Adobe Audition and Vista - official statements by Adobe

Excerpts from HOW ADOBE PRODUCTS SUPPORT WINDOWS VISTA
The full pdf is at http://www.adobe.com/support/products/pdfs/adobe_products_and_windows_vista.pdf

ADOBE PRODUCTION STUDIO AND WINDOWS VISTA
Q. Does Adobe support Adobe Production Studio on Windows Vista?
A. Adobe Production Studio was released a year before Windows Vista became publicly available and is not recommended for use on this new operating system. While some of its components, including Adobe After Effects 7.x, Adobe Premiere Pro 2.x, Adobe Audition 2.0, Adobe Illustrator CS2, and Adobe Photoshop CS2, install and run on Windows Vista Adobe Products and Windows Vista/page with only minor known issues, other key components such as Adobe Encore DVD 2.x have more significant issues installing and running as expected. For more information—and to evaluate the impact of these known issues on your workflow—please visit www.adobe.com/go/support to search the Adobe knowledgebase. Enter the keyword Vista.

Q. When will Adobe Production Studio officially support Windows Vista?

A. The next version of Adobe Production Studio will be certified to run on 32-bit versions of four editions of Windows Vista—Home Premium, Business, Enterprise, and Ultimate. The next release of Adobe Production Studio is expected to ship in mid-2007.

Adobe does not recommend installing and running earlier versions of After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Encore DVD, or Audition on Windows Vista.

[Interpretation - don't try Audition 1.0 or 1.5 with Vista].

Note that the date given for the next version of the Production Studio is not necessarily the date for Audition 3.0 (as it has been referred to by an Adobe employee on a public forum) - Soundbooth will replace Audition in the next PS version and Audition will float free of the suite.

This pretty much sums up what I thought would turn out to be Adobe's line on Vista at present. So for the time being, we alter nothing on the forums to reflect the situation - there's no point. And this thread, for obvious reasons, becomes a sticky.

Steve, can you find any concrete information about Adobe's support plans for 64-bit windows versions?

The Adobe support docs really don't specifically mention operability OR support under 64-bit windows (XP or Vista), rather they're unsupported by virtue of the fact that they're not in the supported OS lists. But in a number of conversations (3) with Adobe support staff, I've been assured that Audition 2.x does work more-or-less as expected under XP64. I can confirm that (the bits that work, and the bits that don't) by experience. But the caveat seems to be the same as for their Vista support plan - AA wasn't planned to work under those OSes, and if it does, then that's a bonus.

I apologise for posting this here, but I thought it might be less inappropriate than starting off a whole new 64-bit thread (with all the attendant perils )

Steve, can you find any concrete information about Adobe's support plans for 64-bit windows versions?

If I could, and I told you, then I'd have to kill you!

I've signed an NDA, which basically swears me to absolute secrecy about forthcoming plans - that is, if they exist at all, and  I happen to know about them. Adobe (possibly quite reasonably) regard all future plans as flexible until they have actually been proved to work reliably - they don't like making promises they can't necessarily keep, so you don't get upcoming feature, or even compatibility, announcements at all. The first you will know of any changes will be in the official press release shortly before the product is launched.

Even on products where there is a public beta, like Soundbooth, you still  only get part of the story...

A couple notes about running AA2 under Vista Home Premium (32 bit) which may be of interest to others here:

1/ I have it in trial (non-activated, non-registered) mode on an HP a6013w. This is a dual core Pentium 3.0 gig (NOT a Core2Duo), with 1.5 gigs PC5200 RAM. The machine was bought inexpensively as an HP refurb, with the idea of possibly setting it up for AA3 when it arrives.  We have a couple copies of AA2 here and have not used up all our activations yet, so figured installing as a demo for the moment might be worthwhile.  This machine (most HPs now) ship with Vista Home Premium only.

2/ AA2 installs OK, but running it brings up Vista barking about compatibility mode and changes the Aero stuff and color scheme to "Vista Basic", which still seems OK for runnning AA2. I brought in a few projects done on one of our main AA2 systems, and other than the plug-ins (see below) all seemed fine. For testing, I had made copies of the other projects' SES files and deleted any non-Adobe plugs used in them except for Ozone and BBE.

3/ Next I tried installing a few plug ins to this test install. Ozone behaved just fine (there's a recent update at Izotope by the way). We have their stuff authorized to a thumb drive and when inserted, it was found fine, all went well. It did drop the settings in my test project files -- but I expected that. I the exported the Ozone settings from those saved on the main system (using Ozone's preset manager, not what's in AA2) and was able to bring those over to the test system.

Installing the BBE "enhancer" was not so straightforward. Figuring out how to do it (again!) from their CD was not easy, and since Vista uses a different help scheme than XP did, the help viewer would not work correctly to see the BBE help file.

Finally did manage to get it into the VST plugs folder, but in the meantime....
   
