Imagine if you could go back in time and tell yourself you could some day you would have a copy of Fruity Loops that supported up to 512 gigabytes of RAM.
Well, while it’s doubtful anyone will use that theoretical capacity, technically speaking that day has arrived.
The big news: you’re no longer limited to 4GB of RAM in FL Studio. FL already let you skirt that problem a bit by loading plug-ins and samples separately, but in 32-bit mode, “the core FL Studio 32 Bit process is still limited to 4 GB and so out-of-memory errors can occur when editing very long audio files in Edison, or when the memory management techniques are not used. This won’t happen with FL Studio 64 Bit. Additionally, FL Studio 64 Bit also includes a complete update of most plugins to native 64 Bit format.”
It may seem a little late in the game for FL to be going 64-bit, when DAWs like Cubase and SONAR have had support for a long time. But given that the main deciding factor in choosing 64-bit over 32-bit is how much of your plug-in library is 64-bit, now is a reasonable time to finally take the plunge.
Image-Line take a conservative stance on performance. Whereas Cakewalk, the first significant Windows music adopter of 64-bit, touted performance gains in 64-bit computation, Image-Line argues that in real-world operation, it makes little difference. I can’t verify that, but avoiding out-of-memory errors seems reason enough me to make the move, unless you rely heavily on lots of old plug-ins.
And beyond that, what’s most important: the transition is seamless.
There’s a single installer. (It adds two icons, one for 32- and one for 64-bit operation.)
You can use any plug-in in the 64-bit version. (64-bit plug-ins run native; 32-bit plug-ins are bridged.)
Projects can be exchanged between the two versions.
If you do have another 64-bit host, from Ableton Live to Cubase to SONAR, you can now add FL as a 64-bit plug-in.
More info in their Knowledge Base:
FL Studio 64 Bit vs FL Studio 32 Bit
Also, if you want to watch your changelog as a YouTube video with a trance music backdrop, yes, Image-Line has you covered. Also … uh, no, not in that category myself, so I appreciated the text above.