It Rains in Seattle: Microsoft's AMP Summit 2007
Rain president, Bill Paschick, reports from Microsoft's AMP Summit. Microsoft intends to woo audio industry professionals with new Vista features.
Though it is not often one gets invited into the inner sanctum at Microsoft HQ in Washington state, I must admit I initially took the invitation of Rain Recording to Microsoft's first annual AMP Summit with a bit of skepticism. Dan Moore, one of the Business Development Managers for Microsoft, advised that this was the first Microsoft-hosted partner event specifically focused on building and supporting the alliance of audio and music partners ("AMP") around the various Microsoft platforms and technologies. But what the heck would a company with thirty-eight billion in liquid assets and over 95% PC market share need to coddle us audio folk about anything? "The creative content market is driven by culture, mind share, and perception", advised Dan. "We simply want to be more proactive in working with our partners to help tell the story that the PC is a phenomenal creative tool. If you believe everything you see and hear, you can get the impression that you have to use a Mac to be creative. That is a direct result of marketing and messaging efforts rather than a realistic assessment of what you really need to capture and produce creative thoughts and expressions. We're really excited to start telling our side of the story." Fortunately via Dan's alluring sales pitch and with my curiosity outweighing my skepticism, I shuffled off to Seattle.
Monday night at 7:00pm a welcome cocktail party was held at the W Hotel in Seattle. Readily I could see Microsoft spared no expense to make the attendees comfortable. From this moment on they treated us like VIPs with great food and comfortable atmosphere. I first met Noel Borthwick, CTO of Cakewalk. We had interacted before via email. Noel was a big help with background research our Vista Watch page and my personal absorption of Vista's technology and pertinence to the audio world. Next I met Toshihisa Sadakata of Yamaha R&D, London UK. We talked about the interfacing of Yamaha hardware and the PC, Steinberg software and other fascinating emerging technologies coming out of Yamaha Japan. The list goes on and on. Though more people from other major companies in the audio industry were arriving the next day, the group from this evening was already a who's who.
The next day, 8:00 am sharp we had a continental breakfast waiting for us at the Experience Music Project (EMP) center. What a beautiful building. I could go on and on about this facility. But I could do no better justice to its description and purpose than their website www.emplive.org. There were about 100 people mulling around before the first general session at 9:00am. At this time we all got name lanyards. Thank God, now I could look down at the approaching person's belly and see what company they were from. And again, the corporate who's who of computer audio was all around me; Digidesign, Steinberg, M-Audio, Roland, Intel, Cakewalk, Behringer and others including some major behind the scenes players that have championed much of the technology we enjoy today in the pro audio computer world.
Vista Benevolence
Sanjay Parthasarathy, Corporate Vice President conducted the keynote address. It was a quick yet compelling pep-rally for the new power, compatibility and stability of the new Vista platform. He had some very succinct things to say about Microsoft's reasoning for the AMP Summit. The bottom line, Microsoft wants to yell from the mountain top that the PC is great for audio at all levels from content creation to content consumption.
Bottom line, Microsoft wants in to our pro audio eco-system. Question is will they acclimate to ours or will they try to absorb us into theirs? Time and patience will tell.
To many Vista is or will be a necessary evil. This view is particularly the case in our industry. I have read numerous forum threads, articles and general banter on the subject of Vista and it's pertinence to pro audio. This summit indeed gave me a little more warm fuzzy on Vista. It holds great promise. But there will be new thinking and new hardware needed to obtain the brass ring with the use of Vista and professional audio applications. The advantages of the new OS as it pertains to audio production are not going to just pop up out of the blue. We will have to hunt for them and coddle them into existence. Clearly, to me that is, some of the attending AMP Summit companies intend to approach Vista deployment in this fashion. Others even more clearly will expect Microsoft to deliver it on a silver platter. I think the hunters will eat before the gatherers in this case.
Bottom line, Microsoft wants in to our pro audio eco-system. Question is will they acclimate to ours or will they try to absorb us into theirs? Time and patience will tell.
Windows Vista for Audio
Later on we received more information on the AMP Alliance Definition and Overview, Microsoft Partner Program Benefits, and Technical Enablement Resources. Each presenter was involved with audio in some way; from aspiring guitarists with a little home project studio to a full blown producer or performing artist. We were advised of an unofficial anonymous survey of the 40,000+ Microsoft employee email address with questions about audio production. Over 30% responded advising some level of use of their personal computers for audio production.
Much insight was offered in this session on how Vista has been optimized for audio. As many of my fellow attendees, I too had much concern on how a platform designed for the masses could address the latency and stability demands of professional audio. This is where Microsoft began to open up the hood of the Vista platform.
WaveRT Driver Model : WaveRT drivers operate directly at Kernel Mode, which will potentially allow lower latency. Native audio driver low latency was the hot topic of discussion in this tract.
MMCSS - Multimedia Class Scheduler Service: Glitch Proof Audio? Applications that are optimized to use this feature will be less susceptible to glitches and dropouts, caused by background tasks interfering with the current process.
Microsoft has indeed engineered some truly powerful components into the Vista platform for low latency stable audio driver processing. Whether we obtain some or all of the benefits of this in the pro audio computer world will depend greatly on our industry programmer's' embracement and harnessing of these new tools.
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Author
Bill Paschick
Bill Paschick is the founder and president of Rain Recording. His passion for music and computers and his commitment to demystifying audio production on the PC platform are the foundation of all of Rain's products.