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Post by svart on Jul 21, 2021 7:35:05 GMT -6
Windows drivers face have gotten worse. This is inarguable. There are many components today that are unusable due to poor vendor drivers causing DPC latency. The ridiculous Fidelizer Audio actually works. Your Lenovo PCs work. That’s great and all but there are other Lenovos from the same generations with components that have drivers rendering them unusable for digital recording. The Lenovo models and sizes that are usable vary from generation to generation. Sometimes you are literally playing a parts lottery hoping that the specific unit of the specific SKU of the model you want has the good parts as ericn pointed out. This didn’t use to be the case. You can run most T, X, and P series from 5-10 years ago just fine with reaper. Now most of the current gen Thinkpads are simply unusable. Macs generally have much better driver integration. Nobody I know worries about it that much. They just get a better cpu, max out the ram, upgrade the ssd, always get apple care, and go. I have audio gear and plugins to worry about, I don’t want to worry about an OS and don’t even have time to spend building and researching pcs beyond seeing a dpc number If I want to get any work done. Spending an extra 500 on an arm Mac for something that works out of the box is worth it to me If there widely circulated pc builds of commonly available parts it would be different but there’s not and many parts are scarce in covid I don't agree. I come from the age of having to do a lot of work to get drivers to "work". Things have gotten tons better for audio gear in windows world. I remember buying cards for computers and the 3.5" floppy disk just had "drivers" on it and it was up to you to figure out which one worked. No instructions. No help. No internet forums full of folks with opinions. You just had to make it work somehow. I remember fussing over a 1st gen soundblaster16 card that I wanted to try to use to record back in maybe '95 or so. Took me a week of work to get it working, mainly because there were no W95 drivers available and a lot of registry hacks and whatnot to get it working with windows sound recorder and then N-Track studio. Old man yelling at clouds time: You kids will never know the hardship of those days with your fancy "plug and play" stuff and all. Things are sooooo much better now. It just works. On the off chance it doesn't, a few minutes online searching around usually finds the answer. Anyway, when the producer brought his trashcan mac, we first attempted to use my computer to work. He hated my Reaper skin, and my overall GUI arrangement, etc. He was astonished that my lowly machine could run all the tracks he imported without needing to pre-render/freeze anything.. and it could still take more and more.. He grumbled many times about how much he spent on his mac. He also grumbled a bit about how he just bought PT updates and it cost him big $$ and my 200$ license for Reaper was peanuts compared to how much he had spent overall. When I reskinned it to look like PT he just stopped paying attention after that. Says more than words can say. But the moral of the story comes afterwards when he decided that he just couldn't possibly deal with using my DAW and needed to use his "for the plugins". We plugged the MOTU converters into his rig and... Nada. The drivers didn't work. A few minutes of online searching found that his version of MacOS had a bug where MOTU drivers wouldn't work. He wasn't going to pay to update his OS either so we thought we were dead in the water, but I did some more searching and found an online forum where someone found a workaround where we had to edit something and change some settings in MacOS. it worked and the converters worked fine afterwards, but don't give me that "it just works" because we spent over an hour doing the same exact thing that you're saying doesn't happen on Macs and only happens on PC, whereas I installed the drivers and "it just worked" on my PC. |
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Post by Quint on Jul 21, 2021 8:27:48 GMT -6
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Post by svart on Jul 21, 2021 9:37:14 GMT -6
The 1975 Magnuson-Moss warranty act says that it's illegal for a company to deny warranties if you attempted to fix a product yourself. Apple and many other companies KNOW this law but the general public does not. They cannont deny a warranty because you fixed it yourself, or had a 3rd party fix it. However, if you damage it further, or the parts that you used cause failures not related to the original issue, then they do not have to fix those other issues. Say you have a bad battery, so you replace it, but your RAM goes bad shortly thereafter but since it's soldered you can't fix it.. They can't deny you the RAM repair simply because you opened the unit to replace the battery. The issue is that they have to PROVE that your battery might have damaged the RAM in order to deny your claim. They have the lawyers and cash to litigate you to death. It's just cheaper to buy a new computer or have it fixed out of warranty than to go to court. When my Mac kept having motherboard failures, I kept sending it in for repair. They kept saying it was user error, that I must have been blocking the air intake, etc. I found tons of other folks with the same issues online. They also had Apple blame them and everything else for the same problems. Some folks threatened to sue, so Apple said "ok, we'll see you in court". Word was that it would be cheaper to go to court and try to have the case destroyed than to warranty tens of thousands of failing Macs. I later found out that a forensic team figured out that Apple didn't properly align the BGA grid for their GPU on the motherboard and the thermal stress would pop some of the balls and they would fail. They would just replace the motherboards with the same one and the same problem would happen again, but usually just outside of warranty. Then it became a cash crop when folks sent these in for repair every 2 years or so. Apple KNEW this was happening, but they were making money off the repairs of their design fuck up so their plan was to deny it was happening long enough to come out with a new model and then stop repairing the old stuff due to "lack of parts". |
