#23

My recent breaking point has been XCode 10. Something has gone horribly wrong with linking, and now anytime I make a small edit to a plugin, I’ll compile and get a segfault at runtime. After doing a full project recompile (about a 5-6 minute process on debug, 10 minutes on release builds), the segfault will magically disappear. Ever since installing XCode 10, I’ve moved 100% of my development work back to Windows and only use my Mac for testing.

Here are some tips for people moving to Windows for the first time (or moving back after a long time)

  1. Use Ninite (https://ninite.com/)! I build all of my Windows computers, so this is the best way to take a computer from “new” to up-and-running. It is a simple program that has a list of the most popular and highly-rated apps (most of them lean open-source). You select what you need and it puts together a custom installer for you.
    My favorites: 7-Zip, VLC, Launchy (if you frequently use command+space to launch Spotlight on your Mac, but honestly you don’t need it… I’ll mention more below), foobar2000 (if you prefer files over music streaming)

  2. DO NOT INSTALL THIRD-PARTY ANTIVIRUS. Every time someone brings me a Windows machine that runs horribly, it’s almost always Norton or McAfee. Avoid them like the plague, as they actually behave more like viruses than anti-virus. Windows Defender (which comes with Win 10) is way better and more lightweight. I keep MalwareBytes installed but not active. I run that about once every few weeks.

  3. I mentioned this in the Win 10 music thread (Windows 10 for music making):

  • After buying an audio interface, open up the Playback Devices tab by right-clicking the volume control on the bottom right of the screen.
  • Select your audio interface and hit “Properties”
  • Go to “Advanced”
  • Turn off “Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device”
    This will make your life a lot easier.

  1. If you make frequent use of keys that are not part of your laptop keyboard, consider buying either a gaming keyboard with macros keys (I prefer Logitech), a hardware macro pad, or software like AutoHotkey. On Logitech keyboards, these are called “G Keys”. They are generic keys that are completely user-mappable and can be as complex as you want. They can cover anything from basic characters to multi-step key commands, so outside of gaming people still use these a lot for Photoshop or DAW commands.

  2. If you like creative graphics, one of the coolest Windows-only programs is vvvv (or “vier-vow”): https://vvvv.org/ It’s a patching environment that a lot of people use for installations.

  3. You can put an entire Linux Subsystem in Windows. I use this occasionally for compiling VCV plugins: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10

  4. For audio drivers, you should generally use ASIO whenever possible. I have found these to be the most reliable.

  5. If you need a virtual MIDI driver to route MIDI between programs, I’ve been using LoopMIDI for almost a year with zero issues (https://www.tobias-erichsen.de/software/loopmidi.html). I’ve been using this to send TidalCycles MIDI to other programs.

  6. Learn your Windows shortcuts. Hitting the Windows key brings up the Start menu. If you start typing, it will start searching. I almost exclusively use only the keyboard for launching apps now. Win+E brings up Windows Explorer. Alt+F4 murders whatever application currently has focus (similar to Force Quit). Ctrl-Alt-Delete brings up a sort-of troubleshooting toolkit if the computer locks up (usually you just need the Task Manager, which I think is Ctrl-Shift-Esc… I have it in muscle memory but not verbal memory hahah). Alt-Tab cycles through open applications. There are lots more, but those are probably my most-used.

  7. If you have applications that are rendering incorrectly, it’s likely because you have desktop scaling set to something other than 100%. A lot of DAWs and plugins are still getting fixes in place to deal with the oddities of Windows HiDPI rendering.

At this point, there are very, very few Mac-exclusives that I miss on Windows. Numerology was a big one, but Loomer’s Architect is excellent. Gleetchlab is gettings a Windows version. Metasynth is great, but it’s already at the point where every Mac update breaks it. For the most part, it seems that ever since Windows 10 came out, many of the applications I use are progressively getting more stable.

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#24

Thanks for that. I’ll check it out.

1 Like
#25

Anyone have a recommendation for a streamlined PDF reader? I’m using Xodo, which I found in the Microsoft Store. It seems pretty good, but figured I’d ask. I mean “streamlined” in terms of design. Optimal is all you see is the document, no framing, tools, etc. Thanks.

#26

Because I have to write texts in several languages that use (different sets of) special characters (german, norwegian, french) and also program for a living, I have at some point decided to made my own keyboard layout. I based it on the default US layout but included all the extras I need bound to keys that make sense to me.

For windows, I used the official tool from Microsoft, which is quite old (2007! :exploding_head:), but did the job and wasn’t too hard to use. I think that’s the least hacky thing you can do and it can be done in a reasonable amount of time (took me something like 30 minutes including research and thinking about how I wanted to map keys to chars).

1 Like
#27

Adobe Reader in fullscreen mode

Which MacBook should I buy?
#28

Three (more) things I’ve learned in my week back trying a Windows 10 machine after a decade-plus on a Mac:

  1. Win+D shows the desktop.

  2. If you elect that the “accent color” (in settings) be applied to “title bars,” this can be useful. The reason is if you have more than one window (not tab, window) open of the same piece of software, only the active one will have the colored title bar. I frequently have two separate Sublime Text 3 windows open. (Side note: this next bit is OS-agnostic, but the InactivePanes package for Sublime Text 3 is great.) Also about accent colors: I initially stuck with the nice blue that was the Windows default, but I changed it to a brown-gray. The benefit was that in, say, Firefox, the active tab retains a bright narrow bar, and the others are muted. Makes it easier to know where I am.

