Vista Audio Stack

[tatteredpotato]

I've heard all about the new audio stack in Vista, and all the problems it has been causing for people with nice sound cards. My question is, are the changes actually for the better? I have heard things like the removal of hardware acceleration, but are there any improvements? My friend does audio recording under XP, and will Vista eventually be a better platform for this with the right hardware?

 

[drag]

Probably not.

At least I don't think that the audio stack has any bearing on the issue. If Vista has better low-latency scedualling then XP then that will make a difference.

For instance in XP if you had lots of disk activity it would cause buffer underruns in the sound card (shows up in the recording as pops and other artifacts).

Better scedualling would solve that problem. (for example on low-latency patched Linux system with a good quality sound card you can have full disk activity and cpu cranked up to 100% usage and not have problems)

I am guessing that if Vista makes it impossible for creative to use it to do hardware acceleration then with professional sound it's not going to improve things.

probably what you will have to do is install ASIO audio drivers so that you can bypass the audio stuff completely, like with XP.


edit:

My advice for your friend would be to probably avoid Vista for the time being if realtime audio performance is important and ask the manufacturers about weither or not ASIO drivers are nessicary and if so if/when they are/will be aviable.


If your friend doesn't need realtime audio performance were then it may make things easier provided that their sound card is supported well.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: drag

Probably not.

At least I don't think that the audio stack has any bearing on the issue. If Vista has better low-latency scedualling then XP then that will make a difference.

For instance in XP if you had lots of disk activity it would cause buffer underruns in the sound card (shows up in the recording as pops and other artifacts).

Better scedualling would solve that problem. (for example on low-latency patched Linux system with a good quality sound card you can have full disk activity and cpu cranked up to 100% usage and not have problems)

I am guessing that if Vista makes it impossible for creative to use it to do hardware acceleration then with professional sound it's not going to improve things.

probably what you will have to do is install ASIO audio drivers so that you can bypass the audio stuff completely, like with XP.


edit:

My advice for your friend would be to probably avoid Vista for the time being if realtime audio performance is important and ask the manufacturers about weither or not ASIO drivers are nessicary and if so if/when they are/will be aviable.


If your friend doesn't need realtime audio performance were then it may make things easier provided that their sound card is supported well.

I do know that ASIO is still alive and well in Vista. The changes made were supposed to improve things in the long run, with professional users in mind. Gamers were the ones that really got the shaft.

 

[slpaulson]

This page does a good job of explaining what changed.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: BD2003
I do know that ASIO is still alive and well in Vista. The changes made were supposed to improve things in the long run, with professional users in mind. Gamers were the ones that really got the shaft.

ASIO isn't from Microsoft. It's from third parties that made applications for Windows, but were limited by the lack of driver performance.

So it's the same thing for Creative and their hardware acceleration. They are going to encourage game developers to port to OpenAL (pretty much audio equivelent of OpenGL, came out of Linux to make porting games easier) and have drivers that by-pass the windows stuff also.

So as long as Microsoft didn't change anything to make audio driver development harder then it probably doesn't make much of a difference.

I looked it up a bit and although I didn't see anything comparing performance yet, only people talking about it before Vista was released.

They call it the new audio stuff WaveRT, which should offer considurable better audio performance then what Windows XP offered. However it appears to mostly be geared at providing advanced features for consumer playback devices.. more advanced software mixing, "headphone" sound mode, better multichannel support, etc etc It's doesn't realy seem to be much benifit for profesional audio folks except for people who don't have the budget to buy a 'prosumer'-style card that supports ASIO stuff.

Nothing uber-full like the good performing 'Core Audio' stuff you get with OS X. But very good for people that want a home theater type setup.

So Vista is a mixed bag. Better then XP, but not realy going to make much of a difference for this sort of audio thing, except on the low end.

Also they claim that Vista has better scedualing and other such things. So then hopefully you don't have to worry so much about loading the system to get good low latency performance.

Of course it's worth it to keep in mind that this is only realy a issue with realtime audio editing and mixing with multiple inputs and outputs and such things. If your the type of person who is just editing samples and doing arrangements then it's not going to make much of a difference, if it does then it will be better then XP.

 

[ProviaFan]

Ironically, with integrated sound cards, in some cases I have actually seen a regression in reliability as opposed to an improvement. In particular, I've had several Realtek-based AC97 audio devices function more poorly (e.g. clicks and pops under heavy activity) in Vista than they did in XP. Even with very recent "Vista" drivers, the problem remains (not that I trust Realtek to do more than test quickly and repackage old junk).

