I likely have this in the wrong forum; please forgive me.
 
Is there any way to find out if a plugin is 32-bit or 64-bit? I have a few and I'm trying to figure out if they should be installed in either C:\Program Files (x86) or C:\Program Files.
 
A couple of these are the compressors Mike Senior talks about in his book, "Mixing Secrets for the Small Studio." However, there's no indication if they're 32- or 64-bit, at least, not that I've found.
 
Anyone?

If you open a 32 bit plugin you will notice
 
.........................................................
. Dots around the titlebar of the window.
.........................................................
 
Check Beatscape, or dropzone, or VC64.
 
And if you open task manager you will see instances of bitbridge.
 
Cheers..

also, if you look at the plugin list in the browser, the 32bit ones will be a different color.

The above methods require that you load the dll into SONAR. If the question is how can you tell if it's a 64-bit file just as it sits in the file system, there are at least two ways to do that:
 
Method #1: If you have a hex editor, you can look at the file header. At byte offset 240 (0xF0) there'll be either "PE..d" (indicating 64-bit) or "PE..L" (indicates 32-bit). Works for dlls and executables. Don't know about other binaries such as drivers, though.
 
Method #2: Use a file-info tool such as the free Filealyzer (PE Header tab). This one's useful for other file types, too, even MP3s.
 
 

Or you can just look in the plugin browser status bar in X3 when you select a plugin there :-P

bitflipper
Method #1: If you have a hex editor, you can look at the file header. At byte offset 240 (0xF0) there'll be either "PE..d" (indicating 64-bit) or "PE..L" (indicates 32-bit). Works for dlls and executables. Don't know about other binaries such as drivers, though.

Yup, that's the kind of thing I was hoping to find out. Thanks, bitflipper.
 
 
 

Thanks to everyone who replied. I guess I wasn't as clear as I thought I was in my explanation, but I need to know before installation. Otherwise, it's impossible to know where to install them when there's no installer.

If its a general DLL you need to know this info about, the easiest way I know other than using Bitflippers hex editor trick is to use this utility. http://www.dependencywalker.com/
 
Load the dll in this tool and if its 64 bit the icon to the left of the dll will show "64" if its a 64 bit dll. If its 32 bit the icon won't show a number. Its surprising that there is no easy way to see this in Windows. Explorer should show this in the file properties.

Nice utility!
 
Of course as I am messing with it I drill down into the 32-bit plugs and the first one I grab is SFZ+.dll Eight of the supporting (truckload worth) dll's come up "Error opening file. The system cannot find the file specified (2)." With these errors in the status at the bottom:
 
Error: At least one module has an unresolved import due to a missing export function in an implicitly dependent module.
Error: Modules with different CPU types were found.
Warning: At least one delay-load dependency module was not found.
Warning: At least one module has an unresolved import due to a missing export function in a delay-load dependent module.
 
Maybe I should quit playing with it...

Dont worry about those. Dependency walker shows a lot of info that is not necessarily a problem.
Delay load dependencies are not a problem until the app tries to load them. Dynamic loaded dlls are normally checked and there is a fallback. Its only a problem if the root dll's in the top left pane are shown in red.