Migrating to doze with dual boot box w/ some resources

[pencilina]

After 25 years of using Apple systems (starting with a IIci) in the studio, alongside some sample streaming PCs when that was necessary, I decided to switch to Windows. I’m doing this for the usual reasons people tend to these days, augmented by the fact that Apple’s next generation of machines will be based on proprietary processors. My transition is via a dual boot machine, I thought I’d share my fairly recent experience and what I’ve learned as it seems like it might be useful to anyone considering doing the same and I often see posts about this.

Hackintoshes do not scare me and I love building PCs. After my G5 I built and used a stable hackintosh from 2010-15 and then switched to a 12 core mac pro. With a recent jump to DP 10, Mojave and a metal graphics card, that system was feeling very slow and also glitching with some 96k projects. I’ve been lightly using DP on a windows laptop without too much issue. Apple’s current new hardware offerings that would be of long term use to me (ie. a new mac pro) are obscenely expensive compared with off the shelf PC HW. I also have a nice big 4k monitor and graphics card. Catalina seemed like it was going to be an annoying upgrade(?) with residual expenses in SW upgrades. My goal was to keep my OSX based projects and work environment accessible on a hackintosh system drive while I transitioned to windows installed on the same box on another drive. I’m not interested in working on a hackintosh machine in the long term because my prior experience with one was brutal any time there was the most minor of OS updates. Once you get one up and running they’re (edit) USUALLY (edit) fine.

In May '20 I built a Hackintosh/win10 box and had it going in a day following this guide _CAREFULLY_, using the same primary components as it suggests (motherboard, graphics card, CPU and wireless networking card):

https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/succ ... 80.267551/


This seemed like a good option as it has thunderbolt. There are a few YT videos about this build but I recommend sticking with the Tonymac instructions as they tend to evolve as people learn more and drivers etc get updated. It also seems like there are a LOT of audio people on that thread. I chose a high end power supply and CPU cooler. My i9 9990 system has a 1tb M2 MVE boot for windows, a M2 SSD, and a TB Mac boot drive and 32G ram as well as firewire for my still awesome RME FF800. It houses 3 additional drives I already owned.

In Mojave My processor usage in DP10 is 80% less on average with half the buffer sizes then ion the aged 5,1 12 core 2.66 system I was using (!!!!). It's stupid fast. It shreds in every way. All this for around $2k, $4K less then the base mac pro (with a single 512 SSD) which my system outperforms on geekbench with no overclocking. Most of my authorizations are on iLoks so most SW works without too much hassle. Edit-> I had some USB freezing issues that were sorted by keeping my usb2 devices isolated to ports on a PCIe card.<- I would't have done such a cavalier tech maneuver in the midst of a lot of sessions but the CV19 lull presented an opportunity.

I’m still finishing up some projects in OSX so cant chime in too much about Windows DP performance/stability yet but will keep you posted. Generally, once I'm immersed in a project using a piece of SW platforms differences tend to fade but I'm a creature of workflow habit so here is a resource list of software and customization I’ve added to my windows system/s to keep some of the functionality I’m used to in mac land (I'm updating all this as I learn more):

Sharp Keys- you can remap the keyboard with this and reverse the control and alt keys:
https://www.randyrants.com/category/sharpkeys/

(edit)Paragon Mac tool box - SUCKS- lots of problems stay away. (edit)

OOshutup - strips windows down quite a bit
https://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

Spacebar player
Quick look- lets you view and hear media with the spacebar as in the mac finder.
If you get the MSI from here it has more functionality then from the MS app store:

https://github.com/QL-Win/QuickLook/releases

Free file sync - seems like a good substitute for chronosync. I'm very happy with it:
https://freefilesync.org/

Macrium Refelect has a Free drive cloning tool (and will tell you about updates constantly.)

And if you were wondering about time machine:
https://lifehacker.com/how-to-back-up-y ... 1762867473



This is the most definitive setup guide I've seen (thanks TerrrBritton):
https://confluence.merging.com/display/ ... figuration

this is interesting and he has a review of DP10:

https://arcadedaydream.com/blog-setting ... roduction/

Anti-Virus: I took the advice below and went with windows built in AV and also installed zonealarm free firewall:
https://www.zonealarm.com/software/free-firewall

Windows issues:

The fonts in dp10 look crappier on windows. I wrote a post about this in the windows troubleshooting forum and have an unresolved tech link w/Motu.

Windows audio and MIDI device handling isn’t multi client- Meaning you can’t use one piece of hardware with multiple pieces of software. This sucks and is archaic in 2020. There is really no good excuse for microsoft not coming up with a solution after all there years and it typifies why many coming from the land of Apple might detest windows at first especially when they realize they might have to quit their DAW to get audio from from their web browser or stereo editor. Few audio drivers are muti client (and luckily RME’s are as I still use a Fireface 800.)

