KVR Audio

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:38 pm

legendCNCD wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:32 pm
Passing Bye wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:38 pm Windows loses snappiness over time and I experienced ocassional freezes, but overall I’m quite satisfied with 8.1 Pro on dedicated audio desktop PC, on other hand 10.6.8 was amazing, best OS I ever used.
Nope, havent seen that with 3 Windows machines, only thing that losed its snappiness was harddisk slowing down. I've seen the same on osx 10.6.x, the disks slowed and it lost its snappiness too.
On SSD times, I've not seen that

Also I dont install & uninstall stuff, except games..

Don't play games, use computers only for music and that's my experience, had all my machines optimized for audio, mostly offline, registry is main culprit for Windows OS I guess, it starts slowing down over time.

legendCNCD · Post by **legendCNCD** » Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:44 pm

Passing Bye wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:38 pm
legendCNCD wrote: ↑Thu Mar 11, 2021 5:32 pm
Passing Bye wrote: ↑Mon Mar 08, 2021 3:38 pm Windows loses snappiness over time and I experienced ocassional freezes, but overall I’m quite satisfied with 8.1 Pro on dedicated audio desktop PC, on other hand 10.6.8 was amazing, best OS I ever used.
Nope, havent seen that with 3 Windows machines, only thing that losed its snappiness was harddisk slowing down. I've seen the same on osx 10.6.x, the disks slowed and it lost its snappiness too.
On SSD times, I've not seen that

Also I dont install & uninstall stuff, except games..
Don't play games, use computers only for music and that's my experience, had all my machines optimized for audio, mostly offline, registry is main culprit for Windows OS I guess, it starts slowing down over time.

Soo.. how does registry, a file, which you dont touch if you dont install stuff and uninstall (uninstall should remove its stuff from registry, but in the XP days it was far from it usually) get bloated by itself?

I've not seen it happen, HDD fragmentation and natural wear will slow machines already at 1 year old. How did the osx get slower then? It doesnt have registry

HDD will never be as fast as the first time you'll power it up. Also I've had more OSX crash on me than Windows 7.

(also Win10 has crashed on my work machine thrice already, reason: AMD Radeon Pro drivers...

)

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Thu Mar 11, 2021 6:17 pm

Opossite of my experience, sorry...

ajdz · Post by **ajdz** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:26 pm

You CAN make windows an audio system, but it takes too much time and nerves, special drivers, registry hacks etc. Macs are made for audio from scratch and you don't need to optimize anything. No drivers, no nothing. No virus scanner either. And you can watch a youtube video while the sequencer is running. Try this in Windows. Won't work.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:31 pm

The registry slowing down Windows is definitely a myth. See the article here, for example: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/dont-beli ... ws-faster/

Apart from that, apart from running the High Performance power plan in Windows 10, which I consider the most important "trick" (without it, you will quickly run into dropouts), I haven't done any optimizing on my system. It runs fine, according to LatencyMon.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:36 pm

ajdz wrote: ↑Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:26 pm You CAN make windows an audio system, but it takes too much time and nerves, special drivers, registry hacks etc. Macs are made for audio from scratch and you don't need to optimize anything.

I guess the false assumption is once again that Windows users use their computers like Mac users. Every Mac user I met won't install nearly as much (shit) software on Mac OS than the average Windows user. Thus there won't be nearly as many background tasks or autostart programs as well, obviously.

But, yes, Windows has more background tasks by default running than Mac OS. The question is how much of an impact that has with a modern CPU, which eats most tasks easily for breakfast. I know when I will run out of processing power, or get dropouts. It's usually when I use a lot of voices of very CPU heavy soft synths.

Background tasks using up 0.1% in the background probably won't have THAT much of an impact in comparison.

zvenx · Post by **zvenx** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:45 pm

Good thing the OP asked not for a mac vs pc thing

I have both, I definitely have a mac bias, however....I bought my PC from studiocat and can't recall ever having a problem with it in the 5 or so years since i have had it, and for sure my next PC will also be bought from them.

my macbook pro is getting a bit long in the tooth and will replace eventually, but I want to see where the Silicon Chips are going first before I do so.

