I can't thank you enough! I have a Surface Laptop i7 and my CPU was maxing out in Ableton Live 9 but now its running super low and the problem is resolved after seeing how you tweaked the settings in Windows to High Performance. You really helped me! Now I can resume making music.
Fantastic videos all around. Long time producer with my first surface being delivered today. I think this is going to really work well for me , thanks for all the time and effort it took to do all these videos.
When you stated that you were using the i5 fanless Surface model, I suspected you would run into thermal throttling issues. The fanless model should perform consistently under normal conditions, but your set up would be classified as a power user. Your idea of setting the minimum/maximum processor state to 99% is a brilliant solution. Even with my i7 16GB 512 Surface Pro 2017 model, I experience occasional thermal issues on extended video editing productions. I will try your solution to see if that resolves my occasional thermal issues.
Thanks for all the time and effort that you put into this, Robin. Much appreciated! So, MS, we want a "Musicians Mode" option on your products so that the Surface can be optimised for Music performance at a click of a button. Thanks. And software developers, please maximise the full screen space so that my, shaking, fat fingers can find all the knobs, sliders, buttons, and menus. Thanks.
Great work! You'd think Microsoft and all the other makers would dedicate someone to demonstrate all their computer products that could be used for music production. Keep it up! Maybe one day they will request your expertise.
Great work as always ! This is an in-depth and helpful resource. For musicians and producers looking for portable devices the surface is a great tool and this channel and the content you provide is a huge resource and exceptionally helpful. Many thanks!
Cheers Robin for all the effort that went into this. Great vids, as usual. Looking forward to DAWS videos in near future. I'm new to recording music and your videos have massively helped me. I run a surface pro 4 i5 and trying to figure out which DAW is worth investing in. But first things first I need some monitors. Look forward to watching more vids, all the best.
When trying this, after altering the settings im experiencing a few issues. Everytime im pushing the "rest"-butting it seems to shut the computer down instead of resting it. Secondly the computer looses the ability to connect to internet automatically. Have you experienced any of these issues? Thanks for the great content!
Generally speaking you don’t want your system to go to sleep (I assume that’s what you mean) when running audio software as it doesn’t tend to wake up very well. But you can change the function of the power button in the power settings. For WiFi there’s a tick box to connect to things automatically. Hope this helps.
Thanks for this review...particularly the power settings... I've been having unsolved glitches in all audio programs, even when using an external USB audio interface.. Sometimes the audio plays fine, then suddenly this throbbing sound (similar to listening to your heart through stethescope), and I have to restart the system... So I'm hoping this CS settings which opened up the other power settings will solve this.. THanks again :)
Hi there again... I'm still having this throbbing sound each time I plug my headphones or any audio cable into my audio port. Here is the link of the sound: www.dropbox.com/s/njxd6i8zageqz3c/GPD%20Audio%20Problem.mp3?dl=0 any idea what could be causing this? Thanks Rally
Hi Robin, have you done any experimenting with the power slider introduced on the Surface Pro 2017 and also added to the SP4? I have been setting it to "Best Performance" when making music but recently I've found that a few programs seem to drop less if you set it to recommended... might be just a placebo though because I would think High Performance mode would just disable all the power mgmt. things the slider adjusts.
Good thorough analysis, thank you. Just one note: Setting the max CPU to 99% is most likely not what is preventing your CPU to go to 3.5 Ghz. This machine uses a Intel Core i5-7300U CPU, which has a base frequency of 2,6 Ghz. 3.5 Ghz is the turbo boost frequency, and that will only ever be triggered for single threaded applications that can't make use of multiple CPU cores. Which is unlikely to happen in such a complex DAW setup with 50 odd plugins active. Rarely, if ever.
Well, i can only report on what I find and if what you say is true then it would be the same for the SP4 - which it isn't. So i tend to find that what works in theory and what works in practice are two very different things :)
24:00 yeah the passive cooling is not good enough the heatpipes are overloaded and the microsoft firmware is telling the system to throttle down get the i7 guys and just downclock it has a decent fan. you can also max the fan and then disable hyperthreading which basically just feads the cpus more work this will reduce its workload. cooling has been the biggest bottleneck since the 90s for portables and hyper threading creates a virtual cpu so it pushes the phyiscal cpu limits you dont wanna do that on a system that had a microscopic fan with tiny heatpipe.
Windows should NOT be adjusted for background services, that is plain wrong. It was suggested by RME back in the winXP days for solving an issue with a particular RME card and driver at that time. It somehow got adopted by all the optimization guides out there, but it was only true for that specific combination of soundcard and driver at that time, RME later released a new driver that fixed the issue..
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I have seen many systems and laptops over the years that are instantly cured of clicks and pops using this tweak, in many OS versions and many interfaces. I am happy to do the opposite if I can see any benefit to it - can you demonstrate a benefit? Or even if it does nothing, then it's one less thing to worry about. Maybe it's a throwback because I've been doing this for so long. Either way I'm not sure it's doing any harm. Do you have any evidence of good/bad results? That would be really handy - thanks.
