As reported in Gearwire, Microsoft's Windows Vista has been only slowly adopted in the audio software realm. Reflecting industry malaise toward Vista is a recent announcement by Native Instruments. On a page entitled "Compatibility With Windows Vista" (link) NI plainly spells out their position:

We are currently evaluating the potential benefit of WaveRT drivers for our products, but have no specific plans to support this technology at the moment.

You know you have a troubled operating system release when vendor after vendor expresses such lack of interest in supporting the audio streaming enhancements of the updated OS.

The bulk of the difference between XP and Vista in audio terms is Vista's reworking of the audio streaming I/O driver architecture, called WaveRT, supplanting WDM and MME and providing lower latencies and increased reliability of processing. A decision by a software or hardware maker to not support this technololgy is effectively a decision to ignore the single largest technical advances of the updated OS, which only makes things more confusing for customers.

In the face of such market confusion, one laudable aspect of NI's announcement is to err on the side of clarity. After all, since NI's existing products (the company makes Kontakt, Massiv, Traktor, Kore and many other top-shelf apps and plugins) reportedly run on Vista, nothing prevents them from taking advantage of the confusion surrounding the situation and marketing the line as Vista-native. Nothing except a conscience, of course.

With today's announcement it's clear that NI's products are not Vista-native and that the company has no plans to make them so. Of course things may change, but technical honesty in communications at least makes it more transparent when they do. Hats off to NI.