I just read the Presonus newsletter today and it appears they have released the first drivers for Windows Vista. As many of you may know, I've not recommended Vista as an operating system for anyone serious about recording simply because the audio manufacturers need time to write new drivers.

It appears that the Presonus Firepod may be ready to rock.

I expect that every audio interface manufacturer is hard at work writing new drivers to work with the Windows Vista operating system and we'll be seeing a flood of new drivers hit the market between the spring and summer of 2007.

I remember when Windows released XP over 5 years ago. No audio interface manufacturer was ready, but in the end, XP turned out to be a huge improvement over Windows 98 in my opinion. When the manufacturers of hardware and software are ready, I expect Vista to be a big improvement.

I expect latency to be lower than XP which should be a big help for anyone who is monitoring with their recording software. I'm interested to see if the lower latency of Vista results in faster performance. As it stands now the amount of time for an audio signal to go into an audio interface, get processed by Windows, and then get shot out of the audio interface is X milliseconds. On top of that, the software also adds a little latency. Maybe it's a dream, but I'd love to see the day when I can leave the latency a little higher on my audio interface (and dramatically reduce CPU usage) because of lower latency on the operating system side. We'll see.

Another big advantage of Vista is going to be in maximum RAM. XP has a maximum usable RAM of 2GB. You can use 4GB, but everyone seams to agree that there is a point of diminishing return after 2GB. Because I'm using a lot of samples these days, I'd love to have 8GB of RAM in a recording computer. By modern standards, that's a little overkill, but the most realistic samples out there are not shy about their RAM usage now. It's very typical to use 2GB of RAM with Toontrack's DFH Superior drum samples.

Anyway, this was the first time I was notified about a Vista-ready driver release. Vista could be a usable operating system for all of us as soon as this summer.

Brandon