And So It Begins...

I have to say that I’m somewhat bemused by the people that are writing us asking about 64-bit versions of our products. It’s like a healthy portion of our customer base suddenly kited work from Hans Zimmer and must (MUST) run 10 sixteen-instrument instances of Kontakt 3.

One piece of advice: don’t believe the hype. The audio differences between 32-bit and 64-bit DAWs and plugins are unmeasurable, never mind audible. Period. Full stop. If you think your shit is gonna be twice as good because you’re running a longer word length, you’ve got another thing coming. The _only_ gain is with the amount of RAM the OS (and thus the DAW) can access, and this is only an issue currently if you’re running massive orchestral libraries.

We had a similar situation occur when Steinberg announced VST3. All the sudden, people were writing telling us they wouldn’t buy any more plug-ins unless they were VST3. Well, I hope those people are happy with the FabFilter line, because aside from about 60% of Cubase’s internal plug-ins, that’s all they’re getting.

In short, there are some outlying developers that either have the inclination, the time, or some other reason to jump on every new bandwagon that comes down the pike, but the industry as a whole tends to follow the lowest-common-denominator “does it work and are people using it” approach.