Ableton Forum

Thanks for all of the comments.

So to frame this correctly, by getting into this new desk top with the Asus P5Q Pro mother board and its 64bit capability, it sounds to me like I have bought some future proofing/potential possibilities as drivers and software develop and mature over the next few years??

Sound right? (no pun intended)

gjm wrote:Thanks for all of the comments.

So to frame this correctly, by getting into this new desk top with the Asus P5Q Pro mother board and its 64bit capability, it sounds to me like I have bought some future proofing/potential possibilities as drivers and software develop and mature over the next few years??

Sound right? (no pun intended)

not really. if youre not technically minded, or dont enjoy troubleshooting pc problems then id advise against 64bit. Its not a consumer operating system yet. You may have no problems, but every time a piece of new hardware or software come out, its a roll of the dice if it will work on your system or not.

yeah, that about sums it up

ava wrote:What it amounts to is a 32 bit pc can count to 4,294,967,296 (256*256*256*256) and a 64 bit computer can count to 7,922,816,251,42,643,375,935,439,503,36 (256*256*256*256*256*256*256*256).

64 bit computing is not needed for audio but for things like databases when you may need to count above 4294967296 for instance the worlds population in about 20 - 40 years or so.

It is also useful for when you have been counting the seconds since jan 1 1970 to keep time, and you can't count high enough, like all the computers everywhere have been doing all along.

If you plug the 32 bit max int into a time_t structure and pass it to the time() function (which for grins I did once, but can't recall exactly the result) it runs out around 2012... or was it 2014? Anyways, somewhere in there. Fairly soon.

I'm not sure of what the workaround for this will be for any 32 bit OSs and machines kicking around at that time, but all the ones that will be running anything that has to keep running for years will likely have been converted to 64 bit, or any of them running software using that method to keep time will be unable to do so.

While Vista can handle up to 64 gigs of memory (or more?), Live is a 32 bit OS application and would therefore run in Vista's 32 bit emulation mode. It's internal calculations are done at 64 bit precision. However, (I believe) that Live is still limited to a 2 gig limit in this mode (as it is in XP). If anyone has loaded a greater than 2 gig set of samples into live let me know. I'd like to understand how your doing it. The common misundersanding is that with XP you can use 3.5 gig but that is total that includes system and all applications. The single application limit is still 2 gig.

My $0.02

NI probably won't release XP64 drivers.

For the most part, developers see XP64 as a dead platform, there have been many developers pass over it who have written Vista 64 drivers.