Optimizing Windows 11 for Music Production: Pete Brown from Microsoft

[@Barney-ii1no]

For me Turning off core parking (+Other Power Explorer tweaks), Changing MSI mode settings, and Changing Interrupt affinity for various things have had the biggest uplift on my pc

[@Psychlist1972]

Thanks for having me on, Ian!

[@IanDixonTDL]

Any time!

[@riccardomalberti4268]

Thank you so much for this!

[@jamiefinch148]

Thanks guys, very informative. I got my son a small set up for Christmas with a M Audio USB interface. I thought I had tried everything but couldn't stop it glitching and dropping out even though the CPU was only peaking around 30%. Disabling the core parking sorted it for me. Thanks very much! 🙂

[@IanDixonTDL]

Glad it helped!

[@longkick649]

Very interesting, thanks!👍

[@ronfrancois]

When does pete think Windows will support aggregated ASIO drivers so that we can use more than 1 interface?

[@bill4510]

The Steinberg built in asio driver is awesome

[@pw7752]

+1 for RME here. Multi-client, low-latency, long product support. More expensive yes but worth it.

[@codewizard58]

I have issue with Zoom L20 not working on Win 11 and recently Win 10 stopped. Found that switching from 16bit to 24 bit in the advanced seems to have fixed it. Zoom L8 works fine on both.

[@IanDixonTDL]

It shows how complex audio drivers are!

[@bill4510]

I am getting horrible CPU performance on my Om my HP omen 25L i7 14700f 32 gig ram. My i5 8 core performs better/with same programs and drivers.Can I disable the network Accelerator.

[@keyibreand3840]

Smth to be noted is that the DAW also matters. Reaper seems to work flawlessly no matter if you are running it on a cheap laptop or not

[@EdwinDekker71]

Can confirm.

[@jackrorystaunton4557]

DPC latency issues plaguing W11 render it unusable in my experience. I have sunk too much time into troubleshooting clean builds to believe it is suitable for running a DAW.

[@Psychlist1972]

Everyone's setup is different. DPC latency issues are kernel driver issues. Two things come to mind, both of which I believe I mentioned both in the podcast: - Check your graphics drivers. In the case of nvidia, try their studio drivers if you can, instead of their game-ready drivers. - If you are on a recent Intel big/little CPU (12+ gen), look at disabling core parking. Many audio drivers fail to respond to core parking and other power management events.

[@synthetic144]

microsoft is not interested in pro users, all they care about is loading your machine with ads, screw this, waste of time, dont need to do anything to windows, no i do need to disable all your stupid ads and services takes me a month to set up a audio workstation with all the crap you load into it, dont need to do it? wll then enjoy your session being broken up cause of some telemetary shit that decided to trigger in the background

[@Psychlist1972]

You may choose to disable things as you want. But the session being broken up due to telemetry is not a thing that actually happens. When you have minimum telemetry set, you send crash / error information to help us and our hardware/software partners identify problems in Windows, drivers, etc., so the problem has already happened by that point.

[@synthetic144]

@@Psychlist1972 not always ive seen the task scheduler send stuff in the middle of my session, also if your projects are pretty lite is no issue but the lower buffer setting anything can introduce spikes and steal a few cycles, and im not talking about crash data, windows sends all kinds of data all the time just you are not aware of it

[@Psychlist1972]

@@synthetic144 Windows is not sending anywhere near as much data as folks like to claim, especially if you are set to minimum diagnostics in settings. It has never been the cause of any audio glitching on my PCs, and I have the optional stuff turned on. Most services will also not cause audio glitches. It's kernel-mode stuff that is the prime cause, with video drivers tending to be the number one cause. Pete - Microsoft

[@mattvdh]

install a slipstream version

[@cheefr0berts]

You should be able to turn off sending anything to Microsoft or anyone else. It should be up to the owner of the OS to decide if they want to or not but there is no option to do this; it's either send some or more which is just wrong imo