For multi client audio there’s voicemeter banana (which also lets you record system outputs like Audio Hijack). EDIT-> Voicemeter Banana sometimes doesn't work properly especially on my laptop on which I use the built in audio and don't have access to RME's fancy drivers. After some more digging I came across ASIOLink Pro which seems like a better choice, is now free and a very comprehensive solution for multi client audio and routing that seems to play well with DP. This thread on the cakewalk forum has a lot of links ad info:

https://discuss.cakewalk.com/index.php? ... /#comments

I was finally to find a wonderful multi-client MIDI solution with even more flexibility then Apple MIDI setuup that works all the time (an epiphany after trying A LOT of other options (MIDI-ox, sonigy patch bay, blone, patchpay classic, etc - each had their own problem/s).
You'll need virtual MIDI cables- you can make as many as you need with loopmidi from here:
https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html
which you can hook up in a good old (for me) Plogue Bidule (a modular sound environment) patch:
https://www.plogue.com/products/bidule.html
with _no_audio_devices_in_it_ and your USB/MIDI hardware assigned to the cables. You can see the routings AND this is wonderful because the cables can be hooked up/into to as many apps you need as you work- just like on a mac. You can label them as in Apple MIDI setup. No stupid complaints from SW about memory errors or device not found. You can do filtering and splits and note reassignments and a lot of other MIDI processing in your custom startup patch. Bidule is A JOY and worth every bit of its price (you can run it as a VST as well).

You can set Loopmidi to run minimized at startup by right clicking its taskbar options put a short cut to your bidule patch here:

C:\Users\_YOURNAMEHERE_\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup

and right click your bidulepatch>properties and select "start minimized"

You might get better results from some of the freeware then I did or find another modular solution (they key is a small footprint and not invoking any audio drivers if you don't need to).

Also, this truly wonderful BSOD analysis tool came in way handy to help me solve a FW card driver issue that was causing os freezes:

https://www.resplendence.com/whocrashed

and I've been enjoying a nice stable system which the next windows update might destroy. There are different schools of thought about windows updates. If you want a very convenient way to stop them you can use:

https://www.sordum.org/9470/windows-upd ... cker-v1-5/


And there's enhanced fast searching like in mac finder:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/ho ... %20History

event viewer - like console:

https://www.howtogeek.com/123646/htg-ex ... an-use-it/

Also, I'm digging this free microsoft add on for a lot of nice customization and shortcuts:

https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys


Dealing with SD2 files (BEWARE!):
I thought it would be smart to copy a bunch of SD2 files onto my new eFAT formatted drives. Erasing some originals on an HFS+ drive was a really bad idea. I was well aware that opening them on DP in windows would be an issue (its not possible), but there is another problem. When you copy a SD2 file to a non mac formatted drive (lHFS+ to exFat in my case) it gets separated from its old OS9 resource fork or file header which contains all the info about the file (bit depth, sample rate, Number of channels). Two things really can really suck about this. Whatever software you’re using won’t recognize the file and you won’t be able to open it in either OS. So I recommend keeping old projects or/sd2 files on a mac formatted drive forever.

I you make the same mistake that I did and you copy a sd2 file (or hundreds of them) onto another drive and they get corrupted and you erase the originals there are a few good solutions:

SD2 fixer for mac which is an old universal binary. I would assume this won’t work past on OSes > 10.14

https://download.cnet.com/SD2-Fixer/300 ... 02562.html

Sdtwowav for windows (which I think needs to be run in XP compatibility mode) converts files to WAV

http://www.railjonrogut.com/sdTwoWav.htm

and finally you can quickly deal with fixing individual files by importing them as raw audio data into Audacity.

In all the above scenarios you need to specify bit depth, SR and if the file is mono or stereo.

Sadly, I can’t find anything like Audio finder……. yet.

Edit->I had a lot of issues getting waves to work on win (GUI issues) and I almost gave up but thanks to help from Charlzs and Terrybritton I was able to sort it out. See below if interested.

Some more potential gems:

A few other handy Windows utils and apps that may interest someone:

Some very useful utilities such as Autoruns and TCPView:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/

Good system optimize option along with cleaning and defragmenting registry:
https://www.wisecleaner.com/wise-registry-cleaner.html

Easy access to several Windows settings:
https://www.howtogeek.com/402458/enable ... indows-10/

Useful iso handler and other CD formats:
https://imgburn.com/

Analyze your and any neighboring WiFi:
https://matthafner.com/wifianalyzer

Anyone questioning the performance of external USB session and/or backup drives:
https://techviral.net/optimize-usb-stor ... indows-10/
I've found a significant bump in drive performance with this last item. You can test by doing a large file copy to the external drive before and after changing setting. YMMV

[HCMarkus]

Sounds like a winner!

