Sonar 8 on virtualized Macbook Pro 2.8 (Parallels, VMWare) For anyone interested: I am currently testing Sonar 8 on my Macbook Pro 2.8 with both Parallels Desktop 4 and VMWare Fusion 2.02 running Vista X64. Both are possible, but only Parallels is really useable downto low output latencies. The main drawbacks are: Only Stereo Inputs + Outputs While it's perfectly possible to route the I/O through my Fireface 400 only Channel 1+2 are used by both solutions.

1. Vmware Fusion 8 Pro (for Mac Os X Youngstown State University Campus
2. Vmware Fusion 8 Pro (for Mac Os X Youngstown State University Address

Maybe I can find some hidden text-based configuration files later. No CoreAudio configuration (Latency Buffers) Regardless of how you output Windows sound (Wave, DirectX, MME, WDM, WASAPI, ASIO(4ALL)) it will always run through CoreAudio on the Mac side. While Parallels offers the possibility to chose Input and Output independent of OS X system setting, VMWare will always use OS X' system settings. If you are using an USB based Audio interface you may connect that directly to your virtualized Windows and thus have full control over its setting, including ASIO support, but I cannot guarantee this. Midi over USB works as well, but I did not benchmark this yet.

Both don't offer to set Latency Buffers manually, but most likely work with OS X fixed system values. Parallels can go downto 2 ms in Sonar 8 using WASAPI and the overall output latencies 'feel' low enough to be useable. VMWare's driver needs at least 12-20 ms to run somewhat free of drop-outs. Parallels features lower DPC Latencies and better integration with ASIO4ALL as well.

VMWare seems to be more optimized towards 3D graphic performance and therefor sacrifices audio performance. This also reveals during gaming where audio output is a drop-out fest and thus remains rather unuseable. Unfortunately both come with a very high Input audio latency, but no one in his right mind would want to do realtime Input monitoring via a virtual machine anyway.

Only 16-bit audio Both only offer 16-bit drivers for input and output. Using ASIO4ALL allows only upto 48 kHz, but WDM/WASAPI offers upto 96 kHZ. I will do some more tests, but currently I tend towards buying Parallels. If anyone had any specific question I might be able to answer feel free to do so. I did not test Virtualbox, because it does not allows to run a virtual machine directly from an already present Boot Camp partition. I might do a testrun with a small installation from CD though. Booting into a bootcamped Installation of Vista performs premium once a handful of Mac specific optimizations are performed and is the better option for anything 'high performance', but being able to fire up Sonar in a virtual box just for some editing and mixing might be a nice option.

Vmware Fusion 8 Pro (for Mac Os X Youngstown State University Campus

ORIGINAL: Timur Very simple, it's not a 'replacement' for Boot Camp but an 'addition' to Boot Camp. Sometimes you just want to have a quick look at things, do some quick and dirty editing or simply export some tracks. That's when you don't want to do a full reboot into another OS.

I don't reboot into Windows just for checking Emails with Outlook neither. Besides that, I'm just curious about how well Sonar can be integrated into an OS X enviroment. Sonar doesn't really run in an OSX environment; it runs inside of Windows. To get a true idea of how it runs on a Mac's hardware (which is all anyone really does when running Sonar on a Mac - it uses no OSX stuff) you really should run it just under Windows and not use OSX as a shell. That would just add another layer of headache that isn't really necessary. Besides, who uses Outlook to check email on a Mac?

Have it, tried it (the Mac version because I have Office for the Mac), went back to Apple's email client. After all, when in Rome. I tried both Jack and Soundflower, routing input though Ableton Live. Jack is not recognized as an Input/Output by Parallels though, but Soundflower is. The input latency didn't seem to change for the better, even when Soundflower and Live were set to 64 samples each the roundtrip latency still is audibly the same.

I output directly from Parallels instead of routing back through Soundflower, because output latency seems to be small enough anyway. My guess is that either input latency is hardcoded into Parallels or they messed up the drivers. I will contact them about it once I bought a licence. VMWare Fusion performs considerably worse for Audio with lots of drop-outs happening.

PS: I am using Outlook 2007 as part of Office 2007 Professional which I already own and paid for. I'm running both the Office applications and Sonar on a Bootcamp partition which (beside booting directly into it) I am using for Parallels in order to have access to these applications from within OS X (without having to reboot just to check some mail).

For 90% of things, VMWare or Parallels would be the way to go. Parallels supposedly has better graphic capability than VMWare. For university level programming, either setup would work fine.

I'd recommend at least 8GB of RAM if you're going to be virtualizing. Everything would just run better. You can install Windows via Boot Camp then use Parallels or VMWare to virtualize most of the time.

But you'd still have the native installation in case you want to do good gaming or something windows processor intensive. For 90% of things, VMWare or Parallels would be the way to go.

Vmware Fusion 8 Pro (for Mac Os X Youngstown State University Address

Parallels supposedly has better graphic capability than VMWare. For university level programming, either setup would work fine. I'd recommend at least 8GB of RAM if you're going to be virtualizing. Everything would just run better. You can install Windows via Boot Camp then use Parallels or VMWare to virtualize most of the time.

But you'd still have the native installation in case you want to do good gaming or something windows processor intensive.