M$ says this: "You can set Windows to allocate more processor time to the program you are currently running. This can result in faster program response time. Or, if you have background programs, such as printing or disk backup that you want to run while you work, you can have Windows share processor resources equally between background and foreground programs". The theory here is that you are setting the system to equalise running the background ASIO driver performance with the cpu required to run the DAW, or maybe more importantly, the audio stream to disc over, or at least equal to any foreground graphical processing. You are compromising graphical and perhaps even CPU audio/plug-in processing to keep the audio driver stable. I have only seen positive results from this for over 20 years when trying to run audio intensive applications that rely more on the audio stream. It might be worth testing this to see if its still relevant, but the theory still stands...
If set to prioritize background services, You will get worse DAW performance. Audio driver is not a background service. I admit the performance degradation is minimal, easy to test for yourself. So leave this setting alone.
This is one of those areas where it's difficult to find an easy test and then what to believe. For starters, your first statement was not entirely true - it was not an RME thing. I know this because I ran tech support for a music shop for many years and had to deal with many different systems and many different audio interfaces. Countless times I talked people through switching to background services, and even dialled into many systems where i did this tweak and it solved their glitchy audio problems. That's my experience. If you check out the comments to my tweaking videos you'll also find lots of happy people having their issues resolved and they all include that tweak. So, I can confidently say it was not specific to RME and XP. Since running my own company building PC's for audio it's not an issue i run into anymore but I don't do the same range of tech support. I include the tweak because it has sorted people out and you never know the sort of system people run or the quality of the audio interface driver they use - that's why it's there. Most people who argue with me over these things have their own system with their own audio interface - they don't, with the greatest of respect, have the experience of supporting hundreds of systems with all the audio interfaces across all versions of Windows. All I can go on is my experience in these matters because there's no one else to ask :) However, it's completely possible that this is a setting that is redundant or even detrimental these days with this technology, this OS and audio interface. It was certainly more effective and common place with Windows XP and with PCI audio cards. Much as i desperately hate to ever be wrong it wouldn't be the first time. So I just ran a test on my SP 2017 - FL Studio still glitched. I was able to add one more plugin in Dawbench on one boot but then after I turned back it was still able to load it and then after repeated switching sometimes it would load another one, sometimes it wouldn't. So in this basic "easy" test it's all a bit inconclusive - which is why you often have to rely on your past experience with such things. What I should probably do is devise another test with a very low impact plug-in so that i can get a higher resolution of result and see what happens then..... but then that's only testing one thing. The problem with tweaking for audio software is that there are so many factors, so many ways to use the software and so many assaults on the processing power that it's difficult to define what works and what doesn't. So when in doubt, leave it in :) But thanks for pointing this out, you may be onto something and I'll endeavour to check into it if i can. I tried Bitsum the other day because someone was convinced it was the answer to everything and it made not a single jot of difference to my tests. Someone else suggested trying Game Mode - so there's always lots to try!
It may depend on hardware and daw software at this point. My audio device processes are all listed under background services in task manager for what it's worth.
Hello, Did you test any DAW with the SP 2017 using the integrated Audio interface only with Asio4All ? I'm just wondering how good is the device for music making while traveling ( without USB hub and devices ) ? Thanks for sharing !
I have an earlier video showing all the DAWs using regular Windows drivers - ruclips.net/video/4U4JagGWxs4/видео.html I plan to do one on ASIO4ALL soon.
Molten Music Technology thank you, I already saw the video before, but not sure that windows Driver will handle low latency for music production (VST instrument playing for eg. ). IMHO, the purpose of such a device is to be able to work outside your home. Personally when I’m home, I use a more powerful Desktop for my production. When you’re outside, on movement, you dont take with you your Usb hub, audio interface....and stuffs. So for me testing the device with an asio driver is key to see if you can make some tunes while traveling. Don’t you think this is missing in your complete and great review :-) ?
I totally understand that which is why it needs its own video. If you look back you'll find the ones i did on the SP3 and SP4 - so i completely get why it's important. However, in all my testing i've found that using a decent audio interface makes the whole experience so much less troublesome! And i want to show the Surface in its best, usable light. But also I can't do everything at once - and no matter what i try to get in there there's always someone who is unhappy.
Thanks a lot for your quick feedback. I'm not really unhappy, I'm rather very happy to find someone like you testing for us new gears ( thanks god)... so thumb up again ! To be honest, the differentiation we have with a surface pro VS other PCs/laptop... is that 1- It's light and portable and 2 -It has Multitouch. So in this perspective, it's relly key to see what a Surface VS another less portable and/or non multitouch PC, can bring to your musical experience.... So this is why I loved your Bitwig and FL Studio videos for Multitouch aspects, Just amazing ! BTW: You did a test on Bitwig 2.1, are they any new enhancement over Bitwig 1.3 in Multitouch area ? And as a recommandation, and regarding the heating issues on CPU you faced, do you recommand a Surface Pro 2017 over Surface Pro 4 for music production for the moment ? Many many thanks !
