Third Take

My recent hard drive crashes gave me the “opportunity” to start over from scratch and reinstall everything. I chose not to use Windows XP x64.

x64 worked, it was stable, and I got a lot of work done on it. However, my list of complaints has grown long over the last couple years:

1. Cakewalk has dropped support for it in new versions of Sonar
2. Microsoft treats it like a stepchild
3. Waves doesn’t support it
4. Antares doesn’t support it
5. Toontrack doesn’t support it, and in the past few EZ Drummer updates, the groove audition tempo has been broken
6. M-Audio only kinda supports it
7. Bit-Bridge worked 98% of the time. The 2%, while rare, was frustrating

When I built this DAW, I went with x64 and 64-bit Sonar because I wanted to be on the cutting edge. I knew there would be some compatibility problems, but I believed that Microsoft and Cakewalk were standing behind this platform. While it did work very well, I’ve felt like both companies let me down in the last couple years. I paid a lot of money for x64, an OS that has been largely abandoned as a prototype or proof-of-concept OS.

So, now that circumstances have forced me to start over, I decided to go with good old 32-bit Windows XP Professional as my operating system. I am already enjoying updated M-Audio drivers, a working EZ Drummer, and a few plug-ins that wouldn’t work under Bit-Bridge. x64 is no more.

Cakewalk just announced a special offer to upgrade to Sonar 7 Producer for $129. The special pricing is good until June 29, 2008. It’s a tempting deal, but I’m going to pass for two reasons. Read more

Sonar 5 and Windows x64 (full name: Windows XP Professional x64 Edition) are a powerful combination – they allow you to take full advantage of the computing power of the new 64-bit processors from AMD and Intel. Cakewalk claims performance increases of 10% to 30%, on the same hardware, by switching from the 32-bit to the 64-bit version of Sonar 5. When I decided to build a new computer, I wanted to take advantage of this combination. However, not all hardware is supported in x64.
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