64 bit migration

Hi Sven,

I can give you some encouragement here. I also decided to make the leap exactly one week ago. I came up to my project studio armed with a new Microsoft Win 7 upgrade disk, a graph pad for planning it out and progress checking and it all went very smoothly. I have since effectively been soak testing my system, throwing everything I can at it in unreasonable terms ie running a 50+ track project on Sonar on loop utilizing 20+ instances of synths and 25+ track FX, whilst keeping other programs running, including my network card and browser, plus various monitors (Resource monitor, DPC latency checker and CPUID hardware monitor) and cannot get the system to glitch or stall whatsoever. Latency running at 3ms / 144 samples on ASIO

Things that may help you - if you can, increase your system memory, its the major benefit of upgrading to 64-bit. I installed on my quadcore at the 4Gb I previously had, but ordered a replacement set of 8Gb faster memory to take advntage of the 64-bitness on offer.

What worked for me - Download all the latest 64-bit drivers for your MIDI controllers / hardware peripherals in advance. I saved them all in a folder in one of my additional internal drives ready to simply drag and drop onto the desktop immediately after reformatting the C: drive and installing Win7 64-bit. Also determine what boxed CD's / DVD installation VST's you re going to use and line them up ready to go. Identify and check your account names and passwords on all your VST vendor's sites (including Cakewalk of course) and download any updates or full downloads again into a separate folder on a spare drive ready to drop onto the desktop. You are then ready to rebuild.

After the 64-bit OS installation and checking of core functionality (ie mouse, monitor(s) network adaptors etc) install all the Windows updates to get your system up to date. Do not consider any DAW based performance tweaks as you need to install on a vanilla OS and then tweak later.

Next, install each latest driver for your audio interface and MIDI controllers (in my case SPS-66, PCR-500, Frontier Tranzport and Korg PadKontrol) load the driver first and then connect the corresponding device and turn it on in order for the device to be recognised and the driver complete installation.

Now, install your Sonar 64-bit installation, if all has gone to plan, Sonar will recognise your audio interface and controller(s). Now set them all up.

Plug-in's - Well, I decided, after a bit of pondering including polling for some opinion on the forum here, to let the DLL's install where they defaulted to, making sure of course to direct the installs on samples to my separate hard drive dedicated to samples. My reasoning was that I could at least guarantee not to screw up the installations and always tidy them up if required at a later time, the primary objective getting to a replicated working Sonar DAW in quick time with little or no troubleshooting, which can rapidly get out of hand. Upon the installation of each VST, identify the location on the DLL(s) and add them to the scan path in Sonar. This leaves you with an untidy menu of plug in's but all accessable and working. My fix for this is simple, tidy them up by creating a custom plug-in menu layout in the Cakewalk Plug-in manager x64. I have seen and taken notice of threads discussing creating two discrete directories for 32-bit and -64-bit directories and directing (or moving) DLL's into these at installation time. Unfortunately some installers just dont want to play ball with this strategy or play along but lose track of their preset or sample locations causing untold grief trying to get it all to hang together. Was I right or wrong? Well all I can say is my VST's installed and worked first time, my custom menu allows me to find them and invoke them efficiently, and I was up and running in no time at all.

All working? great! NOW go for the performance tweaks, for which there is a goldmine of information on this thread and I dont need to replicate here. Suffice to say restore points are your friend here. Also time to make image copies of your C drive etc.

To be absolutely honest, I expected more problems and it all went very smoothly indeed. Nothing to be too concerned about upgrading to 64-bit provided you have done your research on your own configuration and you work to a plan.

I know my plug strategy goes against the grain from some opinion here, but it works so please consider it.

Hope it all goes well for you, see you in 64-bit land !

Cheers

Garry Kiosk
 
EDIT: Typos

Well that was a lot less painful than I thought.  All is well here.  So far all plugs a go, old projects working perfectly. 

The only problem is that when I load up Sonar 64, it wants me to register it.  However, when I try it tells me it is already registered (which it is from 32 bit version).  Anyone ever heard of that?