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Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2016 9:44 pm
by Sober
Stupid me thought I'd harness the power of this $3500 PC rig I just built, and get back into the SF game.

I bought PT 12.5 (like, paid for it with US currency!), without realizing that Windows 10, which has been out for nearly a fucking year, isn't supported. Many users report no problems though, so let's give it a go. Went ahead and bought a new Focusrite too, because my old Tascam US-600 doesn't support 10 either.

Twenty crashes within an hour. Sometimes because I made a new track. Sometimes because I tried to save. Or I hit record enable. Or I moved the mouse a little.

My first DAW and interface ran beautifully in 2003 on a crappy-even-for-then machine. I made music with that setup for years, and have made music with many different garbage setups since. Now, I have this brand new hot rod rig with paid-for (!) software, and I can't record a single fucking note.

I have full access to Audition CC, but the market inexplicably demands that I learn Pro Tools. That's a neat trick. I should make a broken, ineffective, inferior-in-every-way product and have that become the standard for some industry. Like, get master carpenters all over the world to swear by my glass hammers.

Jesus fucking Christ, this is 2016. I just want to make music like I was doing before we invaded Iraq (the second time).

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2016 9:57 pm
by josh
you can't roll back to win 7?

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2016 11:15 pm
by Sober
Fresh install of 10. Compatibility mode doesn't help.

Also, kind of feel like the Michael Bolton thing from Office Space. "I'm not gonna change my name, he's the one who sucks." Well, I'm not gonna roll back my OS, when it's Avid who's ten months behind.

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 8:43 am
by HeuristicsInc
Man, I've been avoiding letting Windows upgrade itself for this very reason. Well, not Pro Tools, but music software in general.
It's getting pretty annoying about it.
-bill

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2016 9:09 am
by jast
If it helps, Bill, REAPER works perfectly on Windows 10, at least over here.

But yeah, I hate these types of issues. The latest driver for my interface is a beta version for Windows 7 (the only driver that works at all). On top of that, about two months ago Windows decided to stop letting me configure my audio devices (sampling rates and such) so that I could only use my interface at 44.1 KHz (which I don't mind for recording... but Flash Player and a bunch of other things refuse to output sound if the audio interface insists on 44.1). I can't even switch over to the on-board HD audio chip because the list of playback devices is empty.

I worked on it some more last night (until 4 am, jeez) and now I've progressed to a state in which I have no sound at all. I'm hoping I won't have to reinstall the OS...

(Microsoft's idea of customer support: what's the make and model of your PC, and have you tried re-installing the drivers in compatibility mode?)

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Wed May 25, 2016 8:06 pm
by Märk
jast wrote:I worked on it some more last night (until 4 am, jeez) and now I've progressed to a state in which I have no sound at all. I'm hoping I won't have to reinstall the OS...
I have some bad news for you; you'll have to reinstall the OS :P

Funny thing happened in the several-years gap from when I hung out here more... I became a Mac guy. I used to be anti-Macintosh, but then I got an old Intel Mac Pro and learned the difference between hating Macintosh and hating Apple. The computer is fantastic, never crashes, things just (mostly) work great. Apple, the company, however, can suck a huge turd in hell.

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 10:49 pm
by fluffy
Märk wrote:[...] I got an old Intel Mac Pro and learned the difference between hating Macintosh and hating Apple. The computer is fantastic, never crashes, things just (mostly) work great. Apple, the company, however, can suck a huge turd in hell.
Yeah, pretty much. Unfortunately Apple-the-company is inflicting some pretty bad changes on OSX and Mac-the-platform lately, and if it weren't for the fact that Logic is Mac-only (and I haven't found anything else I like even remotely as much elsewhere) I'd probably have jumped ship a while ago.

