Sequencers and Windows Vista

Dear reader,

As it isn’t a long time since I bought my very first laptop with pre-installed Windows Vista Premium and wanted to turn it into a DAW (Digital Audio Workstation), I thought I’d open this can of worms.

To be honest, I was still under the impression that most (semi-)professional sequencer software and music production tools did not support Vista at all but it seems this has changed since the last time I checked. In my setup, Vista had to make room for the good ol’ XP, partially because I was unaware of which programs would support Vista (I was especially concerned with the VSTi’s), and more so because Vista consumes more CPU and RAM than XP. Then again, I’ve always lagged behind in the platform contest – my old computer still has Windows 2K Pro installed, although now that I have my new notebook, the old computer has become a web browser instead of the wannabe-DAW it once used to be. 🙂

Anyway, now that I’ve seen the light and know that the most common sequencers at least partially support Vista – here’s a short list:

Support for both 32 bit and 64 bit Windows Vista

• Cakewalk Sonar 7 (system requirements)
• Image-Line FL Studio 7, former Fruity Loops (system requirements)
• Propellerhead Reason 4 ?? – They state on the web site that Reason supports Vista. However, I was unable to find out if it supports the x64 version or not.

Support for only the 32 bit Vista

• Steinberg Cubase 4 – however, on the Steinberg website they explain that a 64 bit preview version is available with support to up to 128 GB RAM.
• Ableton Live – does not support any 64 bit Vista versions officially.
• Digidesign Pro Tools LE 7.4 and Pro Tools M-Powered 7.4 only support the 32 bit version. More information on the Digidesign web site.