I know, I know ... :) I'm just a little impatient,cause I want to buy a Surface and I found an i7 16 Gb SP4 on sale for a good price... I was wondering whether I'll go for it, for a new SP 20017 or for a Macbook Pro. I really want to use the touch features,....if it works...really ! And for me, this will be the game changer.. Surface Pro is not cheap. In the other side , on MacOs there is no such a hassle with low latency audio drivers, or midi routing... like you/I are facing with a Windows OS.... I don't really understand why we still don't have a good low latency audio driver otb in windows 10, and we still need to tweak a Windows installation to have a decent Audio workstation.... I did this back in early 2000 's. Now I just want to plug and play :-)
I've had much luck with the pro3 i7 undervolted and running high performance profile and get near constant turbo 3+ghz and never see the temp go over 90. Usually around 80. No throttling.
Great video! I always wanted a SP for my audio mixing post-production, however without a thunderbolt three I cannot take advantage of offline DSP and UA plugins...! I hope they'll insert it on the next iteration of SP. Would you consider inserting Harrison Mixbus in the list of DAWs you're going to test on the SP? If you find it at discount it's 30$ and totally worth it, but I'm curious how the SP is going to handle it :)
Mixbus? Someone else asked that earlier - possibly yes. Audio recording is not very difficult for the Surface so i'm not sure how interesting it would be.
I am mainly a mixing engineer, so I use Mixbus for that. I think you could find it limiting compared to other DAWs, especially because I don't think it has the ability to directly draw automation with the pen (probably the main reason why I am looking for a Surface-type device with thunderbolt), but I think that the overall layout might be very interesting for touch enabled devices. It's just a suggestion, maybe you want to look more into it, or more probably you already have too many to look at! Either way great videos, I love this subject (audio + surface ;))
It's a bit odd because i had some long conversations with Harrison a couple of years back about how they were going to implement touch screen support into MixBus - based on their own touch technology on their consoles - but it never seemed to materialise. I will try to check it out though.
Memory is only really needed for large sample based instruments. If you are wanting to load large orchestral library then memory is important, if not then 4gb is plenty
No, not really. You’ll get the same result whether running audio software or not, because the audio software won’t be the cause of the issues. It can help you connect a glitch to the actual DPC occurrence but I’m not sure how that information helps. I recommend leaving latencymon running for 5-10 minutes and see what happens.
You mean MixBus? Possibly - it's just not very exciting. The Surface can do multi-track audio recording without any bother. I'm more interested in a DAW that balances audio and software synthesis/sampling for a more encompassing music making experience.
do you know anything about the zoom uac 2's performance with the surface pro? i was thinking of getting one because ive been reading that it has very low latency at a reasonable price
I had one for a week - seemed to work fine but it didn't give me any better performance or latency than other interfaces I was using. I was expecting something impressive, it wasn't, it was perfectly adequate though.
thanks for the reply and all the videos! (you convinced me to get a surface pro) do you think its worth it to sell my presonus audioboxx usb 96 and get the uac or something else? im getting some pops and glitches running keyscape on my i5
Tricky to say. Keyscape is Spectrasonics - they tend to eat CPUs for breakfast. But Presonus interfaces are not that efficient either. I would buy it from Amazon - run some tests and send it back if it's no better.
Do the same processor stability/ cooling system problems affect the i7 16 RAM GB model as well? (Does it have a fan or am I just mistaking it with the Surface 4 model?) Is the i7 16 RAM GB a good tool to use Cubase 8.5 + run 10 Eastwest instrument channels? Your performance tests are on the i5 model?, I wonder about the i7 one. Right now I have a quad-core desktop computer and I was looking for something even more "portable" than the Surface Book yet reliable enough to make full Cubase 8.5 eastwest plugg-in projects without audio distortions, lags, etc...
The different spec models work in the same way as far as i know. I like the i5 because it's not pushing too close to the thermal and performance edges and so is more predictable. The i7 might well give you more if you can keep the temperatures under control.
So, can one run 10 Eastwest vst (64 bit) Plugg-ings simultaneously on Cubase 8.5 in the 8 GB i5 model? Also, when you record the "audios" from the microphone (without cracking sounds), can you save the project audio data directly on the Micro SD card? Or do you use the SSD drive for the project not to bottleneck? I would go for the i5 too if I can do the following: (Use the SSD for the system alone, record the audios on a secondary HDD hard drive to make the SSD last longer, (I guess here it would be the Micro SD card?) and run 10 Easstwest plugg-ins from a C partition simultaneously on my projects withot overloading the machine.
How would I know that? I've shown you examples of what the Surface can do - you have to decide whether that compares to what you want to do. You can use the Micro SD card as a regular drive, but it's terribly slow and low performance so i wouldn't recommend it.
I will try to compare the workloads of both Eastwest and the plugg-ins you used so as to make a good guess. Your videos are really helpful in the sense one can actually see the product working, which is something you cannot really view in shops or commercials. I also found your tips on CPU usage quite interesting to solve the thermal issues. They make the Surface stable, which is what we all music producers want. And as for the SD card...perhaps using an external USB 3.0 HDD drive for recordings can solve my problem then.
