For my own experience with the Windows 7 32-bit driver, have a look here: http://moshang.net/soundjeweler_blog/by-the-ways/new-pc/

***UPDATE*** M-Audio released a BETA driver for the FTU on October 13th. I’ll be upgrading to Win 7 soonish and will report on my findings then. You can download the BETA driver for yourself here: http://forums.m-audio.com/showthread.php?p=58296

I reported on a quick experiment with the Windows 7 Beta and my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra soundcard in January and have been following developments regarding a dedicated driver for the FTU with an eagle eye. Well, it’s September and the driver I’m waiting for is still in the development stage (read low on their list of priorities). At least they have added a handy page to chart progress on the M-Audio / Windows 7 driver front. Not sure if the image below will update, but here goes:

Happy 2009!

Having skipped on Vista, I’ve eagerly signed up for the Windows 7 Beta. It’s been getting good press and I think I see why. I’ve installed it in a dual-boot config. on both Em.’s 5 year old Ben-Q laptop and now on my own dual-core system. It offers a very smooth experience on both machines (the laptop has less than a gig of ram!), especially with aero running on my desktop system.

I’ve yet to experiment with my audio apps, but I think that’s going to have to wait for a Win 7 driver from M-Audio. I installed the Vista 32 driver for my M-Audio Fast Track Ultra in compatibility mode, and although it works (I have sound) I’m noticing a glitch in mp3 playback with the Win 7 Media Player and in Firefox every 10 seconds or so. While it’s good enough to play music with in the background while surfing the net (Win 7/Firefox is performing like a champ in this capacity), actually making music with this driver is another question.

I’ll probably go ahead and install Reason and Sonar soonish. For all I know the glitchy playback affects mp3′s only. Either way, I’ll be booting back into XP to do production work until Windows 7 is officially released and available in retail.

My desktop specs:

Asus P5B-E motherboard, Intel 6420 CPU (2.13 GHz Core2Duo), 2 GB ram