My first real music related post!

I've just bough a Mackie Onyx 400F audio interface. One of my hobbies (well, it's a little more than a hobby) is music. I play in a band for laughs, and occasionally I have a requirement to record stuff. I create some backings for the band, and also write songs when I find the time.

For a while, I've been using a Hoontech ADC2000 or something like that. It's a 19" rack-mount interface that has 8 ins and 8 outs on it, plus a few extra digital type ones, and it plugs into an adapter card that you install in your PC. It's actually a fairly ordinary piece of gear. Quite noisy (electronically speaking), very cheaply made and very highly strung.

When I bought it, it was cheap. $1000 got you the box and the adapter card and an extra jumbo bag of grief. At the time, however, it was quite the bargain. The original sets of drivers for it turned out to be complete crap. There was a lot of whinging in the forums about this, then some enterprising individual came up with their own set of drivers. These drivers were actually quite good and did the job. I've been living off them for a few years now and everything's been good.

The problem came when I was getting a new machine and upgrading to Vista. Last week I found out the company has gone *** up. Nobody cares about us "Hoonies" anymore, and there'll be nought in the way of Vista drivers.

So I committed to purchasing a new unit and decided this time to go with a name brand. I've got a Mackie VLZ1202 that I absolutely love, so when the decision came down to Focusrite, MOTU, PreSonus or Mackie, I gave into past success and went with the Mackie.

This thing is awesome. I set it up on my XP machine (as the Vista machine hadn't come in yet) and did a backing. I cannot believe how quiet it is. I actually didn't think it was working until the playback started and I nearly lost my hearing. It's pretty much silent. I had gains cranked and headphone outputs cranked, and I couldn't hear the slightest hiss. It went straight onto XP witthout any dramas and I was banging away in Sonar within minutes. Very impressed. Highly recommend it.

Then came Vista. After going with a brand name, and a quality brand name at that, they've dropped the Vista ball. There aren't any Vista drivers at the moment. They are working on them, but they're not available right now.

The argument was they didn't want to develop the drivers on a moving target, so they were waiting until Vista was released. I'm going to call bull on that. Vista has been at RTM for more than a month, yes? They could have been getting their basic crap together prior to that, then nailing it down once the RTM was released and shipped Vista drivers on time.

For those of you who perchance don't lean on the software wagon, RTM means Release To Manufacturing. Software in the big houses goes through several stages that are mostly the same from one place to the next.

  • Alpha - Complete garbage. The developers are playing around; the features haven't been nailed down; the whole thing barely works, if at all.
  • Beta - Things should be a bit more stable. The features are nailed down (pretty much); the architecture is set; there are still bugs but most people won't find them.
  • RTM - Developers go into hands-off lockdown. No code changes are allowed. This is what will ship if the QA department doesn't find any showstoppers. That means bugs will go out the door, but if they don't cause the application to go down in a ball of flames, they'll be left in there to be cleaned up by a service pack.
  • Release - (Should be called unleash). This is the shrink-wrapped product sitting on the shelves of your computer store.

So, the Mackie guys are full of it. They could've been finishing drivers on what was the released bits of Vista ages ago.

They've really dropped the ball here, as a lot of reasonable studio's will be upgrading to newer hardware all the time, which ultimately means Vista, which means a lot of Mackie customers with expesive silver boxes that light up and do bugger all else.