Cantabile Development Blog

64 Bit Audio

Cantabile 2.0 now supports 64-bit audio.

64 bit audio means that Cantabile's audio processing pipeline performs all calculations using double width floating point numbers. In theory this provides additional accuracy, but really requires using plugins that also support 64-bit processing.

Note 64-bit audio is not to be confused with x64. x64 is a completely different operating system (eg: Vista x64) running applications built especially for it. Whereas the main advantage of an x64 application is the ability to use more than 4Gb of memory, 64-bit audio provides more accuracy and can be supported by x64 and x86 (32-bit) applications.

64-bit audio needs to be enabled as a per-session option on the Master Bus Configuration (formerlly called Speaker Arrangement):

Also, when 64-bit audio is enabled, Cantabile will mark plugins that don't support this mode with a suffix of "*32". Inserting a 32bit plugin in a 64-bit pipeline effectively negates the advantage of 64-bit mode so the intention here is to point this out:

Finally, the audio recorder and offline renderer now support a new sample format known as "64/32 bit floating point". In this mode audio files will be recorded in 64-bit audio when the 64-bit audio is enabled. When not enabled, the recorders revert to 32-bit audio since there's no point writing a 64-bit file.

Next I'm planning on adding support for the Wave64 file format. Wave64 is an improved but very similar version of the wave file format that supports files greater than 4Gb.

Posted on April 16, 2008

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