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[Langston Holland]

Just went through the trauma of an OS upgrade. You know what I'm talking about. I wait as long as I can between these self-inflicted waterboarding episodes so MS and my app mfg's can polish things as much as possible beforehand.

Took me two days to sort everything out, but my 6 month old MacBook Pro w/ 8GB RAM is running my measurement software far better and faster now that access to all the memory is available. This is done through a dual boot environment that Apple calls boot camp. I own a copy of Win7 Ultimate and the box came with two disks, both 32bit and 64bit versions. I went with 32bit initially for several reasons, but mainly due to 64bit driver compatibility issues. Plus it seemed silly to me that all this 32bit software we use would have to be thunked up to run in the 64bit OS and they weren't designed for all that additional memory, etc.

I was so wrong. It's probably the OS itself that benefits the most, but I effectively got a new computer out of this. Everything is so much faster and smoother and DPC latency is 1/10th of what it used to be - now constantly under 200us  (that's a good thing for real time external USB and Firewire audio recording and measurement hardware):

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

What forced me to do this was I just started making multiple hour Leq measurements with CLIO and it started stuttering after about 30 minutes. Not anymore - plus I can run the OS with the pretty Aero thing without punishment. :)

Secondly, all the software I'm interested in is happy at this time with the 64bit environment - even the ancient Smaart v5.4 runs faster and better than ever other than a little fuss dialog that pops up when you first start it.

Random Thought:

Tom is about to be out $15:

https://www.trueaudio.com/dats/downloads/DATS%20brochure.pdf

For the rest of you it's time to buy DATS if you haven't done so already (used to be called WT3 impedance tester):

http://www.parts-express.com/pe/showdetl.cfm?partnumber=390-806

What is running better than ever under Win7 64bit:

D-Audio USB measurement gizmo
CLIO v10.31 with its FW-01 Firewire gizmo
SysTune v1.2
Smaart v5.4
ARTA v1.7.1
X-Frame 88 with MediaMatrix X-Ware v2.3h 631
FTDI chip based USB to Serial adapter
Ashly v5.11 control software
Xilica v9.3 control software
Audition v3.01 wave editor/recording software
Reaper v4.25 (native Win7 64bit)
DATS v1.01
EAW KF730 Wizard v1.2.4
EAW Resolution v1.3.1.39
EAW Pilot v1.1.77
FlukeView v3.3 (ScopeMeter 42B power analyzer)
FlukeView v4.5.2 (ScopeMeter 192C)
More to come... this is just to get me through the week. :)

What Broke:

Dolby Lake Processor control software v5.08.011.
EV's cool little ArrayShow 1.1RC2 prediction software. It's 16bits.

The DLP software barely worked under Win7 32bit. I now run it in WinXP SP3 under Parallels v7 in OSX v10.7.4 and it flys just like the old days. I demo'd VMware Monday and the DLP software stuttered, too bad - seemed like a better, faster virtualization environment than Parallels and its code base is half the size. The new Lake software (v6) runs great in Win7 64 bits but has dropped support for the DLP. ArrayShow in the virtual XP environment is as happy as a tornado in a trailer park. :)

[Arthur Skudra]

Very timely, Langston, I'm getting ready to reconfigure things on my MacBook Pro as well.  Just curious whether you can get Parallels to run some of those bootcamp apps?  I hate having to reboot my laptop just to run one program.  Hey, where's EASE? 

You should check out Crossover Mac as well, surprising what you can run on it!!

[Mac Kerr]

Very timely, Langston, I'm getting ready to reconfigure things on my MacBook Pro as well.  Just curious whether you can get Parallels to run some of those bootcamp apps?  I hate having to reboot my laptop just to run one program.  Hey, where's EASE? 

You should check out Crossover Mac as well, surprising what you can run on it!!

I don't have the same list as Lang, but I haven't run into anything that doesn't run under my copy of XP running in VM Fusion. I assume Parallels can do as well. I'm running mostly console software and array prediction software. L-Acoustics SoundVision runs fine as do the console config and offline editor for Studer, Avid, Yamaha PM1D, and Digico consoles. In addition, Profession Wireless's IAS Intermod software, and RF Guru work.

I do want to upgrade my RAM from 4G to 16G though. Switching between VM ware and the MacOS is not as fast as it should be, I think due to memory swapping that VM Fusion is doing because of my 4G RAM limit. I just have to let go of the $150.

