BILL PASCHICK: Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition was one, has been one of the greatest improvements that Microsoft has made for our business particularly. As a matter of fact, I can’t say that it was specifically made for our business. But what they did with our business, meaning the audio production industry, is they used us as guinea pigs, and for the first time, I think they did a -- it was a wonderful choice because this 64-bit platform breaks a lot of barriers that we need broken in production for using the computers for audio production as well as eventually in the home user space, the people who buy our product or buy the product of the people that produce on our computer, their systems are going to be, need to be more robust. Their systems are going to need to be able to playback multitrack material and run plugins and a lot of stuff that we’re running that we just kind of all mixed down to these little two tracks at 16-bit, 44.1. Well that’s changing. The 44.1, 16-bit world is, is rapidly leaving us and we’re going to have this world of coming home and being surrounded by speakers and multitrack, multitrack productions and video productions that inside the, you know, inside the machine literally is going to be technology that we were -- that we would maybe just dream of using in our project studios are going to be in the home. And Microsoft as usual, is, is blazing the trail for all of this. And that is where we have this, this very gray, strange area of Windows XP Professional 64-bit edition and the upcoming release at some point of Vista. I’ll just say it in a nutshell that the Vista operating system is the, is the add-on, the plugins, the overlays, all the stuff that’s going to make it, make Windows X 64, make it able for some guy at work to find out what his refrigerator temperature is. [LAUGHING] There’s this smart house technology and multi0media entertainment in the home. It’s all these things that Microsoft wants to build into one operating system and to have it so a grandmother can now have a computerized device and have interfaces that intuitively makes sense to them and that’s great.

So the engine behind that is Windows X64 and then the overlay for the end-users is going to be Vista. And there’s this, there’s this confusing misnomer, in our industry particularly, that Vista is going to be the Promised Land of, of for audio production. And actually, it’s here. I mean, X64 edition is the Promised Land for us. Matter of fact, it’s the best because it’s not burdened with all the stuff that Vista will be burdened with. Let me, let me give you an idea. One of the reasons that Vista has been delayed is that it was taking, I believe in one report, 35 minutes for it to boot up. 35 minutes for the operating system to boot up. And this was because the hard drive buffer sizes were not enough. Now, as I spoke earlier on in this interview, our serial ATA 2 drives in the Element are 16 MB buffer now. So 16 meg, 16 MB. The -- in order to get Windows Vista, the beta versions, to boot up in less than, less than five minutes, the hard drive would have to have 512 MB of buffer, which is half a gigabyte of buffer. The drive, some speculate, would cost $2,000. Just the drive alone. So there is a big delay now where Microsoft has kind of over-coded this system and now requires more hardware and they’ll solve it. I’m sure they’ll solve it. But let me get back to how it pertains to audio production is that we don’t need that. We don’t need 512 MB of cache or buffer space to load up an operating system so the screen can this be beautiful, touchable, manipulable thing for the end-user. We need it to break the memory barrier and get a gig -- get a zero latency. And this it is doing.

Right now our Element 64 is available with 8 GB of RAM. The operating system itself is capable of handling, addressing up to 16 TB. What this means for us audio professionals, particularly guys who do, guys and gals who do virtual instrumentation is that we will be able to load all of the stuff into RAM. Right now we -- the big term is streaming from hard drive, how fast can you stream from hard drive? And certainly we’ve come a long way with that and there’s a lot of great equipment, Rain Recording gear being some of that, that can stream from hard drive very, very well and you’ll have no issues. But there’s still limitation there. And there’s still -- and that does contribute as, as many other things in the, in the digital audio chain to latency. But one of the biggest ones is how long does it take to get a chunk of data off the hard drive, into the processor, into the memory, back to the processor, back to the hard drive. It takes a lot longer than it takes this processor to write to the memory and then come back to the processor.

The difference between hard drive storage and memory, random access memory, RAM, is that the hard drive storage is physical or called hard because if a computer power goes down, the data is still sitting there. It’s all like little magnetic tape days, all these little particulates that are moved in certain ways to record your data. Turn the computer back on, the magnetic heads read the direction of the particles and say, okay, here’s your data, take it back. In RAM, that isn’t the case. When the computer is turned off, all the data is gone. That’s called static RAM. For when you’re -- so right now the static RAM that we have on our computer’s basically is a holding area. Things are placed in there so the processor could say, hey, get out of my way for a few nanoseconds while I take care of some of this other stuff, and then suck it back. And it really is just this big shopping bag that the processor throws stuff into. And know I’m being very, very light with my -- my associations here. I mean it’s certainly is more detailed than that. But I just want try to bring this all down to earth and, you know, as I said earlier, demystify some of this stuff as best as I can. But now with Windows X64, we will theoretically, I mean it hasn’t totally been done yet but record right to RAM. Now with 4 GB of RAM in Windows X32, that would be almost useless. But if we had 8 GB of RAM, 16 GB of RAM, or maybe a terabyte of static RAM, addressable by the OS and the -- your DAW application, your multitrack DAW or your virtual instrument application, then all of that could go record right into RAM and not have to hit a hard drive until the machine went off. And I’ve actually spoken with a few of the men behind the curtain at some of the DAW software manufacturers out there about some way of writing their programs so they could, they could write to RAM and have that power in low latency of writing right to static RAM, but still have the safety of hard storage and I, I, I am hope -- I have been told that there is work being done and we’re close. But here is that promise, and any minute, any minute now, any week, any AES show, any NAMM show, we’re going to start to see that first, that first inkling of recording to static RAM and finally, the delivery on that, that Promised Land of, of near-zero or zero latency. And Rain Recording plans to be right at the forefront of that, bridling this technology and helping to manage it so it’s usable, stable, reliable, consistent and balanced. It’ll specially be very important to be balanced in that realm because you’re going to be dealing with static RAM. Sort of like flying high, there’s a saying in hang gliding, you never fly higher than you are willing to fall. Never put in more power or write more tracks without backing up than you’re willing to lose or re-enter. So with static RAM the challenge really will be how can we make sure that that data isn’t lost when there is a power outage? But someone, someone will find the magic bullet, I’m convinced. And I’m also convinced that Rain Recording will have something to do with it.