As noted in our Music Hardware feature elsewhere on this site, we do not recommend Windows 3.1 or Windows NT for musical applications, unless the software you want to use runs best on either of these OSes (and there are a few cases where it does). As detailed in that article, Windows 98 or Me continue to be the best choices for Intel or compatible PCs for most musical applications. However, a growing number of music applications and audio hardware devices support Windows 2000. In this article, we'll examine why you may (or may not) want to consider Windows 2000 as the foundation of your music platform. The NT Compatible website (www.ntcompatible.com) provides an extensive list of products compatible with Windows NT and Windows 2000.
We've been busy testing the Terratec EWS64XL and Cubase VST 5 under Windows 2000 Professional. The good news is (was) that we got everything working 100%. The Cubase VST 5.0 software is an amazing upgrade. The bad news is the performance of the Win2K ASIO driver is pathetic (serious playback glitches occured on a 400 MHz machine with 128MB of RAM, even with I/O buffer settings set so high that latency was in the hundreds of milliseconds range!) and the performance of the DirectX driver (running the "codec" input on the card) wasn't much better, with glitch-free playback basically impossible on the above-noted machine. Both results are vastly inferior to those obtained with "lesser" versions of Windows, which deliver better overall performance with even a low-end card such as the AWE64 Gold (ugh - But at least it works!), which we ended up putting in there instead, after we pulled the EWS64XL out in disgust. (This machine isn't our primary MIDI/audio workstation, so this isn't as horrible as it seems.) We must confess, we never did like the confusing signal routing options on the Terratec card. They are even worse under Windows 2K. Thus, the Terratec card, or virtually any other audio card on the market, delivers substantially better performance and superior timing stability under Windows 9x or Windows Me.
Fortunately, there have been some recent changes that improve the situation. First, though, let's look at why the problem exists in the first place.
(From MIDIMAN.com's Driver update page):
When the WDM spec was first released by MS it mandated that audio had to pass through the internal MS Kmixer in all cases. The Kmixer unfortunately introduced a 30 ms delay in any audio that was passed through it. This initially made the WDM spec appear to be unusable for recording audio applications since a 30 ms delay is unacceptable for doing sound on sound. This problem was brought to the attention of MS and after a few months a “fix” or workaround was suggested that was acceptable to MS. This fix allowed the KMixer to be circumvented.
Some software companies have or are now implementing this work-around in their applications. These should be released soon as updates or upgrades. Once this fix is implemented, the latency of audio in these applications is not only reduced, but can be better than typical latencies introduced by other Windows-based operating systems/drivers (VXD, NT etc.). Contact your preferred software company to find out how they are dealing with this WDM issue.
Thus, our conclusion is that Windows 2000 as a Cubase VST 5.x platform is only viable if one or more of the following are true:
Steinberg's WaveLab, for example, is designed to take advantage of multiple CPUs under Windows NT or Windows 2000 and, according to the company, processes exactly twice as fast on a dual-CPU system as it does on a single-CPU. At any rate, you should not put too much trust in "minimum requirements." An app might say it runs on a P150 with 32 MB of RAM, but Windows 2000 demand more memory, more disk space and, indeed, more user expertise to correctly configure and maintain. At minimum, we'd recommend at least 128 MB of RAM and a 500 MHz or better CPU for accurate MIDI timings and decent digital audio performance under Windows 2000. Add more RAM for better results.
Thanks to the staff of Kelly's Music and Steinberg Canada for assistance in the production of this article.
Comments:
I read your web page, and I thought you might be interested in my setup with Windows 2000 and Cubase VST 5.0. The computer is an Athlon-C 1200MHz with 256 megs of RAM, ABIT KT7A-100 RAID motherboard and IBM Deskstar 75GXP 45 GB hard drive.
Yesterday, I dumped my Terratec EWS64 XL, having had the exact same problems that you described. As a "replacement", I bought an RME DIGI96/8 PST audio card, and I'm having absolutely no problems with it. The card is just magnificent! I'm using ASIO drivers for it, and it works with absolutely no glitches with 5ms latency. (256 samples buffer, 48kHz sampling rate) I believe the card would do 2.5ms just fine, if it was set to 96kHz. (at least they said so on the RME web site, although I haven't tried it out yet)
When I had both cards in the machine, the best I could get was 10ms! Based on the FAQs and documentation on the RME web site, I figured out that I had too many devices hogging my IRQ resources... Apparently all of them weren't doing IRQ sharing so nicely.
Removing the EWS freed two IRQs, and I also disabled the ACPI support, and set Win2k to optimize its process timing for background processes, as suggested on the RME web site. After those "adjustments", I just couldn't get a single glitch! :)
For MIDI stuff, I have the Midiman MIDISport 2x2 USB with WDM drivers, and it works like a dream, too!
So it is very much possible to get Windows 2000 to perform well in pro audio applications, given you have the right hardware.
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