Nerdblog.com

8/31/2006

Vista build 5536 is lots better

Some of you know that I've been really worried about the performance we've been seeing of Picasa on Vista. Until now, blttest and ScrollWindow have been 5-10x slower on Vista when compared to XP.

I'm happy to say that Microsoft has turned this around in the latest builds of Vista, and you don't have to write your app in WPF or D3d to get good performance. Legacy GDI apps finally perform well too.

In build 5536 I'm seeing bitblt performance that's within shouting distance of XP, and so even our fullscreen screensavers are performing pretty nicely.

8/27/2006

Rightmark

Found a neat (free) loopback audio quality tester.

Download Rightmark

This app measures the usual audio bits, and all you need is some cables that plug your ins & outs together.

The m-audio 410 does something like this (with my 10-year-old cables):

m-audio 410 rightmark results

Seems a tiny bit happier at 48khz & 96khz, but overall quite nice.

8/25/2006

Better sound boxes

Just wanted to say that all is not lost in digital audio land!

I picked up an m-audio Firewire 410 at Guitar Center. It works, except for occasionally adding some latency...I plugged things in, and I can record them, and play them, and whatever else you'd expect.

It's not like the mbox2, which doesn't work so much, though you can buy ProTools for it.