The new Windows Media Player for Windows 95 and Windows 98 removes the need for lots of separate players, and can be downloaded free from the Microsoft web site.
This month sees a major upgrade of the PC variety, as Martin Walker invests in a faster, more powerful machine, as well as installing Windows 98. Things will never be the same again!
Well, I've finally taken the plunge. After much deliberation, I now have a new Pentium II 300MHz machine, complete with separate Ultra Wide SCSI drive for audio purposes. This may not be a cutting‑edge processor, but it certainly is the most cost‑effective at the time of writing, with each faster model above it jumping in price by about £100 a time. Although I have championed the cause of those with entry‑level machines for a considerable time, my ageing Pentium 166MHz MMX machine was not only becoming borderline in some cases for reviewing the latest cutting‑edge software for SOS, but its Baby‑AT motherboard format made the installation of long expansion cards a bit of a nightmare. My new machine (purchased from SOS advertisers Red Submarine in York) is housed in a Midi tower case (lots of expansion room) and has an ATX‑format motherboard, which can accommodate full‑length (14‑inch) cards in each and every one of its expansion slots.
I'm well pleased with the increase in performance, and although I will report in more detail in a future PC Musician feature, for those who can't wait to find out the improvement when running real‑time plug‑in effects, Waves TrueVerb drops from a processor‑draining 57 percent (with my 166MHz machine) to 19.5 percent with the Pentium II 300MHz — nearly three times the performance!
The Upgrade Path
Those folks at Cakewalk have been busy again — by the time you read this version 8 of Pro Audio should be available, with support for 16‑, 18‑, 20‑, 22‑, and 24‑bit audio hardware, recording at up to 24 bits at 96kHz, up to 128 audio tracks, and a new range of MIDI processing plug‑ins.
In fact, this purchase coincides with the second anniversary of my starting to write for SOS, and it's a sobering experience to look back at how my PC equipment has changed in that time. When I wrote my first SOS piece, for the October '96 issue, I had a 486DX33 machine, complete with a luxurious 2Mb of RAM and a huge 250Mb hard drive, but this was about at the end of its usefulness, and even in that first piece I was reporting problems with MIDI sample dump transfers, due to its low speed.
By the April '97 issue I was reporting the purchase of a new PC powered by the Cyrix P166+ processor, with 16Mb RAM, and a huge 1Gb hard drive. I learnt a lot more the hard way about PCs during 1997, and particularly about the lacklustre floating‑point performance of this Cyrix chip — following my processor speed tests in the August '97 issue (when running music software), I hung on to the Pentium 166MHz MMX processor I had borrowed for the tests, for a big jump in plug‑in performance. I later upgraded to 32Mb of RAM, and then to a huge 2.5Gb hard drive (funny how each time I got a new drive, it always seemed huge — I remember thinking the same with my first ever 20Mb model). However, the Pentium 166MHz MMX is about the lowest entry‑level processor that will run the majority of today's music software, and it's not even manufactured any more.
Each one of my machines had a useful life of about 18 months (although they all worked fine for MIDI sequencing), and then either provided a useful trade‑in price when upgrading, or in the case of my latest upgrade, gave me a useful second machine for general word processing, running a software synth alongside the main machine, or as an emergency backup in the admittedly unlikely event of hardware problems with my new machine. If things run true to form, I expect I will be buying a new machine around Easter in the year 2000.
Call Me Back When We're Not So Busy
I installed Windows 98 on my new machine (as well as having Windows 95 on another drive in the same case), and since upgrading, I've noticed one very useful feature of Internet Explorer 4. This may be present in some previous versions, but I've always previously used Netscape Navigator, and so haven't spotted it before. If, like me, you download various large update files using the Internet, this might save you a lot of hassle.
When downloading the huge 3Mb upgrade for Waves' Native Power Pack (see the Internet updates box) I foolishly tried to simultaneously open four pages from the SOS Forum to read while I was waiting for it to finish, and my system crashed. Nothing new there, but after completely re‑booting my PC and logging on again, when I restarted the download, it picked up from where the machine had crashed. Typically, unless you use a dedicated FTP utility for download purposes, any break during a transfer means starting again at the beginning, so this is a huge improvement. If you find that the Net gets a bit 'cloggy', and your download transfer rate is either getting slower and slower, or it has stalled, simply cancel the download in progress (see screenshot), and then log back on another time when things aren't quite so busy. Then you can continue where you left off, but at a hopefully much higher speed (as long as you don't clear your temporary Internet files in the meantime, that is!).
EZ Does It
Adaptec have just launched a new version of their EZ‑SCSI utilities — the Deluxe version 5.0, which has three major new features. Web‑CheckUp (Windows 95/NT) connects to the Adaptec web site, automatically determines if your SCSI drivers are the latest versions, and then downloads any updates from the web. I personally find these automated updates a mixed blessing — while I applaud the principle, some updaters are so clever at cleaning up after themselves that if you ever need to re‑install the same software, you have no separate update file, and have to log on and go through the same process all over again.