So can you just give me a simple answer and tell me whether or not an i5 surface pro is good to use for using FL Studio with many plugins and instruments?
Molten Music Technology Ok. The problem is...I have lot of traveling to do. So can this laptop be considered as a good start. And also i can upgrade the ram to 32gigs later.
It's all a question of scale - you can do orchestral scoring on a phone if you want. People often use 2 or 3 networked computers to run high level orchestral library. I'm sure the laptop will do fine - is it a good choice? No, but go with what you can and what you need - it's a "how long is a piece of string" question, you know?
You are the only person i can ask this ques too ...if i tweak my p.c .......for power using mode can i ise surface go with 8gb ram asi have limited budget ...please help ....
Nice vid! I wanted to suggest you to try gaming mode in your daws. I had problems with studio one 3 but when enabling windows game mode, it improved the performance.
Molten Music Technology : GREAT review . Just saw one of these at Best Buy in the states. Torn between this and the HP 15.6’ Spectre .. Alrhough the wonderful 3:2 screen ratio looks so wonderful and I remember you saying you ran Reason on this smaller screen without having to squint too much. So am considering pulling the trigger here. Thanks again for this great review . Actually I’ll be using it in conjunction with RS remote on my iPad Pron 12.9 so I imagine e it should suffice .
I don't know. Why do people buy laptops, or MacBooks? Can you perform a gig with a maxed out desktop computer? It's not that hard to see how it could be an attractive device and the creative possibilities in the touch and pen paradigm. I believe that working different brings about different creative directions - but of course, you are spending a lot of money on that. It's a beautiful device though.
Playing a gig might be a reason I guess, but then again for $3k you could buy a Kronos or something. If that was your main studio rig (based on you testing studio DAWs) and started charging hourly rates to use a dinky toy to record bands with, you might get laughed out of the industry, just saying.
I think a better use of this device is as a remote controller for a desktop. You could set your noisy PC tower in another room and have this wirelessly controlling it - now that I would pay money for. Maybe using something like TeamViewer? Not sure. Challenge for you?
Meh, it's the sort of thing you can do with an iPad or any old laptop. You are kind of missing the point in this is a creative device that can run proper desktop software and give you creative access to touch and pen based music production. You don't want laggy dial-in software, you want your fingers on the real thing, running the software, with all your gear attached. It's not your bag, and that's fine.
Way too much video for the simple question of whether it works and is worth it or not. I'm guessing @16:52 by all your disclaimers that it kinda sorta franken-DAW works and is not worth $$ and all the drama. especially when an ipad is pretty much plug and play. and i'm no fan of windows either. I'll waste my life watching something other than another hour video about how unreliable windows still is and always will be. peace.
Dude there are way shorter videos to answer that question; he made clear his tests were quite exhaustive; you could’ve picked any of the other 5 min vids out there :)
Geez whizz are you kidding me? Nope, Microsoft haven't given me anything for this - you should check out the history of my Surface videos on www.SurfaceProAudio.com this is all my own work, off my own back, with my own Surface that I bought, myself :)
I can't thank you enough! I have a Surface Laptop i7 and my CPU was maxing out in Ableton Live 9 but now its running super low and the problem is resolved after seeing how you tweaked the settings in Windows to High Performance. You really helped me! Now I can resume making music.
Even though I'm not in the market for a Surface, I really enjoyed the video.
Fantastic videos all around. Long time producer with my first surface being delivered today. I think this is going to really work well for me , thanks for all the time and effort it took to do all these videos.
Cool! And you're welcome.
When you stated that you were using the i5 fanless Surface model, I suspected you would run into thermal throttling issues.
The fanless model should perform consistently under normal conditions, but your set up would be classified as a power user.
Your idea of setting the minimum/maximum processor state to 99% is a brilliant solution.
Even with my i7 16GB 512 Surface Pro 2017 model, I experience occasional thermal issues on extended video editing productions.
I will try your solution to see if that resolves my occasional thermal issues.
I suspected that too :)
Thanks for all the time and effort that you put into this, Robin. Much appreciated! So, MS, we want a "Musicians Mode" option on your products so that the Surface can be optimised for Music performance at a click of a button. Thanks. And software developers, please maximise the full screen space so that my, shaking, fat fingers can find all the knobs, sliders, buttons, and menus. Thanks.
Great work! You'd think Microsoft and all the other makers would dedicate someone to demonstrate all their computer products that could be used for music production. Keep it up! Maybe one day they will request your expertise.
Great work as always ! This is an in-depth and helpful resource. For musicians and producers looking for portable devices the surface is a great tool and this channel and the content you provide is a huge resource and exceptionally helpful. Many thanks!
Fantastic review. Thanks a lot.
Awesome video; very thorough and gave me a lot of ideas!
Great test video as always! Thanks!!
Cheers Robin for all the effort that went into this. Great vids, as usual. Looking forward to DAWS videos in near future. I'm new to recording music and your videos have massively helped me. I run a surface pro 4 i5 and trying to figure out which DAW is worth investing in. But first things first I need some monitors. Look forward to watching more vids, all the best.
