Rain Recording, makers of audio-optmized PCs and laptops have published a web resource called VistaWatch that helps outline the slow crawl Vista is making into the audio world. Check out the chart here and notice a few things.

Rain keeps tabs on a selection of popular audio I/O hardware and software titles for Vista support. They publish a six-column grid that covers some of the important data points about Vista as it relates to the covered products.

While Gearwire loves Rain (Hi, Bill!) we have to point out that this chart's usefulness has been limited by its omission of a column - we would call that column "Vista Native."

The reason for this is simple: what Rain's VistaWatch (and to be fair, what much of the industry) calls "Vista Compatible" is actually not Vista-native. It's our opinion that for an application or piece of hardware to be called Vista-native, it needs to have been re-engineered to take advantage of the essentail audio I/O improvements in Vista, also known as WaveRT.

WaveRT is the rewrite of the Windows streaming audio driver model that makes the greatest strides the OS delivers as relates to audio processing in specific. The latency of these drivers has been utterly slashed and the execution space for the drivers has been changed in such a way to improve stability and performance. A Vista machine running audio without running that audio through WaveRT drivers is missing out on what Vista means most to audio. (Okay, 64-bit "means" a lot to audio, but not to its streaming.)

So when we take a look at the entry for Sonar 6.2 on Rain's VistaWatch we see that it gets a green checkmark for compatibility with Vista 32. That's to be expected - Sonar announced WaveRT support when they rolled out 6.2.

But that test result is the same green checkmark that they give to the Edirol UA-101, which as far as we know, does not ship with WaveRT drivers. And this is where the chart's limits are - discerning between the compatible and the native items on it.

The distinction matters because Vista presents an unusual situation to Windows audio adherents - it rewrote its audio streaming model but since the XP drivers work under Vista, users who upgrade to Vista may be doing so without fully understanding the benefit received - or not received.

Hey, we're just trying to reduce the confusion surrounding this strange release of Windows. And so is Rain. I guess we just have more time on our hands to nitpick! :)