to using 385 or so mb of ram for sound, you can further hack it to make I think near a gig available. So when I load in my enormous banks I am limited to sizes of 380ish mb of ram even though I have far more than that in my computer. I want to expand the size of my soundfont banks beyond a gig but in order to do that I need an operating system that will let me utilize more ram. Plus, the true utilization of dual core CPU's in windows wont hurt either. That is why I was interested in switching, however since the recent anouncment I will hold my judgement till I know soundfonts will work.

Is there another OS that will let me didicate up to 2 gigs of my ram to midi function? I don't even know for sure if Vista will let me dedicate that much but I know it will at least be better than the meager 385.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Quote:

That's no limitation of XP, but of the Creative driver. Any process in (32bit) XP can use as much memory as the virtual address space can give.

No, it is the limitation of XP I will find a link and send it in a few minutes.

Update:
This sort of describes it, I am looking for the actual link that helps you further extend the size through editing the registy pagepoolsize

http://phorum.sf2midi.com/viewtopic....3db7a3cf9e4a04

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

I just tried some alternate Soundfont loading programs and they pale in comparison with Creatives. This one distorts my amazing live vibraphone soundfont to the point of uselessness. I sure hope the creative ones work in Vista with a larger chunk of ram to pull from.

Oh and on a side note, I read that KX is limited by the same windows issue that limits the creative soundfonts.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

I am not sure about the bleeding edge version but I did check their faq and they acknowledged the pagepool size issue was present in the KX drivers also. I will try the beta, but I am pretty sure that the issue alone lies with Windows XP. I tried Sfz which is a soundfont loader and it will load my bank but it limits sound usage to 16 channels from a bank at any given time. So I can only utilize 16 instruments at a time. boooooooooo. Since Vista does allow a significant increase in ram utilized I imagine any limitation that they introduce will be larger also, but I cannot find anything that states the facts on that. I guess I will find out when I try it or someone else does that I am in contact with.

I was speaking idiomatically.

All I have to say about that is wow. There were soo many ridiculous descisions made with windows vista, it makes me wanna vom. However, I still could not find anything about the pagepool size for sound. Good read though.

What kind of toxic man-thing is happening now?