Did you look into Open Core at all?

[CharlzS]

On the virus front, one thing about using Windows Defender is that you can create a process exception in settings. This means that anything associated with that process is exempt from real time scanning, i.e. plugs, samples, audio files. With most other virus software you can create exceptions, but they have to be listed specifically, like your plugs folder, sessions folder, the executable . . . all just one entry in Defender. I see quicker load times with real time avoided.

Your list of resources is great. The Tobias Erichsen stuff is particularly good for inter platform communication (Network MIDI) and also the functionality of Mac IAC.

A couple of other tools you might want to add:
MIDI OX http://www.midiox.com/
Bomes MIDI Translation Classic https://www.bome.com/products/mtclassic (free for personal use)

You can create the equivalent of the Mac's Aggregate Device using ASIO4ALL if that need ever arises (though the software gets little love in the Windows community). If you ever need to pair a USB mic with an output pair, not many other options.

Also one anomaly with Win, you need use the shift key (rather than option/alt) to get the 'Multiple' option the menu tree.

[pencilina]

Hi,

HC, I wasn't familiar with open core. I checked it it. Seems like its a bit above my skill level but I will definitely look into it more if I need to boot multiple OSes in the future. Are you using it?

Charlzs, Thanks for the links/knowledge. Setting up exclusions in windows defender looks like the way to go to keep antivirus SW from F&*cking with my stlye. A lot of what I read says w defender is a sufficient antivrus solution by itself. Do you agree with that? Also, I revisited midiox a little while back to try and do some MIDI monitoring (I used it a bit in my gigastudio days) and got flummoxed when I realized I couldn't use it and the SW I was playing into at the same time to simultaneously receive controller messages from the same HW port my controller was connected to and thus that windows MIDI was not multi-client (restraining from rant). The solution I came up with for monitoring incoming MIDI was to insert a VST MIDI monitoring plugin into a daw.

Looking at midiox used with MIDIyoke it seems like it could be a good multi client patching solution:

http://www.midiox.com/index.htm?http:// ... /myoke.htm

but Its last update was 13 years ago. How are you using it mostly? Does it seem to work well with MIDI yoke or would you use Tobias ericsen's drivers.

I've used asioforall as a generic driver for laptop sound hardware. I researched and experimented a little with its the aggregate device functionaloty (multiple HW interface) but couldn't get it working properly and gave up.
I hadn't heard of MIDI translator - that looks awesome. Going to check it out fo sho.

I'll eventually update my original list with more links/tip as they hopefully roll in.

[CharlzS]

Windows Defender had a rough start years ago, but now performs well against the competition. You can compare all the AV apps here: https://www.av-test.org/en/

I only use MIDI-OX for sysex and the occasional debug when trying to configure control surfaces, so never need multiclient functionality. Not familiar at all with MIDIYoke. The whole multiclient thing was suppose to go away with Win10. Here's a quote from a while back re the new API:

One great feature of the new API is that it is multi-client. As long as all apps with the port open are using the Windows 10 UWP MIDI API and not the older Win32 MME or DirectMusic APIs, they can share the same device. This is something the older APIs don’t handle without custom drivers and was a common request from our partners and customers.

Read full blog post here: https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdevelo ... indows-10/

I think this puts the burden on the app developers to update everything. It seems the majority of Windows MIDI utility apps are very long in the tooth and in need of updating. Not sure where the contemporary DAWs stand.

I've used the Erichsen stuff to sync MTC across apps and platforms and to connect to iOS and Android control surface apps - very solid stuff. Haven't used LoopMIDI yet, but on the strength of rtpMIDI would use that over other options.

If you have an Android tablet, check out TouchDAW in the play store.

Just for grins, I decided to checkout the multiclient thing. My MOTU M4 is fully multiclient (audio and MIDI). I ran DP and Studio One simultaneously and both played audio and responded to MIDI from the M4 MIDI I/O. I also ran MIDI OX and DP concurrently and monitored the the MIDI in MIDI OX while playing a VI in DP. So, this stuff does work with certain devices. My Arturia controller will have nothing to do with multiclient. Whatever opens it first is exclusive. Studio One complains on load if a device is already opened exclusively by another app. So definitely test your devices.

[HCMarkus]

Hi,

HC, I wasn't familiar with open core. I checked it it. Seems like its a bit above my skill level but I will definitely look into it more if I need to boot multiple OSes in the future. Are you using it?

No, at least not yet. If I ever need to move my Mac Pro to Catalina or install a Thunderbolt PCIe card, or should I tread in the direction of the Mac Faux like you, Open Core looks like a winner. Because it is relatively new, I expect documentation to improve as time rolls along. The ability to upgrade macOS without major issues is a big plus. But if Apple goes to ARM for all its Macs, as appears very possible, all bets are off in the Hackintosh world.

