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This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad. I spent the last week shopping around for an audio interface and every single model had people complaining about driver issues and latency and "random loud static" or other crazy things when using Windows. Always Windows. Crazy stuff.

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> This is the one 'creative' use case I know of where Macs actually are better - the lag and latency issues on Windows still seem pretty bad.

I don't know where this is coming from. It certainly doesn't apply to the actual driver latency of higher end and professional interfaces. Most of these actually have a slightly smaller latency for the same buffer size with ASIO then they do with CoreAudio.

The one thing that can cause latency issues are GPU drivers, but there's ways to fix that.

One of things that really annoys me about Windows is that there doesn't seem to be a way to capture audio from a single application even though the audio mixer can clearly change the volume. But if you want to capture, it's only the final mix output for everything (so you better hope that there's no sudden notification sound from anything). Or you'd have to use a virtual sound card like VB's Cable/Voicemeteer, which requires the application to be able to select a specific soundcard.

Arguably this isn't relevant for audio production, but it does make capturing applications a huge pain. (And if I did miss something and there is a way to e.g., have OBS capture the audio of a specific Window/Application, I'm all ears!)

This page from 2023-07-12 says OBS can capture audio of individual windows in Windows 10 and up: https://obsproject.com/kb/application-audio-capture-guide

Oh, nice, thank you! That is pretty recent, so I missed it when I setup my stuff a year ago, but that'll teach me to read the patch notes in the future :)

As someone who does quite some audio stuff on Windows, using Focusrite Scarlett interfaces - I never encountered issues like that.

On Linux however..

Huzzah for pipewire.

It was just posted today: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2024/03/15/pipewire-camera-ha...

Linux ships with a realtime kernel patchset these days, so the only issues there have to do with hardware- and proprietary VST support. With the newer Pipewire audio server you don't even need to set up JACK.

Except that Apple breaks audio applications with every new release of macOS and has for years. And, it's just a matter of time before Apple kills basically every DAW and VST when they finally kill off OpenGL on macOS.

Edit: What I have said is true here, so I'm unsure why the downvotes.

Curious, why would OpenGL break VSTs? (And yes, I get that AU is the preferred way over VST2 or even VST3, which is why most modern plugins are available in AU as well. I just don't see how OpenGL plays into this.)

A lot of plugins use OpenGL, it's just that simple :)

Huh, TIL, I assumed they used standard OS controls, but looking at some of them that makes sense.

I would be very surprised if the vast majority, as in 80-100%, of DAWs and VSTs don't use OpenGL.

Some VST plugins use OpenGL to render their user interface.

I learned this running them on Windows in a VM. I would have expected it to fall back to software rendering like the old days, but no. I ended up installing some build of Mesa for Windows.

Why would anyone ever use anything other than Logic Pro? /s

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