Well you've really gone and done it this time, Robin. I've only gone and ordered a new Surface Pro!
When trying this, after altering the settings im experiencing a few issues. Everytime im pushing the "rest"-butting it seems to shut the computer down instead of resting it. Secondly the computer looses the ability to connect to internet automatically. Have you experienced any of these issues?
Thanks for the great content!
Generally speaking you don’t want your system to go to sleep (I assume that’s what you mean) when running audio software as it doesn’t tend to wake up very well. But you can change the function of the power button in the power settings. For WiFi there’s a tick box to connect to things automatically. Hope this helps.
Thanks for this review...particularly the power settings...
I've been having unsolved glitches in all audio programs, even when using an external USB audio interface..
Sometimes the audio plays fine, then suddenly this throbbing sound (similar to listening to your heart through stethescope), and I have to restart the system...
So I'm hoping this CS settings which opened up the other power settings will solve this..
THanks again :)
I'm hoping it will help :)
Hi there again...
I'm still having this throbbing sound each time I plug my headphones or any audio cable into my audio port.
Here is the link of the sound: www.dropbox.com/s/njxd6i8zageqz3c/GPD%20Audio%20Problem.mp3?dl=0
any idea what could be causing this?
Thanks Rally
Nope, I have no idea what that is.
Hi Robin, have you done any experimenting with the power slider introduced on the Surface Pro 2017 and also added to the SP4? I have been setting it to "Best Performance" when making music but recently I've found that a few programs seem to drop less if you set it to recommended... might be just a placebo though because I would think High Performance mode would just disable all the power mgmt. things the slider adjusts.
I tend to just kill the power settings without much experimentation - it seems to sort most things out.
Good thorough analysis, thank you. Just one note: Setting the max CPU to 99% is most likely not what is preventing your CPU to go to 3.5 Ghz. This machine uses a Intel Core i5-7300U CPU, which has a base frequency of 2,6 Ghz. 3.5 Ghz is the turbo boost frequency, and that will only ever be triggered for single threaded applications that can't make use of multiple CPU cores. Which is unlikely to happen in such a complex DAW setup with 50 odd plugins active. Rarely, if ever.
Well, i can only report on what I find and if what you say is true then it would be the same for the SP4 - which it isn't. So i tend to find that what works in theory and what works in practice are two very different things :)
Thanks for this deep review. Keep it up !
That was so helpful for my decision buying a Surface Pro!
Thank you!
One question: Which Surface Pro 4 model did you compare with this i5 (2017)?
The i5 8GB model
24:00 yeah the passive cooling is not good enough the heatpipes are overloaded and the microsoft firmware is telling the system to throttle down get the i7 guys and just downclock it has a decent fan. you can also max the fan and then disable hyperthreading which basically just feads the cpus more work this will reduce its workload. cooling has been the biggest bottleneck since the 90s for portables and hyper threading creates a virtual cpu so it pushes the phyiscal cpu limits you dont wanna do that on a system that had a microscopic fan with tiny heatpipe.
Windows should NOT be adjusted for background services, that is plain wrong. It was suggested by RME back in the winXP days for solving an issue with a particular RME card and driver at that time. It somehow got adopted by all the optimization guides out there, but it was only true for that specific combination of soundcard and driver at that time, RME later released a new driver that fixed the issue..
Well, I don't know what to tell you. I have seen many systems and laptops over the years that are instantly cured of clicks and pops using this tweak, in many OS versions and many interfaces. I am happy to do the opposite if I can see any benefit to it - can you demonstrate a benefit? Or even if it does nothing, then it's one less thing to worry about. Maybe it's a throwback because I've been doing this for so long. Either way I'm not sure it's doing any harm. Do you have any evidence of good/bad results? That would be really handy - thanks.
M$ says this: "You can set Windows to allocate more processor time to the program you are currently running. This can result in faster program response time. Or, if you have background programs, such as printing or disk backup that you want to run while you work, you can have Windows share processor resources equally between background and foreground programs". The theory here is that you are setting the system to equalise running the background ASIO driver performance with the cpu required to run the DAW, or maybe more importantly, the audio stream to disc over, or at least equal to any foreground graphical processing. You are compromising graphical and perhaps even CPU audio/plug-in processing to keep the audio driver stable. I have only seen positive results from this for over 20 years when trying to run audio intensive applications that rely more on the audio stream. It might be worth testing this to see if its still relevant, but the theory still stands...
If set to prioritize background services, You will get worse DAW performance. Audio driver is not a background service. I admit the performance degradation is minimal, easy to test for yourself. So leave this setting alone.
