Windows 11 and music production

[Sylim]

anybody switched yet? any experiences to share? i made the switch this week because my pc was acting up for some time and got more and more unstable, so it needed a fresh install. then i thought i might as well get an nvme ssd and switch to windows 11.

overall i actually kind of like it. the settings are very well consolidated and put together instead of being all over the place. what i don´t like is it actually comes with bloatwear. instagram, facebook, disney+, freaking tiktok... i thought this is windows and not a smart tv. all that crap had to go. weirdly enough some of those apps don´t show up in the apps tab in the settings to uninstall them. so i had to uninstall those from the start menu.

i´m still on Studio One v4, not 5. but it works just fine. the focusrite drivers just say they are for windows, not specifically for windows 11. so i don´t konw if they got some tweaking. but they also work just fine. but that´s also expected. the cernal of windows 11 is not really different from 10 afaik. so there shouldn´t be any major compatibility issues.

so far i just ran into two issues. one fixed, the other not. first one is you absolutely HAVE to set the power mode to performance. you can just type "control panel" in the windows start menu or the search bar and it opens up the old control panel we know and love and it actually gives you some more control. in here set the power plan to performance and in the advanced settings make sure the "USB selective suspend setting" is disabled.
i got clicks and pops playing just through the standalone of Mercuriall Ampbox at a buffer of 128kbps. also Studio One had way more artifacts than usual. on windows 10 i could run Studio One at 32kbps without any issue. but changing the power mode fixed that.

the other problem is my Waves plugins don´t work anymore. when Studio One scans for plugins on the startup, a window pops up telling me to look for the wavesshell dll file. but it´s right there where it´s supposed to be when i go look through the file explorer. but somehow either Studio One or the Waves management system thingamajig can´t recognize it. i´m still on the V9 Waves installer and the legacy version of Waves Central, so pretty old. so either that has some incompatability with Windows 11 or Studio One v4 has. i don´t know. but i´m sure as heck not going to upgrade to the V13 installer. in order to use my old Waves plugins that i bought years ago with the latest V13 installer, they actually have the audacity to make you pay extra. eff that, greedy money grabbing bunch they are. in general i´m really against some of Waves practices and i´ve been slowly switching from those to other plugins. so this is just the right time to make a clean cut and just ditch Waves all together. these days there´s better stuff out there anyways.

Forza Horizon 5 still gets graphic glitches for me, though. my graphics card has enough horse power to run it at 1440p maxed graphic settings. and it runs fine at first. but after half an hour to an hour it starts to lag and textures glitch out. i was hoping that wouldn´t happen after a fresh install, but aparently it just needs better optimizing.

so share your stories and/or tips for Windows 11.

 

[STRHelvete]

I just upgraded. Nothing serious to report. FL Studio works just as it always did

 

[GunpointMetal]

I threw it on my laptop last year and the only issue I had was having to assign the core affinity for my NVIDIA graphics card to any core other than whatever Reaper was on to avoid clicks/pops with real time audio processing. Seems to be a known issue with NVIDIA and I found an article from Blue Cat Audio that had the solution. Other than that, didn't have any issues with plugins or anything, but I did the update from Windows 10 instead of a full reinstall.

 

[Aewrik]

The only difference I notice is that Windows 11 really does not like being disconnected from the internet... but once you get past those dialogues and accept that some functionality (like the search bar) won't work without internet it's pretty much the same as Windows 10.

One more thing. I'm on a 13" laptop where screen real estate is a premium: you can't move the taskbar to the side of the screen anymore or hide the it completely, so my display is for all intents and purposes 16:8 rather than 16:9...

 

[GunpointMetal]

One more thing. I'm on a 13" laptop where screen real estate is a premium: you can't move the taskbar to the side of the screen anymore or hide the it completely, so my display is for all intents and purposes 16:8 rather than 16:9...

Unless its just the Pro version, you can absolutely do a traditional orientation/autohide with taskbar. Just right click on the taskbar and choose Windows 10 from the Taskbar Style setting.

