windows 98se

R

ric3xrt

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Any ides what would be a good DAW to use on this old school out dated box? I need to use this box once in a while,so I'm looking for a daw that will work on the 98 machine, and the newer W7 or maybe an Xp machine....I know this might be a long shot but I have my reasons for needding the 98se box.
Thanks
Ric
 
depends on your hardware. Win7 32 bit may work, Upgrade advisor XP is pretty much dead, I know few people who ran SE. Check out the link to see if your hardware will work. If it does, you can use Reaper as it requires little resources for the most part. Might work.
 
You will have to find software AND hardware from that era, otherwise the drivers for the interface will not exist. It's a crapshoot if it will work with win7 or not. It will not work on a 64 bit machine.
 
I'm still running 98SE to this day on my DAW. It's a 550MHz PIII with 640 Megs of RAM. This to run a MOTU 2408 mkII and Cakewalk9. It's pretty solid so I've never felt the need to upgrade. I can run around 30 tracks or more at 24/44.1 with a handfull of plugins. It works for me.
 
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Cool Edit Pro runs great on 98SE, as does Adobe Audition 1.0. I can still get a lot done with CEP 1.2a, but version 2.1 is about all you need if you're not concerned with ASIO drivers. 98SE was a great OS. I still have it running on a box myself. Adobe Audition had some bugs that Cool Edit did not for a lot of people, but YMMV depending on your system.
 
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I have 98SE running on a legacy computer, mainly because I have a lot of games that just don't want to work with newer OS's and hardware. That and XP ran kinda sluggish on that computer, and ME was shitty and I don't need Firewire support so 98SE is just fine for those old games. I haven't used it since I moved (over two years ago) but it still worked flawlessly last I ran it.

I also did a lot of Radio Shack mic recordings on it into the Sound Blaster Live circa 2004-2005. Fun times.
 
I think I'm going to try Reaper and see how that goes, this box, is going to be used to pull raw music off of ADATs(with ADAT/CONNECT..the only part of ADAT/EDIT that really worked) for storage, not sure how much editing I would do on this box but just looking to maybe cut long lead times.
Thanks
Ric
 
Windows 98 is very old. I'm not even sure the computer will be strong enough to handle today's audio work. Now I'm talking about big sessions. You might get away with it handling small sessions but who knows. If you try it out, let us know how it goes for you.
 
Some where I have a copy of MAGIX Sound Studio Generation 6 that I bought from W.H.Smiths for £9.99!
You can have a burn if you like.
The software is very similar to an early, basic version of Samplitude and is why son and I have used versions of Samplitude for 75% of the time since.
N.B. it is 16bits only but it must be ok for 98SE because the MIDI is too old to work on XP!

Dave.
 
FirstClassAudio said:
Windows 98 is very old. I'm not even sure the computer will be strong enough to handle today's audio work. Now I'm talking about big sessions. You might get away with it handling small sessions but who knows. If you try it out, let us know how it goes for you.
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Audio is very low CPU intensive. I know a lot of people who do full fledged multi-track DAW recording on Pentium 4's. Where the old computers have issues is with effects and virtual instruments. You can easily get around that with printing the effects, which more or less is how things were done in the tape days. Pro audio can still be done on those machines, even with older software.
 
Cakewalk 9 will work. Older Soundforge (say version 6 or 7) should work for single operations, plus it adds some much needed plugin functionality into Cakewalk. Shouldn't be hard to find used copies of older software.

The bigger issue IMO with W98 is the system memory limitations, which I believe was 512MB (?). You'll tap into that quickly and then you'll be swapping a lot of information with the hard drive which will end up being the bottleneck in performance. IMO it would be better to load Windows XP on that computer if you can also upgrade the memory to 1GB or more.

You should also have no issue finding an older sound card on the cheap for a legacy Win98/XP system. It will depend on what you need, if you're not multitracking (only need stereo L/R) then consider an older retail PCI sound card and asio4all. If you need 4 or more inputs live then the options narrow, perhaps something by M-Audio (PCI card).
 
512mb, is the lower limit, I've read about a few tricks to get 98se to use up to 1G but have not tried it myself.
 
I've never heard of a memory limit for 98 aside from the standard 32-bit OD limit of 3.2 gigs. I know hard drives max at 120 gigs approximately, but honestly that's plenty.

I ran Sonar 2 on a 98 machine and it worked fine. 1.4 ghz computer, 768 megs of Ram.
 
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