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Post by Quint on Jul 22, 2021 10:00:22 GMT -6
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Post by ericn on Jul 22, 2021 10:07:23 GMT -6
Yeah but knowing the biggies and the large repair centers they will act like it never happened and you will have to take them to court to get any where. This isn’t about politics it’s just nobody ever stops and thinks how do we enforce it ? |
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Post by Quint on Jul 22, 2021 10:16:42 GMT -6
Yeah but knowing the biggies and the large repair centers they will act like it never happened and you will have to take them to court to get any where. This isn’t about politics it’s just nobody ever stops and thinks how do we enforce it ? Well that's how it already was before. Here's to hoping that it will finally be enforced, which was the point of the FTC's ruling. It seems that this ruling was directly aimed at companies like Apple, so I'd expect Apple to be specifically targeted for this sort of thing going forward. Consumers won't have to sue if the FTC does it for them. One of the biggest turnoffs for me, when it comes to Macs, has always been the "walled garden" nature of their products. If I could actually buy a Mac and fix it on my own at a later date or upgrade things like drives and ram on my own, I might actually consider something like a Mac Mini somewhere down the road, given where the M1 thing is headed. But not as long as they continue soldering ram. No way with that BS. |
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Post by christopher on Jul 22, 2021 12:09:01 GMT -6
The stage is so setup for Windows to take massive market share from Apple, if they would just stop trying to be more evil! Remember clippy the evil paper clip guy they tried to ram down our throats? They are still at it, just in new other stupid ways. If they would simply make the OS easy to use and modify to our liking, not force us into crap, and offer $60 per license for Win Pro for home users they’d grow like weeds! I’ve been in the Apple garden for 12 years, and the Apple Watch is a great example. My wife got one, it’s awesome, but battery life is bad and overpriced, she misplaced it. She got us new Garmin watches on sale, it’s better than Apple.. notifications come through, tracks oxygen like Apple, it’s lighter, battery lasts up to a week, it’s focused mainly on fitness. It shows where Apple weakness is, give users something no frills and simply works and people will flock to it.
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Post by Quint on Jul 22, 2021 12:16:50 GMT -6
The stage is so setup for Windows to take massive market share from Apple, if they would just stop trying to be more evil! Remember clippy the evil paper clip guy they tried to ram down our throats? They are still at it, just in new other stupid ways. If they would simply make the OS easy to use and modify to our liking, not force us into crap, and offer $60 per license for Win Pro for home users they’d grow like weeds! I’ve been in the Apple garden for 12 years, and the Apple Watch is a great example. My wife got one, it’s awesome, but battery life is bad and overpriced, she misplaced it. She got us new Garmin watches on sale, it’s better than Apple.. notifications come through, tracks oxygen like Apple, it’s lighter, battery lasts up to a week, it’s focused mainly on fitness. It shows where Apple weakness is, give users something no frills and simply works and people will flock to it. I'm kind of hoping Intel comes out with a direct competitor to the M1. Good luck with MS taking your suggestions to heart, but I agree with you. Complaints aside, I generally still prefer PC to Mac for all of the oft discussed reasons, but the M1 thing is intriguing. |
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Post by svart on Jul 22, 2021 12:41:27 GMT -6
The stage is so setup for Windows to take massive market share from Apple, if they would just stop trying to be more evil! Remember clippy the evil paper clip guy they tried to ram down our throats? They are still at it, just in new other stupid ways. If they would simply make the OS easy to use and modify to our liking, not force us into crap, and offer $60 per license for Win Pro for home users they’d grow like weeds! I’ve been in the Apple garden for 12 years, and the Apple Watch is a great example. My wife got one, it’s awesome, but battery life is bad and overpriced, she misplaced it. She got us new Garmin watches on sale, it’s better than Apple.. notifications come through, tracks oxygen like Apple, it’s lighter, battery lasts up to a week, it’s focused mainly on fitness. It shows where Apple weakness is, give users something no frills and simply works and people will flock to it. Huh? We have a right click. Checkmate, Apple. Win10 now has an S mode option, which limits what you can change about the OS and limits you to Microsoft certified apps to make things safe and reliable. They've taken a page from Apple on this one, by removing the ability to change and adjust anything you get fewer instances of people mucking up their systems. The Achilles heel of Windows has always been the extreme amount of flexibility and adjustment you can do. It's led to many a user accidentally ruining their system by happy-clicking on things they don't understand. |
