As I write this in early February 2008, Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system has been out for a year, and to say it has met with a mixed reception would be a bit of an understatement. Most Vista users are pleased with its look and feel and there are now quite a few musicians using it successfully. However, a significant proportion of users have been disappointed by aspects of its performance compared with Windows XP, and some have taken the unprecedented step of uninstalling Vista and returning to XP. You can even find web sites dedicated to such tasks, with names like and .

For musicians, Vista's new and potentially low-latency WaveRT architecture has suffered from a Catch 22 situation: few audio application developers have yet added the required support for it — after all, ASIO already performs extremely well — and almost no professional audio interface manufacturers have written any WaveRT drivers that could take advantage of such support (partly because WaveRT is only currently compatible with PCI devices, and is not applicable to either USB or Firewire audio interfaces). One exception is Echo, who released Vista-only WaveRT drivers for their Echo 24, Indigo and 3G families in November 2007.

Meanwhile, the MMCSS (MultiMedia Class Scheduler Service), hailed as a way to permanently banish audio clicks and pops under Vista, by enabling audio-processing threads to be given a higher priority than other active threads, seems to have fallen at the first fence. Reports from developers who have included MMCSS code in their audio applications are that other, higher priority, Vista tasks like Aero graphics can still interrupt audio. Those interested in using their audio interfaces with a latency of 3ms or less can still run significantly more plug-ins and software synth parts under Windows XP, making the potential benefits of MMCSS a little academic (see, for instance, ).

On the positive side, concerns about Vista DRM (Digital Rights...