This is one of those areas where it's difficult to find an easy test and then what to believe. For starters, your first statement was not entirely true - it was not an RME thing. I know this because I ran tech support for a music shop for many years and had to deal with many different systems and many different audio interfaces. Countless times I talked people through switching to background services, and even dialled into many systems where i did this tweak and it solved their glitchy audio problems. That's my experience. If you check out the comments to my tweaking videos you'll also find lots of happy people having their issues resolved and they all include that tweak. So, I can confidently say it was not specific to RME and XP. Since running my own company building PC's for audio it's not an issue i run into anymore but I don't do the same range of tech support. I include the tweak because it has sorted people out and you never know the sort of system people run or the quality of the audio interface driver they use - that's why it's there. Most people who argue with me over these things have their own system with their own audio interface - they don't, with the greatest of respect, have the experience of supporting hundreds of systems with all the audio interfaces across all versions of Windows. All I can go on is my experience in these matters because there's no one else to ask :)
However, it's completely possible that this is a setting that is redundant or even detrimental these days with this technology, this OS and audio interface. It was certainly more effective and common place with Windows XP and with PCI audio cards. Much as i desperately hate to ever be wrong it wouldn't be the first time.
So I just ran a test on my SP 2017 - FL Studio still glitched. I was able to add one more plugin in Dawbench on one boot but then after I turned back it was still able to load it and then after repeated switching sometimes it would load another one, sometimes it wouldn't. So in this basic "easy" test it's all a bit inconclusive - which is why you often have to rely on your past experience with such things. What I should probably do is devise another test with a very low impact plug-in so that i can get a higher resolution of result and see what happens then..... but then that's only testing one thing. The problem with tweaking for audio software is that there are so many factors, so many ways to use the software and so many assaults on the processing power that it's difficult to define what works and what doesn't. So when in doubt, leave it in :)
But thanks for pointing this out, you may be onto something and I'll endeavour to check into it if i can. I tried Bitsum the other day because someone was convinced it was the answer to everything and it made not a single jot of difference to my tests. Someone else suggested trying Game Mode - so there's always lots to try!
It may depend on hardware and daw software at this point. My audio device processes are all listed under background services in task manager for what it's worth.
Hello, Did you test any DAW with the SP 2017 using the integrated Audio interface only with Asio4All ? I'm just wondering how good is the device for music making while traveling ( without USB hub and devices ) ? Thanks for sharing !
I have an earlier video showing all the DAWs using regular Windows drivers - ruclips.net/video/4U4JagGWxs4/видео.html
I plan to do one on ASIO4ALL soon.
Molten Music Technology thank you, I already saw the video before, but not sure that windows Driver will handle low latency for music production (VST instrument playing for eg. ). IMHO, the purpose of such a device is to be able to work outside your home. Personally when I’m home, I use a more powerful Desktop for my production. When you’re outside, on movement, you dont take with you your Usb hub, audio interface....and stuffs. So for me testing the device with an asio driver is key to see if you can make some tunes while traveling. Don’t you think this is missing in your complete and great review :-) ?
I totally understand that which is why it needs its own video. If you look back you'll find the ones i did on the SP3 and SP4 - so i completely get why it's important. However, in all my testing i've found that using a decent audio interface makes the whole experience so much less troublesome! And i want to show the Surface in its best, usable light. But also I can't do everything at once - and no matter what i try to get in there there's always someone who is unhappy.
Thanks a lot for your quick feedback. I'm not really unhappy, I'm rather very happy to find someone like you testing for us new gears ( thanks god)... so thumb up again !
To be honest, the differentiation we have with a surface pro VS other PCs/laptop... is that 1- It's light and portable and 2 -It has Multitouch.
So in this perspective, it's relly key to see what a Surface VS another less portable and/or non multitouch PC, can bring to your musical experience....
So this is why I loved your Bitwig and FL Studio videos for Multitouch aspects, Just amazing !
BTW: You did a test on Bitwig 2.1, are they any new enhancement over Bitwig 1.3 in Multitouch area ?
And as a recommandation, and regarding the heating issues on CPU you faced, do you recommand a Surface Pro 2017 over Surface Pro 4 for music production for the moment ?
Many many thanks !
I know, I know ... :) I'm just a little impatient,cause I want to buy a Surface and I found an i7 16 Gb SP4 on sale for a good price... I was wondering whether I'll go for it, for a new SP 20017 or for a Macbook Pro.
I really want to use the touch features,....if it works...really ! And for me, this will be the game changer..
Surface Pro is not cheap. In the other side , on MacOs there is no such a hassle with low latency audio drivers, or midi routing... like you/I are facing with a Windows OS.... I don't really understand why we still don't have a good low latency audio driver otb in windows 10, and we still need to tweak a Windows installation to have a decent Audio workstation.... I did this back in early 2000 's.
Now I just want to plug and play :-)
I've had much luck with the pro3 i7 undervolted and running high performance profile and get near constant turbo 3+ghz and never see the temp go over 90. Usually around 80. No throttling.
Great video! I always wanted a SP for my audio mixing post-production, however without a thunderbolt three I cannot take advantage of offline DSP and UA plugins...! I hope they'll insert it on the next iteration of SP. Would you consider inserting Harrison Mixbus in the list of DAWs you're going to test on the SP? If you find it at discount it's 30$ and totally worth it, but I'm curious how the SP is going to handle it :)
Mixbus? Someone else asked that earlier - possibly yes. Audio recording is not very difficult for the Surface so i'm not sure how interesting it would be.