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Post by christopher on Jul 22, 2021 12:43:43 GMT -6
Yeah Win10 is not bad, just a few things should be better. #1 is all the trying to spy on everything we do, is it really that profitable? The big search bar is awesome idea, like “search for your files here!” but instead it opens the internet and says “we can’t find that on the internet”.. ugh. What the hell are they thinking?  It’s a PC! Obviously they want to know exactly what we are searching for. So that’s a big waste and turnoff. #2.. how come when I record something it automatically creates a Windows Media Player file? Is MS tracking every recording I do? #3.. pop ups. On an OS. |
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Post by svart on Jul 22, 2021 12:50:38 GMT -6
Yeah Win10 is not bad, just a few things should be better. #1 is all the trying to spy on everything we do, is it really that profitable? The big search bar is awesome idea, like “search for your files here!” but instead it opens the internet and says “we can’t find that on the internet”.. ugh. What the hell are they thinking? It’s a PC! Obviously they want to know exactly what we are searching for. So that’s a big waste and turnoff. #2.. how come when I record something it automatically creates a Windows Media Player file? Is MS tracking every recording I do? #3.. pop ups. On an OS. 1. I turn that junk off and uninstall it if I can. 2. I don't know what you mean by this. 3. Never had this happen and I have 5 computers running win10. Seems like something you might have installed doing it? |
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Post by thehightenor on Jul 22, 2021 12:53:06 GMT -6
It was on Windows 7 and reluctantly moved to Windows 10 with Cubase Pro but I've been so pleasantly surprised.
I find Windows 10 to be a thoroughly modern OS - it has been 100% reliable, I've had absolutely zero issues with updates and
Cubase has been running all day every day with zero crashes - I'm very pleased with just how stable and reliable W10 actually is.
It's also very efficient and loads so quickly.
I also run OSX on an iMac for Logic X and OSX feels very much like Windows 7 in as much as it feels a bit old and tired.
Windows 10 has the most modern OS feel about it, I think Apple needs to do to OSX that which Microsoft has done with the leap from W7 to W10
and bring it up to date.
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Post by christopher on Jul 22, 2021 12:58:32 GMT -6
They don’t want us turning that stuff off or when you install it would be super easy choice.
I also have no idea why but in my audio folder after every recording is a wmp file, same name as my file with but smaller so Windows media player can recognize it. It somehow snuck it in there and I have to do a some homework to figure that one out. I can’t imagine anyone but MSFT benefiting from that.
Pop ups I refer to are emails associated with my MSFT account. (Edit: they probably sell ads related to my user data.. I’ve seen pop up alerts from MS outlook saying “sale today only!”.. even though I get 20 emails per hour on that account- why just one get through?) If I stay offline, it’s probably gone. However, on Mac I got used to constant access to cloud drives and streaming, I feel it’s essential these days and hearing stuff through monitors, so we should ideally be able to be online at this point.
Edit: thanks for letting me rant a little. Overall win10 is good, but some of these things are total head scratchers. Especially search, the most useful feature for me. That’s one thing somehow macOS got right, it knew for example I wanted to find the MP3 I just made and was always top of the list before I even do the search. Smart.
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Post by popmann on Jul 22, 2021 21:04:40 GMT -6
Apple has had contextual "right click" forever. Certainly in OSX....but, I had it back in the day with a four button trackball on the old OS7/8/9 sequencers. It's just not always enabled by default.
Never had a pop up in Windows of any variety. This is professional, right? Not some retail Laptop with whatever adware all over?
What is the file extension of the alleged "windows media player files"....? Are you sure you're not just seeing normal audio files, made by your DAW, that have a file association with WMP by default?
I am going to answer the search part, as I don't see the actual spying bit being involved...when you click that search icon...and type "ThingIWantToFind"....while it's still open, there's three selections in the top left of that pane: search web, search documents, Search apps...if you don't click one of those, you get a kind of prediction like "itunes" will bring up the app iTunes as the first (most likely) hit...are you just wanting it to guess that you want to find the last file your wrote without typing anything?
I do very little searching for files. Why do you not know where your files are located? I mean I use search more to find things that might be hidden away...or an app I don't want to browse through the start menu for, but isn't regularly run enough to pin it to the start menu or taskbar...iTunes IS one of those for me, which is why I use it...but "itu..." it's chosen the app as top hit and I hit enter.
