Windows Vista: The Sound of Wow

According to Microsoft's 'The Wow Starts Now' website, the official launch of Windows Vista has already occurred in New York City, about 5.5 hours ago as I type this, although in my mind the real launch event will happen in about an hour when Bill Gates appears on The Daily Show. And, of course, copies of Vista (and systems containing it) won't be on sale until tomorrow. About a year ago, I told you that noted guitarist Robert Fripp was creating various sounds for Microsoft's latest O/S (ironically, famous Fripp collaborator Brian Eno, who composed the startup sound for Windows 95, is now creating the soundtrack for the upcoming Electronic Arts game title, Spore). The by-committee tweaking of Fripp's raw material wrapped up in early November of last year, and if you're curious to hear (and hear about) the final product, check out these links:

• Jim Allchin's post on the topic
• An MP3 clip of the various sounds
• A comparison between them and their Windows XP predecessors
• An interview on National Public Radio with Microsoft's Steve Ball
• An article on Vista's sounds, from MSNBC
• Commentary from Ars Technica and Slashdot

Of course, those of you making the jump to Vista right away will hear the new sounds for yourself soon enough. My review copy of Vista Ultimate has arrived, so I'll be putting it on my under-construction desktop system straightaway. Some of you, on the other hand, may be more cautious, concerned about rumours of 'high impact issues' or preferring to wait until after Service Pack 1 is released later this year (more from Ars Technica).

Vista's a bit of an odd beast; having both run it myself and read plenty of words written by others about it, I'm now well aware of the substantial rewrite and update of the underlying operating system plumbing that it represents (thereby explaining why it took five years to develop!). But at first glance, it probably won't appear to most users to be near as substantial an upgrade as, say, the move from Windows 9x to Windows XP was. Speaking of sounds, one of the subsystems that received key focus was the audio stack. This Extremetech writeup gives a decent overview of the Vista enhancements (and impacts to hardware and software suppliers), while this Jim Allchin blog post and an article titled "V For Vista" in the February 2007 issue of EQ Magazine both go into more exhaustive detail. The EQ piece doesn't yet appear to be on the website; I'll add a link later if it shows up there.

Hungering for more on audio? Ryan Bemrose's Audio Fool blog is an excellent resource, and not just about Microsoft-specific topics; in fact, I recommend you scroll through the archives to get up to speed. And I'll close for now with three other interesting (at least to me) Vista tidbits:

• Jim Allchin's remarks on balancing security versus useability (and Ars Technica commentary)
• A clarification of the tradeoffs of buying normal retail (upgrade and standalone) versions of Vista versus the often much less expensive OEM versions (more from Ars Technica), and
• Guidance from a Microsoft employee on how much system memory you'll need to smoothly run Vista (see why the DRAM manufacturers are so excited about this O/S transition?)

Followup: Here's the clip from Bill Gates' appearance on The Daily Show last night.

Jon Stewart was more restrained and respectful than usual but still got in a few zingers. And Gates let loose a few jokes of his own, although I couldn't help but notice how quickly he split at the end of the interview. Glad to have escaped relatively unscathed? Oh, and by the way, apparently this is what the F12 key is for….but only on a Mac.