It's a sobering experience to look back at how PC equipment has changed in two years
The second new feature is Disk ImageSaver (Windows 95/NT) which, as its name suggests, allows the entire contents of a hard drive to be saved to another drive, either as an emergency backup, or when transferring to a new hard d rive. Drive Preparer (Windows 95 only) provides an easy‑to‑use partition and formatting utility which can be used instead of the rather bland and uninformative MS‑DOS Fdisk and Format commands. All of theold favourites appear as well, such as SCSIBench 32 (performance utility), SCSI Explorer (scans the buss to find any connected SCSI devices and gives a diagnostic report), Adaptec Backup (file‑based backup utility), and Easy CD Creator Lite (a cut‑down version of the CD‑R writing package). Retail price is £55, but EZ‑SCSI 4.02 owners can get a free upgrade (as can anyone who bought version 4.01 after Jan 1st '98) and you can get more details about this from the Adaptec web site (www.adaptec.com/). The full URL for the update page is: www.adaptec.com/products/promos/...
Keep in Touch
On another happy note, SOS have kindly given me my own email address specifically for PC Notes. If you have any suggestions for topics that you would like to see me include in a future PC Musician feature or PC Notes item, drop me an email at pc.notes@soundonsound.com. I can't promise to reply to everyone, and I can't realistically sort out individual readers' PC problems, but it will certainly help me to keep abreast of what sort of problems you are having, how you may have already managed to solve them, and just what we need to cover to keep SOS the No.1 hi‑tech music recording magazine for the PC musician. See you next month!
Getting Animated About Windows 98
As a companion to my PC Musician feature on Windows 98 (see page 68), here are my first Windows 98 tips — a brief guide on how to disable some of its more outlandish graphic fripperies that can slow down your PC, many of which control features that are not immediately obvious. Some of them are quite fun the first few times you see them, but all of them add overhead — and the last thing you want when running a MIDI + Audio sequencer is extra animations every time you select a new option!
Most of them can be switched off individually using the General section of the Windows 98 version of TweakUI — simply untick the appropriate option to speed your PC up a little. However, there is also a global way to disable all but the Mouse hot tracking effects (which do need TweakUI). You can do this in the Display portion of the Control Panel, under the new Effects tab — untick the box marked 'Animate windows, menus, and lists'. While you are here, you may also want to check that 'Show window contents while dragging' is unticked, since this is bound to add overhead every time you rearrange your sequencer arrange and mixer windows. This is what the different options do:
- Window animation: controls those expanding and collapsing effects when minimising and re‑sizing windows.
- Smooth scrolling: lets Windows Explorer slide an area of the directory structure up and down when opening and closing folders.
- Menu Animation: cranks drop‑down menus up and down, rather than just letting them appear.
- Combo box animation: smooth‑scrolls information when opening the contents of things like the preset list of DirectShow plug‑ins.
- List box animation: lets you smooth‑scroll through list boxes such as the Wallpaper selection box in Control Panel/Display.
- Mouse hot tracking effects: activates those little tool tips that appear when your mouse hovers over the main window close, minimise, and maximise boxes. One Cubase user reported audible VST playback effects when his mouse moved over these!
Internet Updates
Event have now posted a new update to the combined Darla/Gina/Layla drivers on their web site, and the new version 3.08 finally cures the recurring problems with Gina S/PDIF input phase — apparently the Gina S/PDIF code has also been generally reworked. Other bug fixes include tweaks to Layla MIDI timing, and a bug fix for its S/PDIF output phase. However, possibly the most important enhancement is that now important phrase 'Windows 98 compatibility'. You can download the new all‑in‑one driver as a zipped file from www.event1.com/
Waves have new upgrades for nearly all of their DirectShow plug‑ins, including the Native Power Pack (a 3Mb download), MaxxBass (1Mb), and Audio Track (971Kb), all of which now move to version 2.5. Their advice is to remove any existing versions using the Add/Remove icon in Control Panel before installing the new ones. The place to look (for registered users) is www.waves.com/main.htm. Apart from a few minor bug fixes (including that dreadful clicking that used to happen when you lowered the bit resolution in the L1 Ultramaximiser), performance is significantly improved, the best being with TrueVerb, which in my new machine drops from 19.5 to 15.1 percent processor overhead — an improvement of 30 percent!
Microsoft have a new version of their Media Player available from the microsoft.com web site (see screenshot). It will work with both Windows 95 and Windows 98, and supports a much wider range of file types than its predecessor. These include not only local multimedia files like WAV, AU, SND, and MID files (as well as AVI, MPG, MPEG, and MP2 for video), but also new streaming media files direct from the Net, like ASF (Active Streaming Format), and RA and RM (RealAudio and RealVideo). It aims to remove the previous need to download different players to deal with each media file format.