  3. In most programs you can hit Alt and then navigate the given active-window program’s menu bar with arrow keys. I think this is doable on Macs, too, but for some reason I never used it on a Mac, but now that I’m back trying Windows again, I am using it all the time.

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#29

It may be cumbersome at first, but as a typist who regularly uses both en-dashes and em-dashes, the best solution for me has been using alt-codes. These work on Macs as well, if you use “option” in place of “alt”.

For an en-dash ("–"), you hold the “alt” key, type in “0150” on the number pad, and then release the alt key.

For an em-dash ("—"), you hold “alt”, type in “0151” on the number pad, then release alt.

4 Likes
#30

Alt + PrintScreen works fine for me to only get one window, you can then paste that into anything (even Paint). And the snipping tool is great for more precise stuff. Or apps like ShareX that do both still and video captures easily (we use this one quite a lot at work to show work in progress for the game we’re working on to the rest of the team…).

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#31

Thanks. Should this also work with the numbers at the top of the keyboard? It’s not working on my laptop (which lacks a number pad).

#32

FWIW, Microsoft Word creates em dashes and en dashes automatically from double or single dashes using AutoFormat.

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#33

Yeah, and fortunately WordPress does, too. I assume I could make Sublime Text 3 do this. That’s where I do about 95% of my writing. I need to look into that.

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#34

Sublime text is a raw text editor and will not do any kind of character substitution, by design. I cannot imagine how maddening it would be to debug code, only to discover a weird and almost-invisible char substitution surprise! That said, it’s extremely flexible and customizable,and you might be able to customize it to your liking.

2 Likes
#35

I wonder if this would be useful for em-dashes and other stuff in Sublime Text 3:

https://www.granneman.com/webdev/editors/sublime-text/top-features-of-sublime-text/quickly-insert-text-and-code-with-sublime-text-snippets

#36

I stumbled across this collection of scripts on reddit some years ago, and use them on all of my windows installs now. They clean out any bloatware / malware, disable telemetry data, perform optimizations, etc.

https://old.reddit.com/r/TronScript/

There’s a github repository for them, which also has a detailed explanation of what everything does. The package itself is somewhere around 500 mb, and takes a few hours to run.

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#37

You should be really careful and knowledgeable about the whole disable thing though. A LOT of the problems users have are based on stuff they disabled and shouldn’t have

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#38

Yes, entirely!

I was specifically speaking about Microsoft’s Windows 10 Telemetry, their phone home structure. More a matter of how thick you like your tin foil hat to be… Here’s a decent read on the matter, with links to technical papers if one wanted to dive deep:

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#39

A little update on my Huawei experiment (a Huawei Matebook X Pro), now that I’m two weeks into it. It’s running great. I installed a heap of software, and everything ran fine immediately except one thing. What ran fine: SuperCollider, Python, Traktor 2 (with a DJ44 controller), Reaktor, Bitwig, Max 7 (running a Grid), and VCV Rack, among other things. What didn’t: Ableton Live — but, after some email back’n’forths with tech support and one phone call with tech support, Ableton got it running (there was a workaround due to some graphics issues). As the above em-dash suggests, I’ve sorted out how to make em-dashes (creating an alternate layout with Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4). And that about covers it. It’s only been two weeks, but I’ve been using it a lot, and I’ll be using it even more in the next two weeks.

3 Likes
#40

This thread makes me happy because I’ve been a Windows user my whole life for various reasons, and especially in the music/art community at times it’s felt like I was literally the only one on Windows. Nice to know that isn’t the case so much anymore- and I feel like it’s been changing in Windows’ favor as of late.

When I went to Berklee in 2012 we had to get Macbook Pro’s, but I remember almost never using mine because it ran everything significantly worse than the PC I’d built a whole 4 years earlier. Don’t remember meeting a single person my whole time there who used Windows, student or professor, pretty amazing how Apple got such a hold of the music industry, never totally understood why.

Basically all the software I’ve ever needed or wanted to use is available on Windows, and typically in a form less restrained than on a Mac. Something about the whole culture of the Mac OS always rubbed me the wrong way- lots of hand-holding and taking power away from the user- little things like the clumsy manner in which you have to uninstall things, file management in general, etc.

But the biggest reason I still stick with Windows is because you can build a PC for a very significant fraction of the cost of a macbook/mac pro, AND it ends up being more powerful.

4 Likes
#41

Thanks a lot Marc for your updates! This is very valuable to me, because after having been running everything on Apple’s platform for years, I’m not sure I will continue to do so, once I have to buy a new computer. It’s certainly not an easy decision, since there’s so many pros and cons, and for that reason the more experience from other people I can read about, the better.

When I started to get back into electronic music I went through a series of Windows7-powered computers. A desktop first, then a laptop, then another desktop. I kept having all sorts of issues. Some of them I was never able to really troubleshoot. So at one point, mostly out of despair, I got a Macbook, which finally worked and still does.
So I’m a bit hesitant. But that was also a long time ago.

1 Like
#42

Sure thing. One further note about my difficulties getting Ableton working on my Windows 10 laptop: no one else I spoke with had an issue. I know various people who use Windows to make music, and none of them had trouble installing or running it. That’s good for Windows, but meant no one had any advice from experience. Fortunately, Ableton’s tech support figured it out.

1 Like