What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit

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Zevsdate
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2008/09/09 10:51:47 (permalink)

What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit

So I guess I'm looking for the bottom line here. What will give me higher quality audio when I do the final mixdown. Sonar Producer 7 in the Vista Home Premium 64 bit environment recorded at 44KHZ, or Sonar 7 recorded at a 96KHZ in Windows XP 32bit.
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    skullsession
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    RE: What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit 2008/09/09 11:03:35 (permalink)
    Try both....decide for yourself.

    The others will take it from here.

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    ohhey
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    RE: What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit 2008/09/09 11:05:23 (permalink)
    ORIGINAL: Zevsdate

    So I guess I'm looking for the bottom line here. What will give me higher quality audio when I do the final mixdown. Sonar Producer 7 in the Vista Home Premium 64 bit environment recorded at 44KHZ, or Sonar 7 recorded at a 96KHZ in Windows XP 32bit.


    The OS bit level shouldn't make a difference, the Sonar audio engine is still 64bit on both. However, it might make a difference in the number of software synths you can run at once. I bounce mine to audio before the mix so that's a non-issue for me. In fact I use so few of them they all run fine in XP 32bit with 2 gig ram.

    The tracking part might make a difference if your sound card makes better recordings at 96k and the resample down to 44.1 doesn't undo that tiny bit of extra quality. Some sound cards (converters) sound just as good at 44.1 but some of the cheap ones do sound a little better at 96k. That little extra quality would be good if you mixed analog but when you mix in the box the resample down to 44.1 will often change the audio in such a way that it really didn't matter what your tracks sounded like.

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    Jim Roseberry
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    RE: What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit 2008/09/09 12:36:14 (permalink)
    Don't confuse a 32Bit or 64Bit program or OS with 32Bit Float or 64Bit Float audio resolution.
    They're two entirely different things... and they aren't mutually exclusive.
    IOW, You can run WinXP-X86 (32Bit version of Windows - along with the 32Bit version of Sonar)... and still have Sonar's audio engine set to sum at 64Bit Float.

    Higher fidelity will come from using greater bit-depth and sample-rate when recording/summing.
    Again, this is not connected to whether you use the X86 or X64 version of WinXP/Vista/Sonar.
    Simply set Sonar to record/sum at the desired bit-depth and sample-rate.

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    bitflipper
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    RE: What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit 2008/09/09 13:06:36 (permalink)
    No audible difference between 32- and 64-bit OS. SONAR computes at 64-bit regardless, and files are saved as 32-bit floats. So for audio quality, it really makes no difference.

    The reason people go with Vista 64 is to be able to use RAM beyond 4GB, helpful if you use a lot of samplers. Many vendors still do not have 64-bit drivers, though, so if you don't need the extended memory addressing you may avoid problems going with 32-bit XP.

    There may be a subtle improvement at 96KHz versus 44.1KHz, but if you have a good interface it's probably not worth the overhead.

    All in all, I'd stick with 32-bit XP and record at 44.1KHz, as least for now.


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    RichElam
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    RE: What will give me higher quality audio 64bit or 32bit 2008/09/09 14:44:33 (permalink)
    +1 to bitflipper's point.

    If all other things were equal, it might be worth going 64-bit so you can stretch out enjoy all that extra RAM (so cheap these days too). All things are not equal though, and you could be in store for a lot of issues getting everything to run properly under 64-bit, while not seeing any benefit. I tried (I wanted to be able to load BFD samples into RAM), and went back after wasting quite a bit of time on it.
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