M-Audio drivers for Vista???

[Lyquist]

I have three m-audio soundcards in my machine and was wondering if anyone has heard about m-audio releasing drivers for Vista. I would love to try Vista out, but I don't really want to go without sound. Thanks in advance.

 

[Sycraft]

I'd hold off. I've used M-Audio stuff since back when they were Midiman and while they tend to eventually get their drivers right, it generally takes a while and goes through a good bit of whining and bitching.

For example back when Windows 2000 was released, new drivers were needed for full support. NT drivers worked, but things like DirectSound didn't and there was a host of other problems. I had a Delta 1010 and I was interested in getting off Windows 98. So I loaded 2000 with the NT drivers. Lead to system lockups if the Delta was used. M-Audio said it was because the Delta was sharing an IRQ (it was) and that wasn't supported. Ok WTF? IRQ sharing is mandated by the PCI spec. Turning off ACPI and screwing around with settings got it a dedicated IRQ and it worked ok with NT drivers.

Well the said they weren't going to release 2000 drivers, ever. They claim 2000 was unsuited to audio because of the kmixer and the delay it introduced. I sent them the MS document on WDM KS and bitched at them. Finally some time later they came out with native 2000 drivers for the Delta. I grabbed them... And only 2 channels of my 10 channel card worked. They claimed it was a Windows 2000 limit, only 2 channels per device, no way around it.

I e-mailed Microsoft and I think they were sufficiently surprised by the stupidity of the question that they responded. They said that 2000 would support multiple channels just fine natively. Not only could you enumerate the device as multiple stereo devices as had been done in 98, but you could have a singly device with more than 2 outs (16 is the max I think). I passed that on to M-Audio.

Finally they got out a driver that fully supported all the card's features under 2000 natively. You got all the channels, you got DS support, you got WDM KS, the whole 9 yards. However it was a long time and a pain in the ass.

So I'd recommend just holding off on Vista. I'm sure they will get support for it eventually, but I think it is likely to take a while and be problematic. Wait until they've released a couple revisions of Vista drivers before you pull the trigger.