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All Vista's new audio stack is going to do for end users is maybe prevent the startup sound from stuttering.

And the per-stream volume adjustments. I curse the moments I forget to turn off Adium's and Colloquy's sounds while watching Dead Like Me. I almost get a heartattack when I'm watching an emotional scene and someone gets promoted to OP in #haiku .

"Yes, but CoreAudio works here, now, on just about any Mac, since 10.2

It's quaint that Vista could give CoreAudio a run for it's money, but that money has long been earnt / spent in audio production based on Macs for years now. "

I don't know how Vista's audio stack compares with CoreAudio, but I've never understood the line of thinking that underlies your statement. Are you saying that because CoreAudio achived a certain level of audio capabilities a few years ago that Microsoft should make no attempt to improve their own audio stack, or if they do, they should be bashed for the effort? That, as a general principle, if Product A had feature X before product B, then it's bad for Product B to ever include similar features? Makes no sense.


"All Vista's new audio stack is going to do for end users is maybe prevent the startup sound from stuttering."

Um, no.
This avsforum thread started by Amir Majidimehr, head of MS multimidea, explains Vista's audio improvements in great detail. I don't know how it compares with CoreAudio (from reading the avsforum thread I suspect that it surpasses CoreAudio, but I don't really know), but I do know that it blows away XP, which is Vista's prime competition, not OSX.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=713073

(Amir ( http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/exec/amirm/default.mspx ) is a frequent poster to avsforum.com, used to work for Sony, and knows of what he speaks.)

Edited 2007-08-28 11:23

My point is that being late to the game isn't exactly worth celebrating, especially with Vista's under-performance in every other area compared to XP.

CoreAudio being here ages ago doesn't mean that Vista's sound stack is irrelevant, but that Microsoft have been holding back the industry, and still largely, are.

The start-up sound digg is a hit at Vista's atrocious performance on anything but high end equipment. If you're a Vista user, go to a shop and try out Mac OS. Regardless if you don't like OS X, try starting it up and shutting it down and that'll give you some perspective at what an absolute arse Vista is for performance, good hardware or not.

There is some truth in that statement, i can't remember the site at the moment, i will try to find it.

Microsoft did make a couple of changes to vista to ensure that it didn't look bad. The first was the removal of Windows and Microsoft from the loading screen (it's now simply blank with a progress bar). And the other was to ensure that the audio didn't stutter during startup.

The blank screen was introduced as microsoft said users associated slow startup with windows as that's all they saw during startup.

Sorry i haven't quite read through the whole article but is the slow down due to mp3's or video. As i know some videos can be very demanding. If it is MP3 then thats not a good sign, as the computer should not throttle music for network services.

Because a stuttering startup sound is the best introduction to an OS, I've ever heard. I hear it regularly, dealing with consumer machines. It's the perfect sign of what to expect from the rest of the operating system IMO.