Installation / Version Question 64 bit?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

Just installed audacity a couple days ago. When I went to download it, I thought it had a 64 bit version based on the tables I was looking at. Looking like I’m wrong about this but thought I’d check.

my installation:

Windows 10 pro (upgraded with the free upgrade) from windows 7 pro
Audacity 2.1.3 from audacity-win-2.1.3.exe

I thought it might be one of those installs 32 or 64 in one installer, but it installed in c:\Program Files (x86) so I assume this is a 32 bit binary. Is there a 64 bit version? I assume it would be better to run that if there is.


thanks

2

Audacity isn’t 64 bit, no. It’s 32 bit only. Hopefully someday that’ll change…

3

Audacity is a 32-bit application. There is no 64-bit version.

In practice this does not make much difference except for a couple caveats (which are documented in the user manual):

Despite being a 32-bit application, Audacity does still use 64-bit data types in certain places. For example the sample count is handled as a 64-bit data type so as to allow > 2^32 samples.

4

Perhaps it will “someday”, but please note that the main advantage to be gained from the 64-bit version is the ability to address additional RAM, and as Audacity does not require large amounts of RAM, there is currently little practical benefit for the considerable amount of work that would need to be invested into creating a 64-bit version. Audacity is a very complex program with many dependencies on third party libraries. To become completely 64-bit would require migrating to 64-bit versions of many of those libraries (if available), or writing 64-bit versions if no 64-bit version exists.

5

I understand, Steve! It’d be nice to see, but yeah: I totally understand it’d take a monstrous effort to do it, and I respect that. I’m sure there’s way more to making it 64 bit than my non-programmer brain could compute! haha :laughing:

6

But it would be faster if it did so require, and the feature to write data to RAM is already there, disabled because it is buggy (and also without a 64-bit version, it can’t normally address more than 2 GB RAM on Windows anyway).

If you want a 64-bit version of Audacity now, you can use a 64-bit version of Linux.


Gale

7

thanks for the info. As a new user I haven’t had the opportunity to push any limits but figured if I had missed something that it would be better to uninstall / reinstall now.

I completely understand the issues with supporting two architectures even on the same platform. Had to do that in the 90s between the 16 & 32 bit windows (3.1 I think). It was pretty frustrating and the microsoft emulation for it made matters worse. We would have been better off just supporting two separate developments.