I am mainly a mixing engineer, so I use Mixbus for that. I think you could find it limiting compared to other DAWs, especially because I don't think it has the ability to directly draw automation with the pen (probably the main reason why I am looking for a Surface-type device with thunderbolt), but I think that the overall layout might be very interesting for touch enabled devices. It's just a suggestion, maybe you want to look more into it, or more probably you already have too many to look at! Either way great videos, I love this subject (audio + surface ;))
It's a bit odd because i had some long conversations with Harrison a couple of years back about how they were going to implement touch screen support into MixBus - based on their own touch technology on their consoles - but it never seemed to materialise. I will try to check it out though.
36:05 its not the case if you have a good hub, one made by microsoft should be good enough but most hubs watch out there quality is shotty.
Excellent, very useful stuff. I may become an iPad refugee... (fed up of Apple breaking everything every five minutes)
When this stuff runs on iOS or Linux too ,then I will be impressed. Peace Christo ✌🏻👽
What stuff? All these DAWs? Why wait for an underpowered (iOS) and an undersupported (Linux) OS to catch up? That's a very strange thing man :)
Linux runs on surface machines fine. Just use jakeday's custom kernel.
Your background goes in hand with your shirt.
What specs you propose are more than sufficient? 8Gb RAM or 16Gb?
More than sufficient for what? What are you wanting to do?
Molten Music Technology I'm using Presonus Studio One & Notion 6 Scoring software, Band-In-A-Box as my main programs
Memory is only really needed for large sample based instruments. If you are wanting to load large orchestral library then memory is important, if not then 4gb is plenty
Molten Music Technology ok. Thank you very much :). Have a good day!
I guess you know but the point with LatencyMon is that it should run while you are using the music software stuff
No, not really. You’ll get the same result whether running audio software or not, because the audio software won’t be the cause of the issues. It can help you connect a glitch to the actual DPC occurrence but I’m not sure how that information helps. I recommend leaving latencymon running for 5-10 minutes and see what happens.
have you herd of harrison's daw, would you review it?
You mean MixBus? Possibly - it's just not very exciting. The Surface can do multi-track audio recording without any bother. I'm more interested in a DAW that balances audio and software synthesis/sampling for a more encompassing music making experience.
For virtual instruments, you think Cubase out performs ProTools on the surface?
No, there's no real difference in performance of the same instruments in Cubase or Pro Tools
I did the registryedit thing and set CsEnabled to 0, restarted, but i still can't access the high performance mode.. :(
Have you attempted to add a new profile?
Thanks for this, this is great 👍
do you know anything about the zoom uac 2's performance with the surface pro? i was thinking of getting one because ive been reading that it has very low latency at a reasonable price
I had one for a week - seemed to work fine but it didn't give me any better performance or latency than other interfaces I was using. I was expecting something impressive, it wasn't, it was perfectly adequate though.
thanks for the reply and all the videos! (you convinced me to get a surface pro) do you think its worth it to sell my presonus audioboxx usb 96 and get the uac or something else? im getting some pops and glitches running keyscape on my i5
Tricky to say. Keyscape is Spectrasonics - they tend to eat CPUs for breakfast. But Presonus interfaces are not that efficient either. I would buy it from Amazon - run some tests and send it back if it's no better.
Do the same processor stability/ cooling system problems affect the i7 16 RAM GB model as well? (Does it have a fan or am I just mistaking it with the Surface 4 model?) Is the i7 16 RAM GB a good tool to use Cubase 8.5 + run 10 Eastwest instrument channels? Your performance tests are on the i5 model?, I wonder about the i7 one. Right now I have a quad-core desktop computer and I was looking for something even more "portable" than the Surface Book yet reliable enough to make full Cubase 8.5 eastwest plugg-in projects without audio distortions, lags, etc...
The different spec models work in the same way as far as i know. I like the i5 because it's not pushing too close to the thermal and performance edges and so is more predictable. The i7 might well give you more if you can keep the temperatures under control.
So, can one run 10 Eastwest vst (64 bit) Plugg-ings simultaneously on Cubase 8.5 in the 8 GB i5 model? Also, when you record the "audios" from the microphone (without cracking sounds), can you save the project audio data directly on the Micro SD card? Or do you use the SSD drive for the project not to bottleneck? I would go for the i5 too if I can do the following: (Use the SSD for the system alone, record the audios on a secondary HDD hard drive to make the SSD last longer, (I guess here it would be the Micro SD card?) and run 10 Easstwest plugg-ins from a C partition simultaneously on my projects withot overloading the machine.
How would I know that? I've shown you examples of what the Surface can do - you have to decide whether that compares to what you want to do. You can use the Micro SD card as a regular drive, but it's terribly slow and low performance so i wouldn't recommend it.
I will try to compare the workloads of both Eastwest and the plugg-ins you used so as to make a good guess. Your videos are really helpful in the sense one can actually see the product working, which is something you cannot really view in shops or commercials. I also found your tips on CPU usage quite interesting to solve the thermal issues. They make the Surface stable, which is what we all music producers want. And as for the SD card...perhaps using an external USB 3.0 HDD drive for recordings can solve my problem then.