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Post by christopher on Jul 23, 2021 10:23:20 GMT -6
Thanks for the troubleshooting tips, search I’ve never clicked on it to open a window, didn’t even realize you could, so thanks for the info… I only use it like an average user because my subconcious sees “search here” as a quick easy way to find those things from months or years ago, as soon as I hit enter I realize the dumb mistake I’ve made. But yes, I could take full blame for being a lazy end user, but I’m not going to.. this isn’t 2005, MSFT is to blame, but I see they have $2b market cap (e: I meant to say $2 Trillion) so they must think the spying is worth it. The pop up notifications are some kind of part of the OS, both my win10 machines do it. It’s not constant.. it’s after startup, “these are your email alerts” and at very random times, maybe 5 times per 40 hours. Well I guess I could already gotten malware on both machines. They’ve only been online since spring, just seems unlikely because that stuff started as soon as I started using it. The media player thing, I’ll Google search and turn it off, unless I did that already. Anyway.. I now have bigger problems  yesterday I told my PC to sleep before we left the house. I’ve learned to wait and watch until the fans turn off, even though the screen is black.. but this time I didn’t. Apparently it didn’t sleep, usually means something running in the background. (That’s how my last motherboard died, I assume it blackscreen hung while the gpu was in “highest performance” mode and didn’t adjust fans up for a couple days while I was gone, overheated something somewhere-Fans were on, screen dark). Yesterday it must have been Windows downloading a new version of itself. Had to do a hard reset, booted up and “windows updating” with a percent. I thought I had turned that off? Oh well just means more Google search.  |
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Post by ericn on Jul 23, 2021 12:24:16 GMT -6
Yeah but knowing the biggies and the large repair centers they will act like it never happened and you will have to take them to court to get any where. This isn’t about politics it’s just nobody ever stops and thinks how do we enforce it ? Well that's how it already was before. Here's to hoping that it will finally be enforced, which was the point of the FTC's ruling. It seems that this ruling was directly aimed at companies like Apple, so I'd expect Apple to be specifically targeted for this sort of thing going forward. Consumers won't have to sue if the FTC does it for them. One of the biggest turnoffs for me, when it comes to Macs, has always been the "walled garden" nature of their products. If I could actually buy a Mac and fix it on my own at a later date or upgrade things like drives and ram on my own, I might actually consider something like a Mac Mini somewhere down the road, given where the M1 thing is headed. But not as long as they continue soldering ram. No way with that BS. Here is the problem, with the FTC nothing really is done till they have 1000’s of complaints. On an individual basis you can sue, sure you probably will eventually win but unless your to the level of it being a class action nobody will take the case because they know Apple and the like will delay and paper them to death so even if you win unless you get to the point of class action, where the FTC will step in anyway, the lawyer is going to lose money. All the big companies know this and have done the math that some how tells them paying their lawyers is cheaper than fixing a bunch of laptops. There is the spirit of the law and the reality. |
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Post by Quint on Jul 23, 2021 12:30:29 GMT -6
Well that's how it already was before. Here's to hoping that it will finally be enforced, which was the point of the FTC's ruling. It seems that this ruling was directly aimed at companies like Apple, so I'd expect Apple to be specifically targeted for this sort of thing going forward. Consumers won't have to sue if the FTC does it for them. One of the biggest turnoffs for me, when it comes to Macs, has always been the "walled garden" nature of their products. If I could actually buy a Mac and fix it on my own at a later date or upgrade things like drives and ram on my own, I might actually consider something like a Mac Mini somewhere down the road, given where the M1 thing is headed. But not as long as they continue soldering ram. No way with that BS. Here is the problem, with the FTC nothing really is done till they have 1000’s of complaints. On an individual basis you can sue, sure you probably will eventually win but unless your to the level of it being a class action nobody will take the case because they know Apple and the like will delay and paper them to death so even if you win unless you get to the point of class action, where the FTC will step in anyway, the lawyer is going to lose money. All the big companies know this and have done the math that some how tells them paying their lawyers is cheaper than fixing a bunch of laptops. There is the spirit of the law and the reality. I hear what you're saying. Let's just hope you're wrong. I'll be interested to see what, if anything, comes of this over the next few years. |
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Post by ericn on Jul 23, 2021 13:05:08 GMT -6
Here is the problem, with the FTC nothing really is done till they have 1000’s of complaints. On an individual basis you can sue, sure you probably will eventually win but unless your to the level of it being a class action nobody will take the case because they know Apple and the like will delay and paper them to death so even if you win unless you get to the point of class action, where the FTC will step in anyway, the lawyer is going to lose money. All the big companies know this and have done the math that some how tells them paying their lawyers is cheaper than fixing a bunch of laptops. There is the spirit of the law and the reality. I hear what you're saying. Let's just hope you're wrong. I'll be interested to see what, if anything, comes of this over the next few years. I hope I am wrong on this one. |