I tried refreshing effects and enabling Direct X in AA.  Didn't find the BBE, and AA hung when it found a pile of other Direct X stuff from the cripppled "bundle" that came on the HP's drive (Roxio, some other stuff).  I had forgot this is one reason why in the past we tend to avoid packaged computers and build our own. But the refurb HP was pretty cheap, less than $400 with a 320 gig SATA drive and an OEM (looks like by Plextor though) DVD. It also offers SPDIF in and out, though we'll probably use it with a Presonus Firepod or something else....

4/ With AA now hung, I was still able to close it. Went looking for the excellent note here (have used before) about backing up workspaces and prefs (that XML stuff).

5/ Here are where the settings that note are stored in under Vista, at least on this machine:

(The excellent notes you'll find elsewhere on this forum are for XP, and direct you to
C:\Documents and settings\{yourusername}\Application Data\Adobe\Audition)

Instead (at least in this case!) for Vista Home Premium they are at:
C:\Users\{yourusername}\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Audition

(took some messing around to find that!)

Then follow the instructions in the notes, and that will clear everything out and make things
happy again.

I will likely either set up dual boot with XP or simply get another boot drive and install XP on
that and disconnect the supplied Vista boot drive when AA3 arrives.  Biggest reason for that
is Waves plug ins currently will not run on Vista at all. Also an older program we have used for
a long time, Backup Exec/Backup My PC, won't run either. We have sizable archives of client
projects backed up with that, so likely we will stay with XP.

But I might decide to stick with Vista and run AA3 on it and forego using Waves stuff on this
partic. system. As noted, Ozone seems fine with it, and BBE is OK too.  Universal Audio claims their stuff will run fine with Vista, though have not yet moved one of their boards to this machine to test that out.

I'll post any other observations here as they arise with this-- naturally there will be a limited time period to running AA2 non-activated on this machine, but by then the upgrade to AA3 should have arrived!




in my machine:
The note

Sorry about the end of that post-- I'm placing the blame squarely on the user (me) and the crummy HP supplied "m/media" keyboard that shipped with it!! (which we will NOT use for real work but it was easiest for initial testing!)

Hope the notes help some of you.

Rich

I'm hesitant to post into a sticky, but Rich's post is so useful and informative that perhaps this is the place to add  that he is referring to external audio interfaces on his laptop. Anyone using internal audio on a laptop (and I presume many desktops) is very likely to hit issues in a whole different league to those under XP.

I've been trying and failing to get straight answers about the problems, but many seem to be the result of the interaction between the hardware and Vista, and I'd be amazed if AA 3 or any other application software can overcome these fundamental problems. The trouble is that the difficulties look at first sight to be almost random in nature, although they do seem to have standard patterns, and affect recording and playback.

It seems that where manufacturers of professional audio interfaces have produced their own Vista drivers, these largely take over and bypass most of the Vista issues. The trouble is that I and people I work with like, and expect to be able, to use the internal laptop audio occasionally, if only for playback.

I wonder if we need a Vista (wailing?) corner in any rearrangement of the forum? 

This may interest those thinking about or already using Vista.

Sweetwater Vista Optimizations

Actually, the machine I've been messing with is not a laptop, but a low/med end desktop, and I was initially just
seeing what it might/might not do with its onboard Intel graphics, which are VGA only. (no DVI and no mult mons)

I will likely add a non-power hogging dual monitor PCIe16 card to the thing. (the lower end NVidias seem
to not require sep power like the pricey gamer ones and consume way less watts- also can be had for $60-80 US)
And once the 90 day HP warr is up, probably a bigger power supply than the 300 watts it shipped with,
since 300 seems a little light these days -especially if another internal drive is added.

Have also been playing a bit with that Har-Bal program that others have discussed here.  New to it, so
need a little more time on it and some critical A/B listening etc.  So far seems pretty interesting though.

There is also a new Izotope suite of restoration stuff that can be demo downloaded at their site.
Haven't tried yet-- I think any saving is crippled in the demo but works otherwise.

For initial testing,  have been running the HP using the SPDIF (coax) i/o over to an inexpensive Behringer box
to get balanced line ins/outs to tie to our main monitoring as a temp measure. (2 chan only that way)

But assuming the machine works out for AA, I'd then likely go to a Firepod or something similar for
the audio interface. None of the Digi/M-Audio et al hardware seems to yet support Vista. I've had
good results and value with some other Presonus gear,  and they claim the Firepod works fine with
Vista, so I'd lean toward that probably.

The questions at this point are 1/ whether it will be a useful audio machine (seems likely so far) and
2/ whether it will stay  Vista  or get reverted to XP.

The Sweetwater link that was posted seems helpful and had some good tips.
But it isn't real clear about the 32 bit versus 64 bit Vista versions, maybe when it was written that
wasn't clear from M/soft.  Far as I know, the Vista Home Premium that shipped on the HP refurb is 32 bits only. 
I haven't seen a 64 bit version of that flavor of Vista - though maybe there is one.

But assuming the machine works out for AA, I'd then likely go to a Firepod or something similar for
the audio interface. None of the Digi/M-Audio et al hardware seems to yet support Vista. I've had
good results and value with some other Presonus gear,  and they claim the Firepod works fine with
Vista, so I'd lean toward that probably.

I can confirm that the Firepod works fine with Vista.