Hi All
 
Apologies if this has been asked before.
 
I am thinking it's time to upgrade my Hard Drives for something bigger,and while I am
doing this i thought I would also go from Vista to Win7.
 
Question is,32bit or 64,does it really matter.
 
I use Sonar X1 and I also play a few games on the same machine.
 
I have an Intel Quad 6600 with 4 gig ram,Abit mainboard.
 
Thanks
 
Alan
 

The only real benefit of going 64 bit is your software and OS can access more than 3.5 gigs of RAM. Some larger sound libraries size are getting too large to load into memory using the standard 3.5 limit of Windows. It will not affect your sound quality in any way shape or form. Your sound quality is only affected by the quality soundcard you use. You will benefit in possibly more tracks and larger synth or sampler libraries. I use Windows 7,64 bit. The beauty right now is being able to run 32 bit programs on a 64 bit platform. I believe you will like 7 very much. I feel like the 32 bit world will probably disappear in the next few years. Right now is a great time to take advantage of both on the same machine. Hope this helped. There are some really good articles concerning this all over the internet. Try some searches. There was an older video on Cakewalk's website about the benefits of 64 bit Sonar bt Brandon. Very informative. Wish you luck!

As Sid mentioned, the biggest advantage is access to more than 4GB of RAM.
If you only have 4GB, you won't see much benefit.
 
If you're running a fully 64Bit system (hardware, host DAW, plugins)... you may see a slight performance increase.  That said, don't expect it to be a night vs. day differrence.
IOW, Don't upgrade expecting a major performance increase. 

If you only have 4 GB or less, then in my opinion you won't be gaining anything by going to Win 64. 

If you have >= 8 GB Ram in your PC, then Windows 7 64 + SONAR 32 is a very nice combination.

win7 64 & sonar x1 32bit will give Sonar (if os has 16 gb of ram) multiple rooms of 4gb ram. Read this somewhere.

Whether or not you need 64 bit depends on the size of libraries you want to use or if you like to open more than one project at a time in Sonar (sometimes I like to do this to compare settings or copy plugins, etc).  If you are making 32 bit work now then you don't need 64bit.  However, going 64bit will open the doors to larger libraries in the future.  It's a personal choice, but the way I see it, sooner or later you're going to want 64bit, so it depends on when you want to bite the bullet.  Making the transition is a lot of work but once you are done it should carry you another decade, until everything is 128bit.

Look at it this way: the first personal computers were 8 bit, then 16 bit, then 32 bit and now 64 bit. Its the logical progression. Soon we will be talking about 128 bit. 

BEWARE! More and more companies are releasing 64 bit plugins. Some 32 bit plugins, if you use any may not play well in 64 bit. If you do make the jump to 64 don't be surprised if some of your faves in 32 don't work. BitBridge and JBridge do help a lot but they don't fix everything. I go along with the philosophy to make the jump now and learn the new tech as opposed to waiting too long and being left behind to struggle learning a new way to work. The guys here in this forum are a great source of info.

stickman393


If you only have 4 GB or less, then in my opinion you won't be gaining anything by going to Win 64. 

If you have >= 8 GB Ram in your PC, then Windows 7 64 + SONAR 32 is a very nice combination.

Could you elaborate stickman?
Thanks

I've been working on w7 64 and Sonar 32 for the last few projects as a plugin I've been using crashes if you try and use it with bit bridge. The plugins just had an update and the difference for me has been night and day. I can get a better performance using the x64 version in sonar X1 64 than using the same plugins 32 bit incarnation in 32bit sonar X1.

For smaller sessions I don't really see much difference between two, I just find that as projects become more complex and the channel and plugin count rises, Sonar 64 seems to deal with the project a bit better than its 32 bit counter part.

If you were looking at upgrading your hard drives I'd also seriously consider getting solid state drives for the audio or sample drives and then have another larger drive for backup and files that weren't going to be accessed that regularly.