X64 or X32?
In the midst of the studio upgrades, I added two new systems (we’ll call them powercubes because they are contained in very neat little square micro ATX chassis.
Powercube1 was designed to run VST stack, and have some favorite soft synths (NI Battery 3, Garriton Personal Orchestra, Spectrasonics Atmosphere, East West Percussive Adventures & Ra (Rare). It sports a nice core2 due processor and 4 gigs of ram. It also enjoys Windows XP Pro 64 Bit.
On to Powercube2, the “Beefier” system. Quad core, 4 gigs of ram, large disk arrays, you get the picture. Gigastudio 4, 64 Bit was the only program this computer was to run. Gigapulse NFX, as well as a number of other choice Plug in effects was meant to make this computer an 8 port, 16 channels per port orchestral screamer.
I installed X64 on this machine, and installed a high end sound card. The high-end soundcard had “Beta” GSIF 2.0 drivers for 64bit OS. The card was not seen, Gigastudio 64 bit refused to open in anything other than re-wire mode, and I was quite miffed. Tweaks, patches and hacks did nothing to resolve the problem, and with deadlines looming, I broke down and reformatted for X32. Gigastudio 4 went on without a hitch, libraries load and GSIF (A Very Low latency protocol) works like a charm. I throw as much MIDI I can at the machine (Using Midi Over Lan (musiclab.com)) and it plays back note on, off and continuous controller data like a charm. My reason for this posting today is, if you are choosing to compose using a 64 bit OS as your platform, be very aware that very few card manufacturers will support 64 bit in GSIF 2.0 mode. High-end cards (Higher end than I was using) will almost definitely give you what you need.
Next week, I will explain the whole Gigabit Ethernet debacle. I fully accept the “Experimental” in what I am doing, and I hope that in some small way you are benefitting from my experimentation.
Till next time,
Jack