[pencilina]

Anything that would make Hackintoshes less of a PITA gets my vote but I'm hopefully on my last one as stepping to w10.

Cz, How does touch daw work work with DP? I really miss having the ios remote app that used to work with DP.

I don't think this is going to play out as well as apple's move to intel from PPC:

https://fortune.com/2020/06/09/in-a-fir ... computers/

https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/10/2128 ... on-coexist

[pencilina]

Updated initial post with more links

[pencilina]

UPDATE:
Windows has been fine, totally cool for the most part, but the long and short of my experience 6 weeks later is DP in windows has been a dog and I give up and retreat to the land of hackintosh. I use Waves plugins which are unsupported and I can't for the life of me get the Waves GUIs to behave. I updated ATI drivers and meters started working but knobs don't move. On top of this ugly blurred fonts, movie sync and playback problems, the option+space key command being broken, clumsy windows (I've had the movie window get stuck to the cursor) and frequent crashes have made DP in windows just too brutally annoying for me to use. Mojave, which is now totally stable on my zippy new HW, will be my OS of choice to run DP for the foreseeable future. May my misery in this adventure save another DP user from a similar fate.

[CharlzS]

Not that it matters at this point, but does your laptop have the same issues as the desktop re Waves plugs? I've had problems with Waves, but mostly just validation on both platforms. It's odd that Waves doesn't support VST2/VST3 in DP on either platform. If your motherboard has onboard graphics, have you tried disabling that in BIOS? Also, re the audition thing, for whatever reason mine was installed as ctrl-spacebar - if you ever get back to Windows you can change it in Commands to alt-spacebar. Glad you have a stable Mac environment to fall back on.

[pencilina]

Charlzs,
Thanks for the suggestion but I rebooted with internal graphics disabled. Same story. Knobs won't move when audio is going through the plugins.
Waves works fine on my laptop which has NVIDIA graphics. They also work fine in bitwig on w10 on my hackintosh.

I came across this thread which would suggest the waves issue has to do with open GL drivers:
https://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopi ... 3&start=45

Maybe internal graphics or an nvidia card would work but at this point I give up, this really should be so hard.

I would imagine there is some antiquated part of DP's MAS VST wrapper that waves plugins don't like.

I guess its not important to waves or motu to work on this which is really a bummer. I hope they work/figure it out before apple phases out intel.

Are you saying ctl-spacebar works to play only what you have selected? This doesn't work on my laptop either. I tried disabling sharp keys (to switch control and Alt) and still had the problem. I also tried re-assigning the command and no dice.

[CharlzS]

Are you saying ctl-spacebar works to play only what you have selected? This doesn't work on my laptop either. I tried disabling sharp keys (to switch control and Alt) and still had the problem. I also tried re-assigning the command and no dice.

Alt-spacebar works for me. I changed it a while back when I saw it was set to ctrl-spacebar. One thing is that I have to toggle Audible off then on sometimes to get it to work - most likely a bug.

Are you scaling the the Windows UI on the hackintosh by a percentage? If so, I've found that to be problematic. It's better to change the display resolution in either the video card driver or the Windows Display preferences. Not sure when this arrived or what the implications are, but you can also change the graphics processor that DP uses in the Graphics preference.

[terrybritton]

I've gleaned from tons of horror stories in both this and the Samplitude forum that Waves plugins are anathema in the Windows environment. So, if you have a large investment in them, Waves doesn't seem to care. Some folks weeded out troublemakers and that settled down their systems.

Anyway, sorry you ran into troubles during your first foray into DP on Windows. I'm having a few issues (like the video playback sometimes being stuck till I manually advance the scrub-bar), but mostly it runs amazingly well. Over time you will read more Windows audio optimization posts and move your machine closer to stability, too. Here is a fantastic article from the folks at Merging that will give you an idea how deep you can go.

Terry

[pencilina]

Thanks to both of you. That's a great article Terry. I have a massive investment in time and money in Waves so thats the straw breaking the camels back. Those plugins are a huge part of my process and have been for decades, as DP is. Everything basically just works in OSX and I want to just work on music for the time being. Eventually I'll start chipping away at this again. It shouldn't have been this complicated and annoying. At least for now I have new projects set up to use VST2 on OSX so that should give my work a little future proofing.

[terrybritton]

I have a massive investment in time and money in Waves so thats the straw breaking the camels back. Those plugins are a huge part of my process and have been for decades, as DP is.

If it is a rogue Waves plugin causing the problem, you could perhaps diagnose by loading in only the ones you actually use, see if the problem persists, then eliminate by halves till you find the culprit. I hope that is all it is.

Terry