My biggest tech headache of 2010 has been my DAW (digital audio workstation - computer built with audio production in mind and outfitted as such). Although many of the components were bought in late 2009, the system has been consistently upgraded to meet my needs. I have no laptop of my own, my work computer is crap, but my DAW computer is a beast.

Let me preface by saying that I always run 64-bit versions of Windows if I can help it. The 3.25 GB RAM limit is absurd, and with most programs taking advantage of as much memory as you can throw at it, and most programs supporting some degree of multi-threaded or muti-core processing operation, if you work in the media there’s little or no reason to not go 64-bit.

But the one reason that there is is a huge one: drivers drivers drivers (and to a lesser extent, program compatibility). I use an E-Mu 0404 PCI sound card in this box (an INCREDIBLE value for the money, BTW), and they just released drivers for it (which are still in BETA, mind you), I think three months ago. I’m not even positive that they had released Vista drivers for it (I’ve only used Vista at work — since the day it was released.)

The new drivers mandated that EVERYTHING be done at 48000 Khz. Set your sound card to 48k sound rate by default - screws up winamp. Set your ASIO patch program to 48000 for a recording session - if you don’t set it back, it screws up playback in things like Flash. What a real pain in the neck.

BTW, Sound Forge 7, which was one of the most stable versions that Sony put out (or whoever they were before Sony bought them). Not compatible with ASIO drivers, which you need for their low latency, high capability universal magic.

So now that I THINK I have the various bitrates ironed out, everything has been going great until it’s time to do some digital recording. You SHOULD be able to do this quite handily by turning the computer’s output monitoring off… but you have output monitoring in your application, in your PatchMix DSP app, you have it everywhere… and by the time you get done hunting around and finding it, your MIDI has gone out of sync and you have to start the whole dub over.

This is more rant than information but I would LOVE to start a conversation concerning 64-bit Windows 7, or Windows 7 in general, and sound. Good, bad, successes, failures? Hardware recommendations?

We don’t even have to keep it on the pro audio side, just share some experiences.