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Mon May 30, 2016 2:07 pm
by jast
Märk wrote:I have some bad news for you; you'll have to reinstall the OS :P
Actually... I reinstalled the OS. A while ago. But thanks. :P

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2016 12:29 pm
by Märk
fluffy wrote:Yeah, pretty much. Unfortunately Apple-the-company is inflicting some pretty bad changes on OSX and Mac-the-platform lately, and if it weren't for the fact that Logic is Mac-only (and I haven't found anything else I like even remotely as much elsewhere) I'd probably have jumped ship a while ago.
I'm running Yosemite, which is wonderful, but I did try out El Capitan and knew immediately that it was not good. It disables your ability to modify anything low-level, and neuters root. ("LOL YOU ARE TOO DUMM TO USE ROOT"-Apple) According to Apple, nothing past 10.7.5 will run on an original 2006 Intel Mac Pro (lol) so when a dev named tiamo created a boot.efi that thunked 64 bit instructions into a 32 bit capable efi firmware and allowed them to boot the fully 64 bit OS, Apple predictably responded by trying even harder to prevent this on future versions. You know, instead of saying "Hey guise! We know you spent 4 grand on these things a few years ago, so we've licensed this simple solution from tiamo and extended the usability of your machine for you!"... you know, like a *good* company would do. I honestly don't know what I'll do when this thing stops working... probably replace it with another one, except I'll try to get a 3,1+ simply because it's easier to update (no boot.efi wrangling)

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2016 1:54 pm
by fluffy
It doesn't really neuter root, it just makes it so that you can't activate the root account. sudo works fine, and is way safer anyway.

Or are you referring to the ability to replace binaries in /bin et al? That's a bad idea too (for a bunch of reasons) - use something like Homebrew to manage your UNIX userspace dependencies.

The whole .kext signing thing is really unfortunate though, yeah. Also with how they keep on re-enabling app store signing and make it harder and harder to get around it for whatever random F/OSS app you might download (although it still doesn't apply to CLI binaries).

I do understand why they disabled the 32-bit thunking thing though, although it does suck that they did it.

EDIT: Here's a pretty good article that sums up the issue. For the most part I agree with these changes (having been burned in the past by badly-written installers overriding system binaries in unexpected ways!) but this is the problematic bit for me:
There's a bigger problem lurking with dropping support for unsigned kernel extensions. Yes, this is a security risk. However, as I've mentioned in the past, it renders perfectly good legacy drivers useless. That means your expensive hardware could suddenly become useless with an OS update. Previously, it was possible to set a boot-time flag that allowed the extensions to load, but that's gone.
I have a drawer full of hardware that is no longer supported and likely never will be.

At least Apple threw users a bone by no longer requiring an Apple-provided SSD in order to get TRIM (which was the main reason I ever turned kext signing off), not that that's really necessary anymore either since all new macs just have their SSD soldered in :P

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Thu Jun 02, 2016 2:36 pm
by Märk
The kext signing was what made me go "nope" on El Capitan, actually; I have a generic USB 3.0 card in mine which worked perfectly with modified drivers. But not being able to easily change system binaries was a close second place. I won't give up a working system for something that offers nothing, yet takes away a whole lot, while simultaneously asserting tighter control and limiting user access to their own freakin' hardware.

Also the SSD trim issue is fixed in Yosemite as well :)

[edit] I forgot to say that IMHO (and I am a cynic, absolutely) these changes are 100% for the benefit of Apple, not the users or their "security".

Re: Pro Tools: Windows 10 users beware

Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2016 1:57 pm
by Sober
As an update (months old):

The problem was the driver for my Focusrite Scarlet 2i4. Apparently, Focusrite has a separate, very well-hidden page for beta drivers, and the latest "official" driver is like a year old. The beta driver works great.

I'd been running into "CPU power low" errors, despite my monitoring software showing no such thing. I went trough Avid's step by step PC optimization process, and I think I've solved it. I'm not 100% sure I've got my BIOS configured correctly. I'm afraid to tinker with it too much. We'll see how it handles a full recording project to see if it's fine as is.