Tweaking Windows 10 on the Surface Pro 4 for Music Production

The key tweaks you need to do to Windows 10 on your Surface to give you the best performance. Applies to all models and is even handy on your desktop. بلاك جاك 21 I’ll write this out at some point some but for now it’s all on the video.


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16 thoughts on “Tweaking Windows 10 on the Surface Pro 4 for Music Production

  1. Hi,

    great work on the videos, gave me some good insight of what the Surface can enhance on traditional laptop music production.

    Just wanted to ask you about your latencies on your tweaked windows. I’m mainly playing the Garritan Yamaha Grand, on my MacBook (i7 2,5GHz, 16GB Ram) with a Komplete Audio 6 interface I have about 3-6ms latency using Ableton Live. Anything north of 8-9ms feels soapy to me. Can I get the same latency on a surface with comparable specs and the same audio interface, since I wanted to move away from Mac for quite a while now?

    Cheers and thanks in advance!
    Tom

  2. Greetings, and thanks for the pointers! Has anyone yet addressed the issue with the Surface Pro 4’s split audio engine? I messed with Reason 8 (Trial Version) on my Surface, but the latency was atrocious, not to mention the fact that I could not get the external speakers to stop playing out loud, even with headphones attached. If you already have this issue addressed, I apologize, if not, please help!

  3. A hardware question, Robin. I’m very tempted by the Surface Pro 4 but not sure which spec I would need for making decent music. I heard you mention in this vid that you are working with 8GB of RAM. Would you consider the entry level spec with 4 GB of RAM and the M3 processor insufficient for making good sounds?

    1. “decent music” and “good sounds” are not particularly useful terms when deciding on a computer. The M3 will do plenty but not as much as the i5 or i7. I’ve also got a Surface 3 which runs an Atom processor and there’s a video showing all sorts of music software running on it. So, maybe it does but it all depends on what you’re trying to do. I hope that helps.

  4. Thanks for all the great work on this site. Just wondering if anyone has successfully used Surface Book with either Pro Tools or Studio One? I have tried the optimizations, and have tried it on 2 different units, but regularly get “driver power state failure” blue screen of deaths. Using the i7, GPU, 512 Mb, 16 Gb ram variety. Any pointers would be useful I am just about to give up on this thing!

  5. Thanks for all the great work on this site. Just wondering if anyone has successfully used Surface Book with either Pro Tools or Studio One? I have tried the optimizations, and have tried it on 2 different units, but regularly get “driver power state failure” blue screen of deaths. Using the i7, GPU, 512 Mb, 16 Gb ram variety. Any pointers would be useful I am just about to give up on this thing!

  6. Hi, I have the Surface Book. I run Cubase 8.5 and FL Studio 12. I have the me Surface Dock as well. I have lots of tips I’ve learned and used to really get good performance and workflow out of the SB. The first is to disable connected standby. When you do this you then get access to the missing power settings you mentioned. You can enable it after you make changes and the changes will stay. Second tip I have is to use the pen button to launch the keyboard and switching the keyboard to the full version. This allows you to do shortcuts and morewith the surface in Tablet mode. The last tip I have is to go to the control panel and enable the full range of the “flick”. This allows you to flick your own against the screen and do cool custom functions. I have set mine as Cubase modifier keys.

    1. Hi Chris,
      Good tips, thank you. I mention the connected standby disable registry thing in a later video. The anniversary update seems to have mucked that up so i’ll have to look into it again. I like the idea of switching the keyboard on to do shortcuts – i’ll try that out. I like to use Toolbar Creator to create a side panel of macros so that the keyboard becomes irrelevant. Not come across “Flick” before – tell me more about that!

      Cheers
      Robin

      1. If you go into settings and search for “flick” you will get options that will bring the pen and touch settings (doesn’t matter which option you pick. They all bring up pen and touch settings). Once it’s open you can click the flick tab and set it up and customize the flicks anyway you want. What I’ve done is set different directions to act as ctrl, alt, and shift (amongst other things). Now when I use my SB as a tablet with the pen I can just flick the screen in Cubase and now it modifies the changes I make with the pen e.g. I flick the pen and then touch a fader and now the fader resets back to it’s default position. The flick gestures also work in conjunction with the touch keyboard so setting the button on the pen to trigger the touch keyboard allows me to make combinations of shortcuts with ease. Now I can do a lot stuff without even leaving bed lol.

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