How well does VMware work with recording?

mindbuzz

mindbuzz

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My motherboard recently burned out, and I've taken the opportunity to fully re-invest and upgrade to an i7 processor. I've effectively doubled the RAM that I was using previously and also am backing up my old primary drive externally and going solid state for my operating system and all my applications. I will also be able to store my active project recordings externally via USB 3.0 now, supposedly. But... now that I've put this new monster together, as of right now, it has no operating system and simply awaits a fresh O/S installation.

With all my software dating back 3 years, I was running on XP Professional and perfectly happy with no compatibility issues. Today, with a new board that has hyperthreading and new DDR3 ram and a fresh, new primary HDD waiting for an operating system... I began thinking, should I just install my XP Pro disc and not even bother with an O/S upgrade? Or should I get Windows 7?

Well, I bought Windows 7 Pro 64 today, but I haven't opened it (I can return it within 15 days, unopened). The reason I bought it was because I was told by a PC repair tech that I could use VMware for all my XP Pro applications. From VMware, supposedly, I can even drag and drop files from one O/S to another, in my case from XP Pro to Windows 7, I guess.

Anyone have any thoughts on this? How effective might a 32-bit Virtual Machine running XP Pro within Windows 7 be in recording a live session? Even with these new lightning fast speeds (a Kingston Solid State Disc as a primary drive and USB 3.0 capability for external storage of recorded data) could VMware running XP Pro be a miraculous and helpful money-saving advantage or merely more trouble than it's worth?
 
mindbuzz said:
.. How effective might a 32-bit Virtual Machine running XP Pro within Windows 7 be in recording a live session? ..
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not at all. a VM wont virtualize most hardware and if if does (i.e. USB) the latency will be several magnitudes worse than a native system. Whats the problem with running your old 32bit apps in W7? They will run just fine..
 
altitude909 said:
not at all. a VM wont virtualize most hardware and if if does (i.e. USB) the latency will be several magnitudes worse than a native system. Whats the problem with running your old 32bit apps in W7? They will run just fine..
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I think I agree with you. The latency running VMware could potentially be intolerable, and I'm sure that getting it to work with peripherals like my mixer would be, virtually, impossible.

W7 Pro 64 will run my old 32 bit apps? No way. Seriously? I've heard that some games designed for XP work fine as well as XP business software on the new operating system, but I wasn't sure if they were referring to 32 bit versions of W7. You're telling me all my XP software will work on a W7 64 bit platform...

Hmm. XP Mode is available for Pro and Ultimate versions of W7. Can anyone confirm that XP versions of data-intensive recording applications for audio and/or video will run within a 64-bit W7 environment?
 
Dunno about running 32-bit DAWs from the XP era, but if you've invested a lot in the computer then why not spend a little bit more on the latest versions of these programs which are known to run well on 64-bit / Windows 7 setups.

Sonar 8.5 has been optimised for Win7 apparently is an absolute beast on a good i7 setup. And considering you already have Sonar 6, I'm pretty certain you can get a discounted upgrade rather than having to buy the full thing. I'll certainly be heading this way soon!
 
mattr said:
Sonar 8.5 has been optimised for Win7 apparently is an absolute beast on a good i7 setup. And considering you already have Sonar 6, I'm pretty certain you can get a discounted upgrade rather than having to buy the full thing.
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Cubase SX3, all way down to its core algorithms, has always performed better for me than Sonar. I upgraded Sonar annually from Sonar 3PE and stopped at 6 because the need for patches came with every upgrade and the features tacked on to each were not nearly worth the dropouts and fatal bugs that came with each new install. With the increasing availability of 64 bit applications for Windows 7, a Sonar upgrade may be worth looking into soon since they came up with the industry's first 64 bit capable audio editing software. But because they were first doesn't mean that they've gotten any better creating an "optimised" program. Look for Sonar 9 in 6 months.

Everything costs money, from my new SSD primary drive to the new DDR3 necessary since my old DDR sticks are defunct on the new board. So a software upgrade, if unecessary, seems like a waste of $300. What's crucial in recording, is not having the best new gear... it's having the gear that works best for you. Breaking open a technical manual or searching the Internet simply to figure out why some new "optimised" program is not doing what you want it to makes for a very un-optimized workflow.

Just my opinion... :)
 
virtual machines = not good for intensive apps

Regarding my original question, it seems to me that virtual machines like VMware and VirtualBox all struggle when tasked with running very intensive applications like audio recording or video editing software. XP Mode is a virtual machine built into W7 just like the aforementioned examples.

Even with a lightning-fast, hyperthreading i7 processor and Windows 7 Pro on a solid state drive, without going so far as testing it to find out, I would say it's fair to remain skeptical about running these large apps in "XP Mode" on W7(64).