So can you just give me a simple answer and tell me whether or not an i5 surface pro is good to use for using FL Studio with many plugins and instruments?
Sure, why not? But as always it depends on the plugins and the instruments!
New day New Shirt ! :-D
I am planning to buy a laptop having i5 8250u and 8gb ram. I mainly do orchestral film scoring and sometimes rock/pop. Is the laptop a good choice..??
No not really - you need a nice big desktop with acres of space for sample library and the grunt to run video and audio at the same time.
Molten Music Technology Ok. The problem is...I have lot of traveling to do. So can this laptop be considered as a good start. And also i can upgrade the ram to 32gigs later.
It's all a question of scale - you can do orchestral scoring on a phone if you want. People often use 2 or 3 networked computers to run high level orchestral library. I'm sure the laptop will do fine - is it a good choice? No, but go with what you can and what you need - it's a "how long is a piece of string" question, you know?
Molten Music Technology Thanks a lot for your suggestions..
Hello great video, ive changed the csenabled to 0 as you said but i still dont have the high performance option
well i guess ive found a way i can create a custom power plan and then i can select the high performance mode
That’s the way 😀
You are the only person i can ask this ques too ...if i tweak my p.c .......for power using mode can i ise surface go with 8gb ram asi have limited budget ...please help ....
Sure - go check out my video on the Surface Go
Yes great but windows 10 update screwed my Korg USB/midi driver now it won't talk to the keyboard / computer
There are solutions out there if you google it.
Nice vid! I wanted to suggest you to try gaming mode in your daws. I had problems with studio one 3 but when enabling windows game mode, it improved the performance.
Yes, I mean to try that, meant to try that, it's on my list of things to try!
Molten Music Technology : GREAT review . Just saw one of these at Best Buy in the states. Torn between this and the HP 15.6’ Spectre .. Alrhough the wonderful 3:2 screen ratio looks so wonderful and I remember you saying you ran Reason on this smaller screen without having to squint too much. So am considering pulling the trigger here. Thanks again for this great review . Actually I’ll be using it in conjunction with RS remote on my iPad Pron 12.9 so I imagine e it should suffice .
Can it run Ozone? My computer can't...
What’s Ozone?
We're you able to connect an interface to it?
Yes. Wasn’t it clear that I was using an Avid Fast Track Duo usb audio interface?
have you ever tested fl studio?
yes - you'll find testing of it on previous Surface Pros in the channel - works well, some good touch stuff going on.
@@MoltenMusicTech yeah ive been binge watching alot lately. may give it a go and see what i can do considering my desktop is in the repair shop
Any usb dock recommendation?
No, there are hundreds out there. I’d go for something that has lots of stars on Amazon and isn’t the cheapest.
Molten Music Technology thanks!
Veela at 14:58, she should be looking at this video!
What will high performance actually do?
It will stop your CPU from powering down which can cause glitching in audio and bad performance in music software.
Molten Music Technology Ok thanks
Nifty project, but why would you spend $3k on a device like that? You'd get a desktop fully maxed with a decent widescreen monitor for that.
I don't know. Why do people buy laptops, or MacBooks? Can you perform a gig with a maxed out desktop computer? It's not that hard to see how it could be an attractive device and the creative possibilities in the touch and pen paradigm. I believe that working different brings about different creative directions - but of course, you are spending a lot of money on that. It's a beautiful device though.
Playing a gig might be a reason I guess, but then again for $3k you could buy a Kronos or something. If that was your main studio rig (based on you testing studio DAWs) and started charging hourly rates to use a dinky toy to record bands with, you might get laughed out of the industry, just saying.
I think most people do this for their own personal amusement.
I think a better use of this device is as a remote controller for a desktop. You could set your noisy PC tower in another room and have this wirelessly controlling it - now that I would pay money for. Maybe using something like TeamViewer? Not sure. Challenge for you?
Meh, it's the sort of thing you can do with an iPad or any old laptop. You are kind of missing the point in this is a creative device that can run proper desktop software and give you creative access to touch and pen based music production. You don't want laggy dial-in software, you want your fingers on the real thing, running the software, with all your gear attached. It's not your bag, and that's fine.
Wow that's really poor performance :O
…….so selling my IPad
Why did you ever get one in the first place lmao
Not useful info.
How so? What information do you need?
Way too much video for the simple question of whether it works and is worth it or not. I'm guessing @16:52 by all your disclaimers that it kinda sorta franken-DAW works and is not worth $$ and all the drama. especially when an ipad is pretty much plug and play. and i'm no fan of windows either. I'll waste my life watching something other than another hour video about how unreliable windows still is and always will be. peace.
Thanks for stopping by!
Dude there are way shorter videos to answer that question; he made clear his tests were quite exhaustive; you could’ve picked any of the other 5 min vids out there :)
I take it this is a Microsoft sponsored presentation.
Geez whizz are you kidding me? Nope, Microsoft haven't given me anything for this - you should check out the history of my Surface videos on www.SurfaceProAudio.com this is all my own work, off my own back, with my own Surface that I bought, myself :)