How can I ensure that my installation is 64 bits?
I am running Win 7 pro 64 bit.
Installing 2.1.1
Thanks
I didn’t think there was a 64 bit Audacity.
Koz
A good idea to develop 64-bit version of Audacity.
What’s the idea?
If we had unlimited developers, then I might agree, but that is not the case.
Even if we did provide a 64-bit build, some of the libraries that Audacity uses are 32-bit, so it would still not be fully 64-bit.
We would still need to provide a 32-bit build for users on 32-bit operating systems.
Creating a 64-bit build would require considerable developer time, effectively bringing all other development to a standstill.
The practical benefits of a 64-bit build are likely to be marginal at best, whilst raising the system requirements substantially.
Developing other performance optimisations such as multi-threading and SSE are likely to produce a much better return on the invested development time.
Demands on the support team would no doubt increase due to users downloading the wrong version.
Maintaining two different builds per platform would greatly increase maintenance costs.
The main benefit would be that Audacity would be able to address more than the 2 GB of memory it now can. It would make it worthwhile to fix the disabled Audio Cache feature Audacity has to use RAM rather than disk to store its audio data. RAM access is much faster than disk access, even with SSD drives.
It would mean that those Nyquist plugins that put all the audio data into RAM while processing would be able to use much larger selections without crashing (though we should fix that issue anyway).
64-bit VST plugins would work in Audacity (though 32-bit ones would not work unless they were “bridged” with some third-party tool).
I agree there would be an issue with Windows users on 32-bit machines downloading the 64-bit version of Audacity, but the main issue is the developer resources as Steve says.
Gale
Unfortunately it wouldn’t help. The Nyquist library is a third party library developed at CMU, and it is a 32-bit library. Last I heard there are no plans for a 64-bit version of Nyquist. I agree that we should fix the RAM problem for Nyquist plug-ins, but that is an Audacity problem rather than a Nyquist problem. The stand-alone version of Nyquist does not have this issue because it accesses the sound differently. The problem in Audacity/Nyquist plug-ins is that we pass the entire selection to Nyquist in one rather than allowing Nyquist to access the data in blocks (which all other effects do).
I was assuming though that in 64-bit Audacity, 32-bit Nyquist would be able to address 4 GB of RAM (which is the 32-bit addressable limit). The 2 GB limit in 32-bit Audacity comes (on Windows, anyway) because Windows allocates 2 GB of the addressable space to Audacity and 2 GB to the system.
I guess I could try it on 64-bit Ubuntu and see if Nyquist plugins crash just before 2 GB or just before 4 GB (unless you already know that they still crash before 2 GB on 64-bit Linux).
If we had 64-bit Audacity on Windows, perhaps it might make more sense for Roger to invest the effort into making a 64-bit version of Nyquist. I agree there is little benefit until that happens.
Gale