Sequencers
-Reason 12 doesnt work, 11 does
-Waves v12+ doesnt work, 11 does
-I heard Cubase 12 doesnt work, Cubase 10.5.20 should work

edit:
-Air new plugins might not work
-Studio one 5 doesnt work , 4.6 does

From plugins , i had gui issued with serato sample 1.4, 1.1 works

Really everything else i have encountered seems to work fine. Id say windows 7 is still alive and well. I have ton of plugins here. Reason that waves and reason 12 dont work seems to be something they decided to do with the gui. Used somekinda libraries that w10 only has

Im on Ryzen 5950x , b550 and windows 7 x64 ultimate.

 

Last edited: Apr 12, 2022

Also studio one 5
Air new plugins
New adobe

sadly we will have to move to the crappy windows 10 sometime.
But i will use win 7 to maximum possible

 

Air new plugins all support win 7 in system requirement atleast it say so on their website.
Its only the R2R sister site versions that doesnt work on win 7

 

I dont know if its me but i've noticed that the latest native instruments plugins that r2r released were not working on my win 7, but on my vm with win 10 they worked... I could install them (Raum, Digital reverbs) but no matter what i did, I couldnt autorize them, whereas it worked straight out of the box on win 10...

 

Win11 according to Latency Monitor (and the number of tracks I can load in my daw before it clicks and pops - which at this point is never, because I can run my projects with full blown masterign chain with no issues) is faster than Win10 and Win10 was faster than 7 when I checked years and years ago. I really can't understand this Win7 obsession. Is like someone made a bad joke "yo, tell no one but Win7 is the best for audio" and people reacted to it without even bothering to do a research.

 

I tried to switch from 7 to 10 a few years back but the DPC spikes etc then were simply terrible, so i hurredly went back to 7. However, a few weeks ago i finally took the plunge and - after a few days of OCD disabling all manner of MS telemetry BS and bloatware - i must say that the 21H2 release under the hood is actually pretty sweet on the DPCs and i now have everything working (and 99% looking/behaving too) just as it was on win7, actually slightly better!

So, to any of you who, like me, were adamant that win10 was a surefire trip to audio hell, i can assure you that, actually (especially as win11 is now the frontline of MS public beta testing) all is now very well on win 10, as long as you can spare a few days to obsessively take control of all unneccessary telemetry/services/UAC and so forth.

 

already installed win 10 4 times in my system in a paralel ssd, and is not a obsession, is a fact that it's slower and clunky compared to windows 7. There are people who uses small amount of channels and use a computer pretty slow and this people will not see any difference. and people who uses a computer pretty fast, that will feel a monster diference in the system. it is like a bad and a good piano kk.
Windows 10 is a bad and slow piano.
you can see in some daws also the smooth on the zoom on projects, and just some projects from win 7 can't even open on win 10 when they are too big.
I already made a lot of tests and my life will be much easyer if windows 10 could handle my workflow like win 7.
So, mac fucked up with the M1 not compatible with old plugins, and the future for windows is also not good for audio. i believe the best for now is not update everything. i have everything i need for doing any song in the world already.

 

I have the native instruments working fine. All the latest i think

 

VirtualDJ Infinity... recent versions from VR only work on Win10/11 (dunno about 8.2). I tried the R2R release from yesterday hoping that it was perhaps something to do with the VR installer/package/ . Alas, the R2R version works on Win10 but not on Win7.
I've read through the change logs and can't find anything saying it no longer supports Win7.
And the VirtualDJ web site only says 64bit OS for compatibility!!

If anyone knows the which last version of VirtualDJ was compatible with Win7 I would be most thankful.

Eventually I will have to take the plunge sometime and update to Win10/11, then upgrade my Presonus S1 license from v4.6 -v5.**
(I might end up waiting until S1 v6 before I next $$ upgrade, unless they do a 50% discount next Black Friday!!)

Good timing on the thread, I noticed a couple of other things this week:
Roli Blocks - ROLI Connect is now only compatibly with Win10
Leapmotion - SDK v5.*.* (≥) Genesis software

Cheers

 

Just for curiosity...
- I removed the Win10 restriction from the VirtualDJ installer. Then it installed OK on Win7.
- First launch after installation - complained that it needs Win10.
- Was just a quick test - always worth a try - sometimes it works.
- In this case, failed miserably. Won't waste any more time trying this VirtualDJ version on Win7.

 

Korg Opsix Native demo, 1.0.0 and latest 1.0.1 has gpu / cpu management issues (+90%) on win7 but works fine on win10

 

in Linux I can tell Wine to pretend to be any version of Windows I need in order to fool programs. If I can do that in Linux, there has to be a way to spoof your windows version to plugins that are simply looking for a version number.

 

Well, this is an interesting thread, though it would be easier this way:
"WIN7, List of programs and plugins that are still working".
This because at least a small number of sw installed that is guaranteed just for Win10 works also on Win7, I tested myself some.
It would be nice to make a list.