 

[cindarkness]

I upgraded my main PC and my old "gaming" laptop to W11 last year. To be honest, I can't tell much of a difference. If anything, the boot times on my laptop are like 2x faster.

Your FH5 issue sounds like a memory leak. I used to have this with some games as well, until I switched the main drive from the usual SATA SSD to a PCIe 4.0 NVME drive and assigned a hefty page file to it.

 

[groverj3]

Under the hood the changes between 10 and 11 aren't in any of the systems you'll notice for recording.

 

[Veldar]

I use 11 on my gig tablet, runs ableton live 11 with 8ms of latency in/out (although my preferences make it faster than that).

I did some laptop/surface specific tweaks and run a debloat script.

 

[Accoun]

Under the hood the changes between 10 and 11 aren't in any of the systems you'll notice for recording.

On the other hand, never underestimate Microsoft's (or anyone else, for that matter) ability to break something else that is unrelated

 

[Anant Naag]

I switched a while back from 10 to 11,

They force you to have an account
SSD performance was demonstrably worst
RAM and Processor consumption was higher than 10
Random bugs with every upgrade
Slightly better battery life overall

All in all, it finally inspired me to drop Windows permanently and switch fully to Linux and go DAW'less for my music. I understand most people cannot do this and this is not advice for anyone else.

 

[Anant Naag]

Hardware support for the most part was more or less the same for me, no noticable changes. All interface's including very unique ones worked just fine. Latency was good after tweaking and de bloating.

 

[Veldar]

I switched a while back from 10 to 11,

They force you to have an account
SSD performance was demonstrably worst
RAM and Processor consumption was higher than 10
Random bugs with every upgrade
Slightly better battery life overall

All in all, it finally inspired me to drop Windows permanently and switch fully to Linux and go DAW'less for my music. I understand most people cannot do this and this is not advice for anyone else.

Honestly if I didn't have my entire solo project living inside of live I would of switched to bitwig on a Linux distro and left it as my performance computer.

I use a lot of Melda plugins however and they don't support any Linux standards. Maybe clap will dominated VSTs and that'll fix my issues.

 

[Anant Naag]

Honestly if I didn't have my entire solo project living inside of live I would of switched to bitwig on a Linux distro and left it as my performance computer.

I use a lot of Melda plugins however and they don't support any Linux standards. Maybe clap will dominated VSTs and that'll fix my issues.

It is a fair bit of work depending on your needs to setup. Then choice of distro, DAW etc. But once it is done, it is worth it. My idle ram usage is around ~2 gb with GNOME, my processor usage has gone down a lot etc. I know most people don't really care for this aspect.

I also have moved back into using lot of terminal based applications and text based setup over applications with GUI, but that is a different conversion.

 

[GunpointMetal]

I would love to use Linux as a DAW but the lack of plugin support and the idea of doing anything in the terminal are what keeps me in Windows (and I HATE Apple's business model and peripheral hardware). I'm curious what "demonstrably worse" SSD performance you were seeing with W11? My idle stats are a little higher than 10, but I don't see any degradation when I'm actually doing processing in the DAW, and some of my stuff that seemed heavier in W10 (some Izotope plugins like Nectar and Ozone) actually seem to be more efficient.

 

[Anant Naag]

I would love to use Linux as a DAW but the lack of plugin support and the idea of doing anything in the terminal are what keeps me in Windows (and I HATE Apple's business model and peripheral hardware). I'm curious what "demonstrably worse" SSD performance you were seeing with W11? My idle stats are a little higher than 10, but I don't see any degradation when I'm actually doing processing in the DAW, and some of my stuff that seemed heavier in W10 (some Izotope plugins like Nectar and Ozone) actually seem to be more efficient.

Linux - You can pretty much go 99% of the time without touching the command line nowdays. The 1% is if you have weird or specialized hardware. In my case, that is a surface tablet.

SSD performance - Big projects in FL, writing lot of data to disk. Worked fine in 10, had hiccups and slowdowns in 11. Maybe they fixed it, maybe not. But I am glad I stopped using that buggy mess.