Hopefully, it will run like altitude909 said. My XP compatible software may run smoothly without XP Mode in W7(32).
 
Meh, I'm a bit of a sceptic myself with many things, but this is one claim that I do buy in to...

I can't seem to find the video that was floating around just after 8.5's release, but despite being a marketing tool it was very convincing proof of Sonar's real-world performance on Windows 7... showed a guy testing his new Core i7 rig running at stupid low buffer sizes and happily playing its through a project with loadsa track, plugins, virtual instruments, etc, all synced up to a HD video file... impressive enough, but then the guy started rubbing it in about how stable and fast his new DAW setup was by means of pointlessly going through all the Windows Aero Flip-3D things and showing how the HD video still rendered perfectly smoothly whilst being flown around the screen in 3D, minimise and maximise animations, etc, and all the time the audio stayed flawless with no skips or stutters.

Very impressive, but perfectly feasible and believable. My Core 2 Quad setup couldn't do that, but still performs very well so its only reasonable to expect that a very powerful Core i7 would be able to do much much more.

Not to say that any Core i7 is guaranteed to run that well with Sonar 8.5 and obviously the computer they used in that video had been spec'd up and configured well for the purposes of the demonstration, but its still a setup that would be perfectly achievable by anyone with a little bit of effort; all DAW setups can take bit of tweaking to get them to their optimal setup.
 
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Matt, I can't say that you're wrong, because you're right. Let me tell you what my experiences were with my old dual core, AMD Athon 64 8800+. I don't record more than 5 live mic inputs at a time generally from my home studio. A need for me to run HD video simultaneously during music recording has never come up (but I'm sure that's possible on the new multi-processors with substantial ram). But on my old setup I could run and record flawlessly for an hour without dropout on Cubase SX3, mix 30+ tracks (many with VST Waves plugins), plug into an FL Studio bridge, run multiple applications simultaneously (e.g., Melodyne and FL), and if the program ever failed somehow (a supremely rare thing in very heavy load circumstances) it would backup my project before it crashed. Sonar 6 would dropout for weird reasons that escaped my own explanation on lengthy recordings of... get this... a single track audio... or click randomly while recording a clip, thereby ruining the track and forcing me to either delete it and re-record or punch in with a cosmetic fix.

So I'm speaking from experience when I say that, especially if you're recording more with audio than with MIDI, I would go Cubase 5 on W7. When I upgrade my software, I think I'm going to the most recent Cubase version and will throw in another 4g of dual channel DDR3. It should be able to handle anything I can throw at it.

Hey, well, maybe you do work more with MIDI drums and synths. I do not know. But what I know about Steinberg's Cubase product is that structurally it has certain fail-safes that Sonar doesn't, and it has produced higher quality audio recordings on completed projects for me than Sonar. There are other products out there as well... Pro Tools is obviously an industry standard. But at home, I don't feel like I need to buy into another editor. When necessary, I've OMF'd files and even tracked everything out into WAV format to go cross platform. In a word, Cubase. I started with Sonar and used it only as a backup later.


I have a buddy who does amazing things dropping tracks from his Motif into Cool Edit Pro and FL Studio on less than probably what you have in a dual core setup, and you'd think he has thousands of dollars in software. He doesn't record vocals though.

:laughings:
 
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VMWare tends to not play too nicely with any but the most basic and straightforward of hardware. (I can rarely even get my onboard sound to work). Plus it never seems to perform quite to the levels of virtual hardware you've allotted for it. If you allocate half of your RAM to a single VM that mirrors your old hardware, neither the VM or the host machine will run particularly well.

Win7 should be backwards compatible with most of your old XP apps. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I haven't really run into any yet.
 
VomitHatSteve said:
Win7 should be backwards compatible with most of your old XP apps. I'm sure there are exceptions, but I haven't really run into any yet.
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Thanks Steve. Awesome. As a Windows 7 novice, I'm still doing a little more research before I try the Win7 installation. Can I switch between 32 and 64 bit on the system on the fly or otherwise from the boot or on the desktop after installation, or am I forced to choose one or the other when I install... ? I'd like to install the 64 bit platform obviously, but if it causes complications then 32 bit is just fine.
 
Well, to answer my own stupid question, I cannot switch between 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems. However, it seems the answer is, "Yes, you can run 32 bit programs on a 64 bit Windows 7 platform." So I'm going to take the gamble. They say the performance of 32 bit programs may not be "optimized" (however one might spell the word), and performance may be slower than optimal. But I'm thinking my speeds may even likely clock better than my old system at non-optimal simply because of the solid state of the new primary drive. And, I plan on going USB 3.0 to an external. We shall see.

I'm going to install a 64 bit Win7.
 
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