JOE WALLACE: I'm Joe Wallace for Gearwire.Com. I'm with Brandon Ryan of Cakewalk and we are talking about Vista, Vista upgrades. What have you guys done to become more Vista capable?

BRANDON RYAN: Well, we're worked really closely with Microsoft. You know, before we were working very closely with Intel in multiprocessor support, multicore. We've worked really closely with Microsoft to get basically Vista compatibility for everything, 32-bit and 64-bit Vista support. We've updated Sonar to work with Vista, taking advantage of the multimedia class scheduling service, off-loading the graphics to the graphics card, WaveRT driver support, so we support that with Sonar and then we also just recently updated the instrument line, so Z3TA, Rapture, Dimension Pro, all of that is full native Vista compatibility now.

JOE WALLACE: Now that's one important hair to split: native versus compatible. How did you guys get to native as opposed to simply compatible?

BRANDON RYAN: Well, again, working really closely with Microsoft, not cutting any corners, and also, you know, we kind of a two-year start. We started X64 about two years ago, so that kind of gave us a head start into getting into Vista, so some of that work was really laying the groundwork for all of that, and just working really closely with Microsoft and having a really great engineering team.

JOE WALLACE: Now, Vista is a little controversial still. Native Instruments, for example, announced that in this stage of the game they're not going to support WaveRT. There's a whole -- there are many other issues. You know, some of the early adopters are very frustrated. What was it like getting p to speed and just working out the bugs and getting to the point where you can actually be native again in your programs?

BRANDON RYAN: Well, there was a fair amount of work. You know, I don't do the coding personally but there was a fair amount of work and some growing pains along the way and in some cases may be still experiencing some. We're kind of trying to drag everybody kicking and screaming but at this point, I'm doing all my demonstrations under Vista and it's working great. Personally, I found it very easy to get into the operating system. The fact that all the graphics are offloaded to the graphics card to me makes a huge difference, so yeah there were some growing pains but we have a good relationship with Microsoft and we started on it a long time ago so that's made things a lot easier. There's definitely been a lot of engineering work but we basically have been doing this over the past few years. We're were ready for multicore, we were ready for 64-bit, so getting into the Vista was just sort of a separate segment of things, but we';re pretty much there now.

JOE WALLACE: And what advice do you have for people who -- they want to make the switch, they view they got to buy a new computer, or they're going to update. They're entering this whole new world and there's plenty of unknowns and plenty of potholes along the way. What's the most important thing you can tell someone who wants to adopt Vista now and marry it up with Cakewalk products.

BRANDON RYAN: Yeah. Well, back up your projects; that's the big one. Back up your projects. Don't start in a middle of a project, but the biggest thing is making sure that your hardware works. I mean you have to take stock of what audio interfaces you are using, MIDI interfaces, things like UAD1 cards, plugins that you really need to run, and just make sure that those -- that there's some Vista compatibility before you take the leap. It's kind of good to kae a list first, make sure you know that everything that you have to have is going to work under Vista, and then computer hardware compatibility. So there, you know, I believe that Microsoft has a way that can look at your computer and see what you're -- how compatible you really are. It's definitely best I think on a new, fresh machine though with newer motherboards, newer chipsets. You know, an old computer may be not; maybe stay with XP on those but new multicore machines, especially if you have a lot of RAM then that would be the way to do it but definitely, you know, either wait for drivers or pick hardware that supports, and surprisingly, there are actually quite a few Vista drivers out now for a lot of the audio hardware and DSP cards are coming along, so it's really just think ahead and look at what you need and just make sure it's compatible, and maybe do a dual-boot system also; that's what we've been doing from the beginning was having XP and Vista and just making sure that things work so you always kind of have that to go back to if you need to.

JOE WALLACE: Now this is a frequently asked questions list type of question but for someone who they really are just building a home studio in the last few years, they've got an older license but they want to go to Vista, what's your advice for somebody who has a few versions back.

BRANDON RYAN: Are they on XP?

JOE WALLACE: XP, it's got to work.

BRANDON RYAN: Well for XP, you know there are updates for the -- for Vista. I think, you know basically you really want to run Business or Ultimate at that point so getting an upgrade is fine. If you're with XP then you get a pretty reasonable upgrade, I think, to Vista, but the big thing with that is just making sure that you've got kind of all your ducks in the row with it, and basically there's so many flavors of Vista that you really need to make sure that you get. If you have multiprocessors, you need to make sure that you're running into Vista Business, which I don't think can be bought in stores or Vista Ultimate. So, you have to think about the cost factors. If you're running multiple processors that's an important factor, and if you can get the upgrade price from XP to Vista then that allows you to get into Vista Ultimate for $207 or something like that. So and if you weigh it back hardware-wise, it's probably makes sense to maybe delegate that some other use and start fresh with a new multiprocessor machine.

JOE WALLACE: Now what about older licenses of Cakewalk products?

BRANDON RYAN: Oh. Well, we have a really reasonable upgrade patch. Generally, our upgrades in the past have been $179 even if you're two versions back, so users who had Sonar 4 were able to upgrade to Sonar 6 for the same price as users of Sonar 5, so unless you're on Sonar 3, you get the lowest upgrade price but we'll upgrade you all the way back from Sonar 1 for a discount, I believe Sonar 1 or Sonar 2 so all you got to do is get to 6 and all the updates from there are free, so you know it may cost you a couple of hundred dollars if you're a few versions back but we take care of our customers even if they don't upgrade every year with us.

JOE WALLACE: Thanks very much. I'm Joe Wallace on the floor of Musikmesse on Frankfurt, Germany for Gearwire.Com.