Compatibility Issues - Vista vs. XP, 64bit vs. 32bit

dirtchamber700

dirtchamber700

New member
Hi guys,

I need some advice on gettin' a new DAW. I've been running on a dinosaur (core-dual) for some time now, and I thought it was time to upgrade.

I'm looking at gettin' a quad core (Q9450), or a c2d (E8400) with windows vista 64-bit and load it with as much ram as my wallet can take.

i've a few concerns tho... i'm using reason 4, recycle 2.0, sonar 7 & ableton 7. are all these programs gonna give me issues when i move over to 64-bit? and that's just the small part.. i'm worried about all the rest of my stuffs like my vst's (*izotope and the works), vsti's are not gonna be able to be ported over the vista. not to mention my other progs like nero, office, zone alarm, etc etc.

has anyone ever encountered this problem?

will greatly appreciate any advice. :)

Thanks guys!
 
Core duo is no dinosaur my friend. I'm upgrading my P4. :)

First thing you need to consider is going for quad or duo core. You'll need to do your homework here. Not all software (and certainly not all DAW software) support quad core. That means even if you have that CPU power, your software will only not utilise all the 4 cores - which makes it wasted. For the same amount of money, you can get a much faster duo core. And in most circumstances, a faster core duo is better than a slower quad core.

Second consideration is 32 vs 64 bit. Sounds like you are doing more than just DAW since you mention zonealarm and office (your DAW should have NO INTERNET access and therfore NO ANTIVIRUS or other FIREWALL). That almost certainly means you'll be doing a dual boot system - one boot partition for DAW and one for other stuffs. Here's some homework again. In DAW, not every software is 64-bit. You'll need to choose your software. But if you already have those software, you'll need to see if they support 64-bit. If not, they can still run in 64-bit Windows under 32-bit emulation - but they won't be utilising the power 64-bit (ie you'll not be using all the extra RAM that 64-bit supports). Again, that becomes wasted. Not to mention about hardware support.

VST is not a problem. Your VST host is the key.

If you're building a system ground up (ie upgrading hardware and software), 64-bit is the way to go. If you have lots of other software already, you need to make sure they work in 64-bit. If not, better to just stick with 32-bit.

Sonar 7 supports 64-bit and I'm pretty sure it supports multi-core.
 
thanks cheez. yeah i know sonar supports 64-bit. was just worried about the rest of the softwares. i believe reason 4 should be able to.. however, i've heard of vsts and vsti-s crashing in 64-bit vista..with the host being able to support 64 bit vista. and that is seriously scary.

i haven't been able to find answers as yet. i'll post back once i've had results. :)
 
At this time, it's pretty pointless "upgrading" from a dual-core to a quad-core or gazillion-core. There are still software around that have absolutely no threading support, i.e dual-core;multi-core; symmetric multiprocessing.

Most (active) DAW software do handle SMP well, and can work with as many logical and physical cores if the last update occured at least a year ago. But the thing is, you get no more than you would from two cores - practically. Yeah, more headroom for multi-tasking, faster encodes, 500 more plug-in instances bottlenecked only by the 8GB RAM limit of mainstream motherboards..and some more insignificant upgrade bling.

But well, if you're the money man, you're the man.
 
Actually, some plugins are pretty CPU intensive but doesn't require huge amount of RAM, which can benefit from multicore processors. I think DAW software will certainly move towards this direction. Graphics and video processing will probably adopt quad core faster than DAW. It might take a while though for more DAW software to move into 4 cores. But it's happening.

But for the average user, quad core is certainly an overkill with little benefits.
 
Ok uhm... I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to post this here, but I'll give it a shot.

I'm a noob with all these recording jingjings, and I'm been using Adobe Audition (I know it's stale and basic or something... but it's easy lah) and I've just confirmed it doesn't work on vista.

My question is, is there a software to recommend, to replace Audition, that works on vista?

Any help (in noob-english) would be greatly appreciated... :)
 
Audition 3.0 supports vista, according to the website. I've also heard good things about Reaper.
 
=dirtchamber700

hey bro would u be using windows live messenger? cause windows live doesnt support 64bit but u can run it in a 32bit enviroment if u know how.. LOL
 
HideX, the threadstarter is refering to a DAW setup. That not only means no Windows Messenger - it means no internet at all.
 
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