 

[drag]

Ya they mentioned that could be a problem with Vista for very low end stuff.

The problem is that those pops and squeels and such are a result of buffer underruns in the sound card. This happens when the system does not have enough time to feed the sound card enough data to keep up with the audio stream.

I don't know what the real hardware difference between a card that is ASIO capable and not, but basicly it boils down to better hardware performance and larger buffers in nicer cards.

With XP everything was fairly high latency and you had that kmix doing all the software mixing you need so that the machine always had plenty of time to keep the buffer full, with large software buffers.

With Vista they have much less 'play' and thus there is less forgiveness for cheap hardware and bad performing drivers, were with XP they would of gotten away with it.

I wouldn't be suprised if the WaveRT stuff ties in well with Intel's 'High Definition Audio' standard that is replacing the old AC'97 stuff. (for people that don't know these are a sort of generic API for accessing sound cards. If a sound card is AC'97 (or HDA) capable then anything with AC'97 drivers can utilize it, even if they won't be able to use any of the extra features of the card.)

I wouldn't be suprised if that realtek card will never realy be that usefull for Vista. I'd bet that you'd want to have a card that supports 'High Definition Audio' or better for Vista as a sort of minimal reasonable requirement.

I expect all decent motherboards support by now. I know with the realtek stuff shipping with Intel's stuff supports that just fine. I don't know about Nvidia or ATI though, I assume they do. (Intel made it pretty sexy sounding instead of calling it: AC'04 so it's marketable) Do they talk about supporting 'High Def audio' or HDA-codec or anything like that?

 

[Nothinman]

My question is, are the changes actually for the better?

Depends on your perspective, if you paid insane amounts of money for a POS XFi card then you probably won't like them, but in general they're good because they move large chunks of the audio stack out of the kernel which will make it more difficult for driver problems to bring the whole system down.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: drag
I expect all decent motherboards support by now. I know with the realtek stuff shipping with Intel's stuff supports that just fine. I don't know about Nvidia or ATI though, I assume they do. (Intel made it pretty sexy sounding instead of calling it: AC'04 so it's marketable) Do they talk about supporting 'High Def audio' or HDA-codec or anything like that?

My mainboard is based on the nforce4 chipset, and while it's not the most up-to-date hardware one could have, I still would have expected acceptable performance (realizing how little data a stereo 16/44.1 audio stream actually comprises relative to the performance of today's computers in general). However, I need a professional audio interface for recording anyway, so it's not unlikely that I'll end up with a MOTU or Digidesign firewire interface before much longer. I'll just have to accept slightly out-of-date cheap integrated audio as one of the casualties of upgrading to Vista.

 

[Frintin]

There are always hardware casualties with the implementation of a new OS. Changing sound in Vista brings high performance audio capabilites (at least in principle) into the realm of everyman, not just users of high priced sound cards.

The hardware companies have had as much time to react to this change in the OS as in the past.

 

[hellokeith]

The Vista audio stack was constructed with stability, fidelity, and features in mind. It is significantly better in these respects to XP/2k. Good for users with integrated "HD" 5.1/7.1 motherboard audio. Good for audio purists. Great for HTPC'ers.

There is also a protected audio path that developers can use which guarantees bit-perfect playback and has higher system priority. Pro audio apps and audiophile apps like Foobar will likely make use of protected path.

The downside is DirectSound is gone. So there's a possibility some older games will not work at all on Vista. But in a year or two, this will be a non-event. All games will be using OpenAL, and all audio workstation apps will be using ASIO (or OpenAL perhaps).

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Frintin
There are always hardware casualties with the implementation of a new OS. Changing sound in Vista brings high performance audio capabilites (at least in principle) into the realm of everyman, not just users of high priced sound cards.

Not realy. The difference between professional/prosumer audio card and a cheap card is the hardware, not the software. (at least from my perspective).

In otherwords you don't have ASIO for cheap cards because cheap cards are not capable of performing as well.

Basicly you have higher quality D/A conversion chips, better ways for the software to drive the hardware, and more importantly many more inputs/outputs for analog and digital. Nothing in Vista is all of a sudden going to change the fact that a more expensive card is going to have several digital analog audio "IN" ports while your cheap onboard is, at most, going to have a line-in and mic-in that sound like crap.