Spark on Mac vs Windows

[rodanmusic]

I gotta hand it to the Mac.  I purchased a new mac mini which is basically the cheapest OS X system Apple offers, and 90% of the problems I was having with Spark are gone.

Even the knobs turn smoother and it's easier to select new kits or drums.  The knob no longer slows me down changing instruments, no delay on loading the kits or samples with the knob.  Runs super smooth I can't even believe it.

The mini has 2.6ghz intel core i7 quad, 16 gigs of 1600mhz ram, and a fusion drive.  The processor and memory are mobile hardware not desktop hardware.  My self built desktop PC which is relatively new has a intel core i5 2500k with 4.5ghz overclocked processor, water cooling (runs like 40 degrees cooler), 16 gigs of 1800mhz ram, and has a much faster ssd & 10,000 rpm hard drive (vs the mini's much slower ssd/5400 rpm fusion drive combo).  So from these specs alone, the pc should smoke the mini. 

I've tested Spark on a windows vista laptop, windows 7 desktop, and 2 different Windows 8 desktops and they all run it pretty comparably.   Of course I guess i could just have crap luck with parts I've purchased to build those other machines.  Who knows.

I've always like Apple products but used Windows for the last 10 years of my production life.  Now I'll never go back for production at least.   

I love Windows 8 interface though.  I'll be using the Windows box now for programming, gaming, and I'm going to set it up as a web server. 

Anyways the fluidity that I have now makes me love Spark so much more.  It's just a fun and easy product to use!   

This isn't meant to be a windows or mac bashing thread or anything, I just wanted to report my experiences.  Everybody has their own preferences with operating systems.

[stevism]

welcome to the mac club 

[xtinct]

This sounds very logical, I do believe that Spark was initial developed for the OSX platform. I have a friend with a souped up PC running windows 8 and he encounters noticeable audio artifacts and hick ups during playback every now and then. My macbook from 2008, not so much....

[rodanmusic]

Honestly it doesn't make much sense to me.  I was really surprised to find the difference in performance even though I have a macbook that has outperformed all my pcs for almost the last 8 years.

IT does though and I'm enjoying it so far.

[mpc60champ]

I'm on win 7 x64, i7 920 CPU, 9GB of ram, 1TB HD. I'm using asio4all and my main DAW is presonus studio 1 v2.5. I rarely have issues with that daw. Now if I am using live that's a different story. The PDC in studio 1. Studio 1 handles midi delay really well. So what info I write the pattern and then do improvisation with it.

[rodanmusic]

Whatever you do stick with 7 for awhile before upgrading to 8...my windows 7 install didn't perform that awesome, but it was still better than my 8 install!

[midimatik]

Iīm using Spark with Mac OSX and it works fine. I had some issues wirh synchronizing
in the beginning and i do not know what i changed but after some trys its working...

Tried Spark with Win 7 at it was not running fine. I wasnīt able to get this running smoothly.

Donīt know why. Canīt sync it to my MIDI Clock.
Using Octatrack as Master.

[rodanmusic]

Not going to lie I just ran into that issue as well.  It kept asking me to authorize every time I started and would forget my library path each time.

Then it just randomly stopped.  Not sure what I did that fixed it. Is that what you experienced?

[midimatik]

On Win the Path for the Library wasnīt lost every startup.

Just tried a couple of times to sync it, than i thought its enough
for me when its running fine on my Mac.