[LAU] OT: Windows experience..

[James Stone]

Hi everyone,

Thought I would just post a little slightly OT post just as general interest.

I have been doing some fortnightly recordings of my attempts at jazz
improvisation on this forum: http://improvstudy.prophpbb.com/ which I
and some other musicians set up as a follow-on from the Gary Burton
Coursera Jazz Improvisation course - which, incidentally, is very good
(particularly for free) - although somewhat tough!

For the last 2 weeks, I have been away on holiday, and then our house
was being decorated - with my linux box, piano, and everything else
having been packed away.. So I decided that for my next recording, I
would use my (work) windows laptop to record my assignment (instead of
qtractor, which I have found to be excellent for this) - thinking it
should be pretty much plug and play.

I did manage to record the piece, but it was much more difficult than expected:

1) my soundcard (focusrite scarlett 2i4) needed extra drivers to work
with Win7. Under linux it basically works out of the box. After
installing these drivers, there was very little control over the
settings - I coul change the  "buffer" from 0-10ms, but it seems from
what it was reporting, that with a buffer setting of 10, the input
delay was around 32 ms, and output 24ms or thereabouts -meaning round
trip of 50+ms, which is way more than I had been trying to push it to
on linux.

2) Started out trying Podium DAW for a long time - lots of hassle.
Wouldn't play. In the end, I found it wouldn't play at all with the
ASIO drivers for my card. Did work with the built in sound on the
laptop, but whats the point of that?

3) Changed to Reaper - found layout very confusing (despite having
used it before). Realised have to click the fx box to add a vsti!
However, Reaper was generally a good experience. The one glitch was
that it only intermittently recognised my usb keyboard - not a problem
I had ever had under Linux - it fortunately worked long enough for me
to record the piece once, but when I reloaded it, the USB input no
longer worked - despite showing up under hardware profile.. I guess I
could trouble shoot it, but I am hoping the linux box will be back up
and running before I have to record the next piece!!

So, overall, I found the switch from Linux-> Windows unintuitive,
difficult and spent more time trouble-shooting than playing.. Sounds
quite similar to what people say about going in the other direction!

James