 

Raum anbd all other latest plugins works fine for me on win 7 pro and is registered aswell

 

Ah, thanks for pointing that nfo out, so looks like I'm out of luck using the 2021 version on Win7 with the intended workstation.
There appears to be plenty of revisions for the 2021 version floating around, yet I can only find the initial release for the 2020 variant... ...and none of the updates. .. Hmm I'll keep digging, surely I won't have to go that far back!!

Fellas I appreciate the assistance, cheers

 

Thanks for testing, removed Win10 restriction from installer!?!?
You did this how? Ran as Admin in Comparability Mode, or you have some other neat tricks up your sleeve???

I know for somethings they require components from within Win10 to work, a good example would be Studio One v5. Whether or not it was possible to run on Win7 was much talked about and for the aforementioned reason it simply can't run on earlier OS.

For sure somethings are worth trying, in the past it was not too much drama to hack a few things into action.
Fundamentally it's an architecture change causing most issues with the new generation of software we're seeing. These days we really are starting to experience some serious processing power, which is great news for things like the Virus Emulator ;)
Anyway, it's not like I don't have any computers on the network running Win10 or Win7 compatible alternatives.
I'm going to have to do a new build at some point anyway because some of these programs are starting to cause the old DAW comps to choke!

BTW - I was able to use the Leapmotion v5.5.5 Gemini driver with the v4 Orion version allowing Win7 to use with latest MidiPaw version ;)

Cheers

 

When an installer is a .msi file (not a .exe file) you can use Orca (see below) to open it up and edit the fields.
(see screenshot in spoiler)

Spoiler: VirtuaDJ installer being edited in Orca

All you need to do is look for a table called 'LaunchCondition' and field called 'Condition'
In this version of the VirtualDJ installer that 'Condition' field had a value "Installed OR (VersionNT64 >=603)"
which basically means 'at least Win8.1'
You just need to change the >=603 to >=601 (which means 'at least Win 7')
(you can ignore the 'Description' field) Then save the edited .msi file and give it a try.
Will take you only 2 minutes.

Orca is a very tiny application.
It's part of Microsoft's (freely available) Windows SDK Components for Windows Installer Developers
but if you want to play with Orca I'd recommend Googling for somewhere that will provide a direct download of just the Orca application - much simpler than messing around with the full SDK.

Sorry if my brief explanation is not very clear but its very simple, maybe much simpler than I explained - very basic stuff.
If it wasn't very basic and very quick I wouldn't be trying it.

It's obviously not a magic solution for enabling programs that do need W10 to run on W7, but many times we have developers restricting the installation, simply because they don't want the hassle of supporting an older OS. Occasionally you can get rid of the restriction on the installer and then find the program still works fine on the older OS.
This did NOT work for VirtualDJ. Yes it allowed the installation on W7, but the program really did need W10.
You win some - you lose some -but it's a quick cheap test to find out.

 

Last edited: Apr 12, 2022

You can add to your overview:

Accusonus Era 5 and above won't install on Windows 7

Latest version of Orchestral Tools Sine Player (required to run their latest free Sine Factory libraries) won't install on Windows 7. I'm still using an older version that works with their previous free offerings though.

I believe Waves v11 and above does also refuse to install on Windows 7.


P.S. I had a few others that didn't work on Win 7, but I cannot recall right now.

 

Last edited: Apr 14, 2022

I'm glad you said "won't install on Win7" rather than "won't work on Win7"

You just provided a perfect example of what I meant by a developer setting the installer to avoid an old OS even though the product works fine on that older OS.

As far as I have looked - Accusonus ERA 6 works totally fine on Windows 7.
I tested only the VST2 dlls on Windows 7 and they all worked well.
I would gamble on the VST3 and AAX versions all working too but I'm really not interested in testing those.
(aside: exploring the installer script showed that the developer had actually set flags to ignore OS restrictions on every item in the package - except on the actual installer which was set to complain - how irritating is that!)

So, Accusonus is now a nice case study...

Two options:-
[1] Install Accusonus on a Win10 box then just copy the relevant folders over to your Win7 box.
(Accusonus is a simple portable example - so that will work well)
[2] Be a bit techie... unpack the installer and figure out where the installed items go. There's an installer script in there that helps with figuring that out. With this Accusonus stuff it's pretty straightforward - nothing was added to the registry - so it was very portable.

Apart from this Accusonus example, there will be many other examples of software that will work fine on Win7 if you figure out some way of bypassing the installer restrictions.

But there's no universal method that works for everything. It's a case of 'suck it and see'.
- For some software it will be trivially easy (like this Accusonus example - very happy to see it working on Win7)
- For some software it might be a bit trickier - but maybe still worth it? - your choice - your time.
- and for some it will be too much of a pain in the ass (like the VirtualDJ example mentioned above) so just give up, move on.