#Linux people... how is Windows these days in a VM? I am about sick of the direction Windows 11 is going in... but I am stuck because my music software and VSTs do not work in Linux. Also, windows is just better with sound. I also run a Sound Blaster for EAX support in old games. Before I start messing around, does anyone know how well all this will work in a Windows VM? My main rig has a 5950x (16 cores/32 threads) and 128GB RAM... and an Nvidia 3080 Ti.
@ward you seem adamant into using a Windows VM... but... Windows uses ASIO right? I heard of people using FL Studio via Wine with WINEASIO. Have you tried that before?
Now that Pipewire exists, configuring Jack should be less of a pain on Linux to interface with ASIO.
@gsthnz I use an audio interface called the SSL 2+ and it has it's own ASIO. So, I'd hopefully be able to pass that through... it's USB though. So who knows.
@gsthnz Your posts are really helpful... I'll look into these things. I haven't done virtualization with pass-through because I just use Proxmox for simple things... actually using virtualization for music editing is something I haven't tried yet. I've only tried to get VSTs to work on Linux with very mixed success rates.
Recent GNOME based distributions usually feature the "Boxes" software, which you can use to create VMs, you can assign USB devices directly from it... IIRC it uses KVM, so it should be relatively performant... If you want a more powerful GUI, check the virt-manager software.
I have a Behringer UMC204, though I never tested it on Windows :(
@ward I use my Audient ID14 on a KVM/QEMU system.
My host OS is Ubuntu and i have several VMs but the most important one is on Windows 11 and is mainly used for audio recording and production.
I have also GTX1080 in passthrough to the windows VM that gives me video outputs on a secondary input on my monitors. (i planned to game on there as well, but my gaming needs right now are fine with proton on linux)
As for Audio, i have 2 USB host passed to the VM. One USB 3.2 from the motherboard (an x299 asrock mobo) that consist on a physical usb c on the back that's dedicated to my audio interface.
The second one is a PCI usb 3.0 controller that's used for basically anything else on the PC. keyboard, mouse, etc and also a midi keyboard
I had lag problem on windows until i pinned my core to the vm(x299 system with a core i9 10940x and 64gb of ram). After that, i managed to record music both by playing guitar on my audio interface and with my midi keyboard without any problem. I use a lot of VSTs too on windows as well and none of them gave me any problem. Outside of omnisphere, but i think it's more omnisphere that's really heavy since i had some problems with it in the past even on some bare metal windows machine.
For me, windows 10 in a VM didn't work out very well for recording because of the innate latency trying to pass my audio interface thru.
I'm not a fan of windows either but for recording audio it just works. linux has a bit more work to do to match the ease of use of audio stuff compared to windwos (imo).. especially when hosting specific VSTs (waves)
A lot of my VSTs do work on linux with yabridge but system updates would usually break something and i'd have to set it all up again.
In the end, I ended up buying a decomissioned business mini PC with windows 10 and use that for for recording. The mini pc has my interface connected to it and I remote onto it with my main desktop. Works out good.
@MrBungle That's what I was afraid of. The last time I tried I found that I was spending 90% of my time troubleshooting and tinkering. I might have to have a separate music PC when I have extra room.
For reference, I'm familiar enough with Linux... I have several servers (mostly Debian) and a laptop with Debian 12... and I'm using distrobox to have never versions of some software... but my laptop isn't powerful enough for VMs. I run proxmox for some stuff, but again... that's not a desktop.
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