Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X for music production – first thoughts!”.
Hello, I’m Robin Vincent and welcome to Malta, music technology and surface pro audio. It’S that time again, Microsoft have released or about to release a new surface pro, and so it’s time again to think about. Oh, my goodness. What’S that gon na mean is it more? Is it less? Is it gon na work? Is it not gon na work? Is it kind of fumble it? Is it gon na give a smooth, fantastic, creative awesomeness of music production, or is it just gon na be a little off this machine that we’re going to have fun on? Who knows we don’t know until we try it, which has always been my philosophy here at surface Pro Audio? Is that we don’t know until we try and over these past years, since the surface pro 3, I’ve been kicking out videos trying to demonstrate what the surface pro range of products he is capable of, and as always all I can give you is what I do So I run music software check it out test it. I look at the four months.
I look at tweaking all those sorts of things. I offer that up on YouTube as a guide to whether you can or cannot run music software and hardware on the surface Pro. Currently, with the surface pro six, this little things been running pretty brilliantly. I’Ve got nice little USB audio interface plugged into it. I’Ve got a MIDI keyboard.
I can play synthesizers just with my fingers all maps emitting that kind of thing it’s quite and completely capable of running. It was live bit. Wig Cubase Pro Tools, Reaper all the lovely little bits of software desktop software that you want to use, because this is no iPad, no an iPad. It’S a proper computer. It runs Windows, 10, proper Windows, 10 running all of your plugins, your virtual instruments, your software, whatever it is that you want to do it can run it because it’s a computer, a Windows, computer yeah. So that’s the point. That’S why I’m into the whole surface thing, because it’s a beautiful form factor, sits really well and has masses of potential for creative input, whether it’s fire pen, words by fingers mouse keyboard.
However you wan na address, it is entirely up to you. However, the caveat with all this is that we don’t actually have any idea whether it’s going to work until you actually try it, because, as with all Windows laptops, they are full of hardware which doesn’t give a monkey’s about music production, doesn’t give anything about low latency Audio and that sort of throughput that we need for the sort of things that we’re doing it’s all about games is all about media. It’S we’re streaming internet and office software and that’s fine, that’s what most people are doing, but not us. We need something a little bit extra and you cannot assume that any sort of laptop or hybrid or tablet or anything running Windows is just going to be able to do it.
You can’t it has to be tested and I’m the person who does that. I do the testing and I can let you know whether it works or not so to come back around Microsoft has announced not one but two or actually a whole bunch of different surface products, but there’s a couple of them in particular that I’m interested in and So I’m going to need to dig out all my tests and we run the whole gamut of stuff to see exactly what it’s capable of and if it’s suitable for music reduction. Now we’re now in the history of all these services that I’ve tested. Is that the answer that question is mostly? Yes, we had a bit of trouble the surface pro 4 back in the day, but that ended up resolving itself.
Eventually, we got around the issues, it’s always dependent on what you’re doing, and it also depends on your level of expectations, because the surface range is a it’s a hybrid computer. It has a processor inside, that’s always trying to save power and that’ll. Save you battery and that’ll may be a sort of hibernating they’re open stuff up again, it’s really useful for a mobile working environment. It’S rubbish for music production, so I have the game.
There tweak a few things, adjust windows a little bit and get it running properly, so it can cope with long extended periods of time of running audio software and plugins without shutting itself down and glitching. But we’ve accomplished that so far. So when a new one comes out, I’ll have to go back through all the tests and just to see whether that’s possible. So here we are we’re here a week or two before the release of the surface pro seven, and so I just wanted to have a very brief conversation about. Is that gon na be any good and what are my plans for it? Well, as far as a surface pro 7 goes yeah, I think you’ll probably be fine. I have to test it. I can’t actually say until I’ve tested it, but on the surface of it it it. It looks fine, so what’s different about this one. Where are we getting to now? Well, probably, the biggest change is that it’s now a quad core. Well, at least it can be, although it could have done before all right, just rewind a second, the one that I’m interested in the one that I’ve gone for all the way down. The line is the i5 eight gig version, that’s the one that for me, hits that perfect point of value, price and performance. If you go for the real high-end, i7 you’ll get more CPU performance, but you’ll also get more heat and that’s something else that we deal with it’s also very expensive. So, if you’re looking for what I would call the sweet spot, I believe that to be the i5 8 gigabytes, you don’t need masses of memory. I don’t think I’ve ever hit a memory limit in all the music that I’ve made on services.
I always hit the CPU limit first, so, while the 16 gig version of the i-5, which there is, is quite attractive, I’m gon na doggedly stay there 8 gigs, and that gives me a better comparison to the surface pro 6, because those sorts of comparisons are important And useful as well, but otherwise as far as the hard way goes, it’s an extremely similar and familiar story. Little extra, which is that we’ve got an extra USB port. It has a USB C, as well as a USB a/b thingy, so a regular USB port, which is what it’s had all the time which has have got connected here to a hub.
So I can use more than one thing. Of course, now we have an extra USB C port, which probably means now I have to run two hubs or means I can run two hubs, potentially connect more stuff together or not have any hubs at all. If I had any hardware that actually used USB C – which of course I don’t but anyway, there’s potential there, which is great, the downside is in order to put that port in there they’ve taken out the DisplayPort.
That’S a bit of a bit of a thing, because I use my surface for videos and projections as well. I mean I guess you could use some kind of miracast or some other connection or you could use it with the dock, which does have DisplayPort outputs. But it’s just a slight inconvenience. I find it makes it a more complete machine if you’ve also got a video output, so you don’t have to mess about with all this.
It’S magic mirror casting color nonsense. It’S only noises cuz! I haven’t really done that. So I’ll have to find out all about that sort of thing, but otherwise the specifications are fairly similar for the processor.
