Mobius plugin 64bit

[zarby]

hi Jeff,

do you think it's possible to make a 64 bit version of mobius plugin?


thank you
laurent
________
Zoloft Attorney (http://www.classactionsettlements.org/lawsuit/zoloft/)

[Jeff]

Anything is possible :-)

It may not be that hard, but I also don't think it would provide
much benefit. It wouldn't effect the audio quality, about the only
thing that might get better is the ability to address more
loop memory in case you needed more than 4GB.

A more interesting change would be to do all the audio processing
in 64 bit rather than 32, but I'm not even sure that's allowed with VST
plugins. Most hosts can process in 64 bit now but I don't think plugins
can. Audio is also now twice as large and requires twice the amount
of memory so for live looping this would be a bad thing.

What else did you think you would gain from 64-bit support?

[Jeff]

Read a little more about this...

The biggest advantage I can see is that there might be some performance improvement because "native" 64-bit applications run better on
64-bit hardware. It isn't clear how much of an improvement there would be.
Cakewalk claims some good numbers but Cakewalk is also a lot more
complicated than Mobius.

Next would be memory access. If you had more had 4GB of physical RAM
then Mobius could take advantage of that.

Third would be 64-bit audio processing. Note that this is different than
just being a 64-bit native application. Switching to 64-bit audio processing
would be a fairly big change for an unknown benefit. It makes sense
for big DAW's like cakewalk that do a lot of audio processing and summing
but I'm not sure you would notice much difference with Mobius. If you
wanted to use Mobius in a 64-bit DAW with say a 64-bit reverb plugin it
may perform better if Mobius was also 64-bit so the DAW didn't have to
do sample conversion, but I doubt sound quality would be much different
especially for live performers.

I don't even have a 64-bit machine to test with so it will be awhile
before this happens.

[moinho]

Third would be 64-bit audio processing. Note that this is different than
just being a 64-bit native application. Switching to 64-bit audio processing
would be a fairly big change for an unknown benefit. It makes sense
for big DAW's like cakewalk that do a lot of audio processing and summing
but I'm not sure you would notice much difference with Mobius.

I dare to challenge that it makes sense for anything to do 64bit audio processing, and especially so for a more "basic-level" software like Cakewalk.

I dare wonder: is there any serious audio software that uses 64bit audio? is there a serious application for it?

(Some rule-of-thumb calculations: if we stick with the 6dB=1 bit approximation, and if we furthermore note that (some) humans can actually hear down to -8dB SPL, then the dynamic range necessary would extend to -8+(64*6)=376dB. Now if we take into account that 'round 160dB SPL you're gonna die...;)).

Just in case the laws of physics and information theory had changed while I was asleep, I checked a few proper apps and plugins. Apps go to 32bit (float or integer) as the maximum (including the big 'un Sequoia, which is the one for mastering applications), while some selected plugins (mostly EQs and Reverbs) use double precision - either 48bit or even 64bit internally.

In most cases, this is simply because the software engineers are too lazy to use their head a little more because everyone got those fast computers anyway...

Soooo - to my opinion:
I don't see any reason to use 64bit audio. 64bit memory addressing *may* be interesting at some point in the Moorian future, while (and I know this has been discussed at length in the past) more than 44.1kHz would really give us a sound quality benefit...