When I was using Bootcamp, it was a very early version that had a memory leak that would eventually hard crash the Mac and require extraordinary efforts to recover. Bye bye Bootcamp for me.

Mac

[Arthur Skudra]

Yeah, parallels has been a good performer for me, most of the windows software I use runs well in it.  But I haven't tread in Windows 7-64 bit territory yet, based on the difficulties others have had with it and software compatibility.  Now that most of the apps I use have been updated, it's less an issue now.  Though I probably will need to get a new USB-RS232 adapter, my trusty Radio Shack one is becoming increasingly difficult in finding current drivers for it. I have found that EASE is still a bit temperamental for me on a virtual machine, and haven't had time to figure out why.

[David Sturzenbecher]

I have found that EASE is still a bit temperamental for me on a virtual machine, and haven't had time to figure out why.

EASE is still a bit temperamental...you could have just stopped there. 

[Arthur Skudra]

EASE is still a bit temperamental...you could have just stopped there.

LOL David, ain't that the truth!!! I just wish they would come out with more frequent updates to address stuff like larger memory capabilities of modern computers!  Load up a model with a whole bunch of GLL's, and watch how things slow down...

[Mark McFarlane]

For the record, Neither VMWare nor Parallels support native Firewire devices.  There are some workarounds for firewire disks (share folders from the OSX host).  Parallels will convert a firewire sound card to 'something' which may be suitable for Smaart, et. al. but I don't think you can run native drivers like ASIO drivers under Parallels with a firewire interface.  My suspicion is that Parallels will deliver only 2 channels of a firewire interface to the virtual machine.

I've had problems with Sabine's Navigator software (most recent release) under OSX 10.7 and Parallels using the USB interface.  The Navigator software would just stop functioning.  I too just rebuilt my 4 year old Mac Book Pro from scratch last week (took 3 days) with Mountain Lion and XP. I'll retest Sabine shortly (now running under Ethernet).

Prior to my rebuild I went to buy Windows 7 but couldn't justify $200+ for the OS when I could buy a laptop with Windows 7 for $400.  Mountain Lion cost $20.  It's nice that Apple doesn't need to make any money on software.  That model obviously won't work for Microsoft.

[Langston Holland]

Fascinating and helpful replies you guys, thanks. :)

Thoughts:

1. Arthur, the FTDI chipsets are rock solid in both OSX and Win7 in either bit flavor. An example. I'd never even heard of Crossover Mac until now. :)

2. Mark is so right about FireWire - it's a boot camp only thing unless it's a hard disk. In the latter case, neither VM product actually supports FireWire disks - you mount them in OSX and then access that through the Windows VM.

3. Mac illustrates the fact that you can do almost everything necessary with XP in a VM. VM's are very efficiently tuned for Ethernet I/O through the host OS and fairly well tuned for USB since it's a non-real time interface unlike FireWire. I'd imagine that you can get consistently solid two channel FFT measurement results via a USB audio device in a Windows VM and very likely excellent results with SysTune's Ethernet based I/O.

4. Boot camp has been very polished for quite a while now and turns my Mac into the best native Windows machine I've ever used. Two things worth your time are: (a) install the latest Apple boot camp drivers, and (b) install the latest video drivers from the video card mfg's website.

5. When using boot camp, you really want to add native read/write capability for both OS's for the other OS's file system. Paragon offers the best solutions. They also have a great OSX based partition size adjustment utility that doesn't require reinstalling Windows.

6. On the rebooting vs. not rebooting thing, I don't really care that much with native file access across partitions. What I want is the absolute best, most reliable measurement platform. One of my favorite aspects of a dual boot situation is that I can run the leanest, meanest OS environment possible for my measurement, prediction and control software while leaving the messy business of life/updates/anti-virus/email/browsing/office apps/etc. on the other partition. In my case I'm into OSX for my business of life stuff, but I'd do this even if I owned a PC - in which case I'd dual boot two installs of Win7.

[Adam Black]

Firewire uses DMA, and barring external hard drives and some digital cameras, neither Parallels nor VMWare support Firewire devices (last I checked). It's conjecture on my part, but I believe the reason for the lack of support for Firewire audio devices is simply that it has a low ROI. When it comes to prioritization of software features, the rule of thumb is to give priority to the features that affect the larger user base. Given the vast amount of functionality that a virtualization product must offer to be competitive, users that need Firewire audio devices are in the minority. Thus that effort gets a low priority.

-A

[ProSoundWeb Community]