But if you don't need portability on mac for sure the mac mini or imac, and I definitely would encourage if you getting a pc have a professional build it for you if you don't want to have to research and possibly troubleshoot yourself.

I of course recommend studiocat highly (I think he is on here on kvr too).

https://studiocat.com/opencart2/

rsp

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 1:49 pm

I'd really like to see a comparison between Mac and PC, with the same hardware, and both not optimized for audio. I doubt there's much inbetween them, considering today's machine's processing power.

That said, if you can and want to optimize the crap out of your machine, I'd do it anyway. Back when Windows 7 and 8 were current, I also always fiddled with services, and took a look which ones I can deactivate. Nowadays, I just don't see the point... the PC is booted up in seconds, and background tasks don't seem to be that much of a hinderance. Actually, I'd even argue that a SSD and a performant CPU is much more important than deactivating performance irrelevant background tasks.

My PC's are general purpose machines, not meant to do one specific job, so, I won't optimize anything about them. I need things like Nvidie Gforce Experience, for example, for gaming and screen recording (it's actually pretty nice for that).

ajdz · Post by **ajdz** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:15 pm

I didn't speak of performance. I don't think that there's a difference in performace between an optimized Windows system with good asio drivers and Mac. It's just the system stuff for me. You don't need to deal with this in Macs at all. And no drivers. It works from scratch. All at low latency. And you aren't harassed byt he system all the time.

VitaminD · Post by **VitaminD** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:25 pm

My Windows 10 PCs stay operational for weeks to months at a time without reboot or powering down. And they function flawlessly. The keys are not to buy cut rate hardware and not to download and install anything and everything that twinkles in your eye. Especially avoid system 'helper' tools. Windows works like an appliance now on its own. It doesn't need helpers and it never 'harasses' me about updates.

Disable the phone home junk and I use a 3rd party firewall called simplewall. Outside of that, I think my win10 is stock. Maybe I disabled auto updates too. But it just works.

I'm sure Macs are nice too. But don't buy in to people spreading FUD about Windows from years past previous experiences or horror story posts they read.

Passing Bye · Post by **Passing Bye** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 4:11 pm

Loosing snappiness and ocassionally getting jerky and little less responsive is far from horror or bad, that’s same experience myself and OP had, it’s nothing uncommon, overall I’m happy with my Windows system and it’s running great, but I had even better expirence with macOS.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 4:23 pm

ajdz wrote: ↑Sat Mar 13, 2021 2:15 pm I didn't speak of performance. I don't think that there's a difference in performace between an optimized Windows system with good asio drivers and Mac. It's just the system stuff for me. You don't need to deal with this in Macs at all. And no drivers. It works from scratch.

You'd be surprised. Many laptops run out of the box these days, when you install Windows 10 on them. Windows Update comes with loads of vendor drivers these days. There are some specific cases where hardware vendors modify their hardware, so, in such cases, you do need special vendor drivers, but, for most of the hardware, you don't need that.

Even when you buy some Razer gaming keyboard, all you do is plug it in, and Windows loads the Razer driver and software automatically... a lot of stuff is just plug and play on Windows nowadays.

ajdz · Post by **ajdz** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 5:05 pm

Yep, regarding drivers Windows is much better than it used to be. Note: I was a Windows user myself for many years (in fact since Windows 98) and still use Windows. I also prefer it for some stuff, but for music I switched to Mac, since it so much less troublesome for this task. No ASIO drivers needed, no virus scanner, no background tasks, no auto-update, etc.. In fact - for music - I liked XP and 7 more than 10 since you really could "freeze" the system once everything was optimized. In Win 10 it's a permanent fight against the system, and automatic updates return out of nothing, even when you deactivate them. It's not YOU who is the master of your system - it's big brother Microsoft.

chk071 · Post by **chk071** » Sat Mar 13, 2021 6:10 pm

ajdz · Post by **ajdz** » Wed Mar 17, 2021 8:11 am

Just an example for what I mean (Windows 10 - automatic updates are deactivated): Suddenly audio is gone. Out of nowhere. I'm checking everything, but can't get it running again. Windows tells me that I have to restart the system. So I do. And now Windows block the computer for half an hour and installs an update, without even asking before! Good trick to enforce updates by taking away audio. It's unbelievable.

Time for new computer. Looking for input