This afternoon, I’m off to Microsoft’s Vista launch shindig. I’m hoping there will be clowns and ponies. After all, Microsoft can afford a party. As for the OS itself, I can’t resist relevant quotes from Star Trek III: Uhura: Would you look at that! Kirk: My friends, the great experiment: The Excelsior. Ready for trial […]

Good things about Microsoft: they’re the rich kid next door who can book Jefferson Starship for their Vista launch tour. Good news for PC users: DRM probably isn’t going to keep you from getting a shiny new OS after all. Whether you choose Mac OS X, Linux, Windows XP, or Windows Vista — or some […]

It’s been pretty quiet at winter NAMM as far as the major DAWs; Mackie released Tracktion 3 but the larger players either just released major updates (Cubase SX 4, DP 5, SONAR 6, Live 6, and the Pro Tools 7.x updates) or have yet to upgrade (ahem, Logic 8, anyone?). That didn’t stop Cakewalk from […]

Several of you have written to point to a new article by Peter Gutmann, who argues that content protection (known commonly as DRM, but arguably broader than that) will exact a major cost in Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista. These issues should be of special interest to Windows musicians: Gutmann predicts Vista’s new content protection features […]

All the major music software developers I’ve talked to have begun testing Vista, but Propellerheads has decided to go out on a limb and be the first to declare it “Works with Vista”, slapping on Microsoft’s official “approved” label: Propellerhead Software Vista Compatibility The flagship Reason, the original loop splicer-dicer app ReCycle, and the sample […]

I can’t take it any more. In one corner, we have PC pundits negatively reviewing Apple’s possibly-upcoming iPhone weeks before it’s announced — reviewing a product they know nothing about that may not even exist. (Incidentally, Microsoft’s new MadeUp Pro 2007 Edition — total crap. So is the new Imaginesoft NeverNeverLand iMadeUp Express.) And in […]

And we’re off to the races. Last week, I wrote up a teaser on some of the new features in Windows Vista for audio, which launched a long and heated discussion of the new OS. (Read through comments for some specifics, including how Vista compares to Mac OS X and BeOS. Hint: BeOS wins.) Now, […]

Updated: Working with the top PC developer Cakewalk, we’ve gotten a more complete picture of pro audio and music creation in Vista. See our new story Vista for Music + Pro Audio: Exclusive Under the Hood with Cakewalk’s CTO. All that’s here, of course, remains relevant. Jim Allchin from Microsoft today posts an excellent description […]