We now have another next generation of Intel. Processor you’ve got the i3 dual core, then you’ve got an i5 quad core, so that’s gon na be new. This is only a dual core, so going for the i5 8 gig on the surface, pro 7 is gon na up, or rather double the core count.
So that’s interesting and there’s an i7 quad core up to 16 gigabytes of RAM the surface pro 7 still has a headphone socket for whatever use that may be, and it has a mini SD card slot. A pretty much got every confidence that service pro 7 is going to do a fine job, and so I’m putting in my order for one this week, and hopefully I should get it by the end of the month and will be able to start checking that out. The important thing will be whether windows can be kept under control. Can you keep the processor from filing around too much and causing glitches and then I’ll get down to how many plugins curly? What sort of software can it run and the sort of response you can expect to get, but unless something has gone seriously wrong in the hardware, I’m not expecting any surprises the service pro-x, that’s a bit of a different matter now that was a surprise. Wasn’T expecting a kind of sideways tangent into a new machine and is the new machine? Is it not a new machine? Is it different? Is it better? Is it worse quite tricky to work that one out price-wise thats, it’s very similar to the surface pro 7, so you’ve got a surface pro 7th and surface pro X. The X sounds like it’s the more exciting ones.
It’S got an X on it. It has things like this built in flat pen that sits into the keyboard that folds up that’s quite nice. The screen is slightly larger, smaller bezels around the outside. All that’s quite interesting.
It’S got 2. I think USB ports in the side, USB 3 ports. So, on initial, looking the surface pro X looks, it looks pretty tasty now. What you have to understand about the surface pro X is that it runs on an ARM processor, and this is a Microsoft processor.
It’S a processor that Microsoft and Qualcomm, whoever is have got together to forge their own processor. That’S quite exciting! Really, I suppose, but ultimately that really means it’s a phone. It’S a phone processor in there. That’S! No! I don’t mean that in a bad way.
I’M just saying that it’s that kind of technology that hopes to give it masses of battery life and they’re also building in phone network wherever it’s called connection. So it connect to the internet when it’s out about roaming around the place, and so the sort of the idea and the design about it comes from that very mobile, very phone market. Now, what does that mean in terms of music software? Well, the first thing we have to understand is that it won’t be running a regular copy of Windows, because Windows is written for Intel, desktop technology and AMD as well sure, but it’s written for that set of technologies that runs desktop computers and laptops the world over. When you introduce a new technology like arm Windows has to be written to use, it has to be changed to use it and Microsoft have been running a version of Windows on arm for a little while it’s really starting to come on.
But there are some problems that we are going to encounter so, strictly speaking, in order to take full advantage of the armed technology, you have to tailor and write your software to run specifically on Windows for arm. However, regular desktop software should also be able to run, but it can only run in 32-bit mode, so these are Winn 32-bit apps, so it should be able to run Ableton Live 32-bit. It just can’t run the 64-bit version, which means Cubase, which I think it’s 64-bit. Only that ain’t gon na happen that also means that the 8 gigs or 16 gigs of ram that you’ve bought with your surface pro x and not going to be accessible to your 32-bit software, because those 2 bit software can only address up to a maximum of 4 gigabytes of RAM the other potential snag in it all is that, in order to install Hardware, the drivers have to be baked into Windows itself, so any manufacturer that requires you to run an installer in order to install their driver, that’s probably not going to work, Although having said that, we did get around a similar sort of situation with Windows s on the surface go so I wonder if there are workarounds ways of sneaking drivers into the system.
We don’t know, we don’t know until we try. So while the surface pro X looks fantastic, how does this great thin pen thing the larger screen, light marvelous battery life, mobile phone network connections? We don’t actually know what it’s going to be able to run, and so you know on the surface of it, it doesn’t look like the best choice. However, it all depends so my plan is to get hold of one of those and to run a bunch of tests as well to see whether keyboards will be installed all your interfaces.
Can you get them plugged in? Can you get the latency down while the audio drivers like, and can it become a useful music production tool? I mean that is the other thing they have. They have removed the headphone socket. So if you are trying to use the onboard audio, I don’t know don’t know what you do have to get some Bluetooth headphones.
Oh look, handily. Microsoft have also released some Bluetooth earbuds. So I guess that’s the solution right there will they work with a zero for all? Who knows who knows so? We have exciting days ahead, we’re not sure exactly what’s gon na happen, let’s leave it at that. Shall we so to summarize service Pro 7. Is that in a week or two I’m gon na get hold one of those? I run my usual tests and I imagine it’s pretty much gon na be just as good as a surface pro 6 and hopefully we like to get a little bit more performance. A little bit more of something for our money.
That would be good surface pro X, which has come along couple weeks after that, I’m hoping to be able to borrow one of those to do a bit of testing on that as well. And I imagine some stuff is gon na work and some stuff isn’t, but hopefully I’ll be able to give you an idea of how the performance of the service pro X compares to the surface pro 7, and you can make your mind up based on that. So there you go, that’s the plan we’ll get there. You might have to give me a bit of time when I can’t do these things instantly.
So I’ll get the surface pro at the end of the month. You know give us a few weeks, but I hopefully before Christmas November December time I’ll be able to report back on my findings. I mean, obviously, you know, follow me on Instagram or wherever and I’ll be throwing out ideas and tests as we go along until I pull it all together into a proper kind of performance video, and if you want all that real insider direct contact sort of information, Then consider joining us on patreon and throwing me a couple of quid, so I can keep these videos rolling and keep investing in all the gear so that I can test it so that you know what’s going on with it. That’S the idea anyway.
In the meantime, .