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Post by christopher on Jul 23, 2021 14:00:41 GMT -6
Sorry to comment again I just can’t help it! Haha.. back when iphone4 (s?) launched, wife had me wait overnight in line and get them for us and grandma. I spent the whole weekend, 12 hours each day transferring iTunes for each phone. Well I was upset it took so long, and needed to vent. I went to Apple forum and wrote an excellent post ripping the whole process and my personal unpaid hell, from standing in line to dealing with iTunes on my day off. Steve or someone afraid of Steve must have seen it because 30+ employees responded to my single comment in the first hour, the only way anyone could see my comment was to click through 4 pages. A few hours later MY iPhone, which was previous version I did not upgrade, overheated and bricked. I went to Apple store and forked out $500 for a replacement. I thought that was some kind of karma, but wondered if Apple really somehow bricked my phone? A few months later they announced on the news that yes Apple can brick any phone .. in case of theft. I’ve been to Steve’s office, so I should have known, just better off not rocking the boat. They make awesome stuff anyway. |
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Post by popmann on Jul 23, 2021 16:02:53 GMT -6
Ok....so, one of the things I take for granted is that I probably did....once....three years ago....do some configuration (just normal UI choices) to whatever "notification center". All mine does is light up when there are updates that need to be OK'd for download. I don't want them checking my mail and notifying me about jack shit except "hey--there are some updates you need to download--when should we do them or wait?"
Is this Windows 10 PROFESSIONAL?
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Post by svart on Jul 23, 2021 16:24:06 GMT -6
Ok....so, one of the things I take for granted is that I probably did....once....three years ago....do some configuration (just normal UI choices) to whatever "notification center". All mine does is light up when there are updates that need to be OK'd for download. I don't want them checking my mail and notifying me about jack shit except "hey--there are some updates you need to download--when should we do them or wait?" Is this Windows 10 PROFESSIONAL? I believe pro and enterprise are the only versions that allow you to turn off the forced updates, unless you do a registry edit.. |
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Post by christopher on Jul 23, 2021 17:02:03 GMT -6
The desktop is pro, I turned that stuff off before. I just need to find and do the tutorial again. I did an update a while back for some reason…. I think it was the chipset needed an update? Whatever it was I too busy troubleshooting crashes and when the right driver/bios settings etc finally worked I went to music. Anyway, Windows desktop is still great for the price: I have NVME drive, 2x WD 2gb IDE’s, 2x USB portable drives, usb thumb drives, usb midi keys, FireWire, display port, Ethernet port, usb-c. If I go MacBook trying to hook all that stuff with dongles and etc adds up fast. And Windows likes that idea now too.. my PC laptop needs dongles and they’ve gone up in price too. Windows desktop still a cheap way for powerful versatile machine.
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Post by Bob Olhsson on Jul 25, 2021 10:45:38 GMT -6
One feature of windows is that there are amazing utility accessories. A favorite of mine is dBpoweramp. It lets me mouse over any audio file and the sample rate and bit depth pop right up. Right-click and I can convert file type and sample rate, view and modify BWF metadata or check on the original DAW, date and file id to spot renamed copies of the very same audio file.
When I first switched to windows, I set my desktop up to look and work exactly like a system 7, 8 or 9 Mac and it still kind of does. I've recently started using the task bar Mac style.
As far as I can tell, system updates are a lots bigger problem on Macs. I run the windows home version and have only had two minor update issues in five years. The only virus I've ever encountered was on a Mac and Macs were lots less vulnerable before system X yanked everything out of the firmware.
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Post by svart on Jul 26, 2021 5:54:52 GMT -6
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Post by Coil Audio on Jul 26, 2021 9:14:55 GMT -6
I was wondering when Louis would enter the chat  |
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It’s a PC! Obviously they want to know exactly what we are searching for. So that’s a big waste and turnoff.
yesterday I told my PC to sleep before we left the house. I’ve learned to wait and watch until the fans turn off, even though the screen is black.. but this time I didn’t. Apparently it didn’t sleep, usually means something running in the background. (That’s how my last motherboard died, I assume it blackscreen hung while the gpu was in “highest performance” mode and didn’t adjust fans up for a couple days while I was gone, overheated something somewhere-Fans were on, screen dark). Yesterday it must have been Windows downloading a new version of itself. Had to do a hard reset, booted up and “windows updating” with a percent. I thought I had turned that off? Oh well just means more Google search. 
