When Cakewalk launched the first digital audio workstation that's
natively 64-bit last month, everyone's question was — so what does
that do for me, exactly?
VP of Engineering Ron Kuper had to be converted, too, says Cakewalk,
but extensive performance testing showed benefits that made 64-bit
worthwhile. The company has just published a white paper
explaining in detail. For us laypeople, it comes down to two things,
though: more memory (meaning bigger samples!) and better performance
thanks to more registers and better designs. Plug-ins do need to be
ported to reap those benefits, but backwards compatibility should make
this an easy transition.
The only way to test for yourself is to try Cakewalk x64 on the 64-bit Windows. Ah, well — back to my humble 32-bit PC and Mac.