FL Studio 64 Bit Native Version To Access Up To 196 GB Ram

Image Line today released this teaser video for an upcoming version of FL Studio that is 64 bit native.

FL Studio already works under 64 Bit Windows and can host 64 Bit plugins. In addition by using ‘Keep on disk’ with Audio Clips/Sampler Channels AND OR ‘bridging’ 32 Bit plugins you can have access to unlimited memory/sample size and fill your RAM to overflowing, no matter how much you have, using in FL Studio 10 or higher.

With FL Studio 64 bit, though, Image Line is bringing the benefits of a 64-bit architecture to the core FL Studio application. It means that FL Studio itself can access up to 196 GB of RAM under Windows.

The move will also mean that 32 Bit plugins will require bridging, just as 64 Bit plugins require bridging now under the 32 Bit software.

Pricing and the release date for FL Studio 64 bit native version are TBA.

Note: For an interesting primer on the benefits, and other impacts, of 64 bit computing for musicians, see this SOS article.

43 thoughts on “FL Studio 64 Bit Native Version To Access Up To 196 GB Ram”

  4. Anyone can name a file, this doesn’t show that it’s truly 64 bit and not just smoke and mirrors.

    It seems too many people have moved on waiting on 64 bit anyways.

    A little to the party?

    All you have left are the naive ones that will figure out that Image-Line doesn’t really make anything.

    They just repackage everything…

    A 64 BIT VERSION DOESN’T EXIST UNTIL IT’S RELEASED.

    We’re still waiting on that Apple, Mac port remember? It’s only been 2 years on that.

  5. HOW DOES SHOWING A FILE NAMED 64 BIT SHOW ANYTHING 64 BIT RELEATED?

    REMINDS ME OF A APPLE/MAC PORT THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO COME OUT TOO?

    SEEMS LIKE IMAGE-LINE IS PULLING OUT ALL THE STOPS TO TRY AND SAVE THEIR SINKING COMPANY.

    EVERYONE HAS JUMPED SHIPPED AND THEY ARE DESPERATE.

    OPEN THAT BETA UP TO TESTING AND WE’LL SEE HOW FAR ALONG IT REALLY IS.

    3. WHEN’S THE FL STUDIO APOCALYPSE GOING TO HAPPEN, BLAH? YOU’VE BEEN GRIPING ABOUT FL STUDIO, SAYING THAT PEOPLE ARE GOING TO QUIT THE APP AND PREDICTING THAT IMAGE LINE IS GOING OUT OF BUSINESS – AND YOU’VE BEEN DOING THIS FOR SEVERAL YEARS.

      YET – FL STUDIO IS CONSTANTLY BEING UPDATED (UNLIKE LIVE!). AND FL STUDIO IS STILL THE MOST POPULAR DAW. AND IMAGE LINE IS NOT ONLY IN BUSINESS, BUT IS INTRODUCING NEW APPS.

      YOUR ENDLESSLY REPETITIOUS ‘THE END IS NEAR’ RHETORIC MATCHES YOUR ‘BLAH’ MONIKER WELL!

  6. The technology behind Fruity Loops is really nothing much. The vendor should have done much better job and better handling.

    This article starts-off with someone trying to get his money back and attempts in several ways to get the attention of other FL Studio users. His posts were subsequently cancelled, he was mocked, made fun of, insulted with the usual name-calling.

    Your correspondent was alerted to this fact by someone else dragging your correspondent to the argument. What does this remind our readers of? The same kind of treatment Simon Kissel, Frank-De-Groot and other dissenting parties in the Borland/CodeGear/DevCo/Embarcadero newsgroup were shamefully treated with.

    Introduction
    FL Studio is considered one of the best applications built with the basket-case language called Delphi. It suffers from the same problems Delphi has: Inability for the developers to make an OSX version or even iOS version or even Linux version, constant access violations and logic errors.

    Unicode Issues
    Although Delphi (2009, 2010, XE) eventually fixed these Unicode problems, fixed most speed issues, FL Studio is compiled with an older version of Delphi and unable to use Unicode correctly (by reasoning that their plug-in system does not support it).

    Your correspondent downloaded the FL Studio SDK and noted it could not even compile with latest version of Visual Studio 2008, 2010 without considerable changes in the SDK code.

    Worse, while everyone-else is using Unicode, Intel SSE2, Intel SSE3 (read: 64-bit multimedia optimizations) and porting their code to 64-bits, the string data-types found in FL Studio SDK were non-Unicode. In fact, the whole entire SDK, the mixers, plug-ins and “everything else” written for FL Studio is non-Unicode.

    Of course, one might say, that’s not important and can be ignored, but going from ANSI to Unicode is an important stepping stone towards 64-bits, OSX compatibility, Linux/64 compatibility.

    It’s like saying, hey dude, let’s build a website used by thousands of users, but since we cannot use Chinese, Korean, Thai, Hebrew, Russian (certain characters), Arabic, Czech, Solvak, Hungarian, Hindi or essentially all the non-English languages, we’ll exclude a significant portion of users who might otherwise create extra revenue for the website.

    The step from ANSI to Unicode occurred 15 years ago (1996) with introduction of Windows NT 3.51, the predecessor to Windows 2000. Dot-Net languages C#, VB.NET stores data in native Unicode and all major cross-platform languages (including C++, RealBasic) have data-types for Unicode string storage.

    How is this important to FL Studio? suppose you enter in some Chinese characters into any FL Studio text field, or filename, the thing turns into rubbish.

    Writing about this is like telling Chinese users, Arabic, Israeli, Thai and non-English users to “get lost” because FruityLoops does not support Unicode filenames. Just try storing a filename in Chinese, Russia or Hindi and watch Fruity Loops crash with title “Saving to ??????” “Rendering to ??????.mp3”

    FL Studio Huge Unicode issue
    Discussing about Unicode to FL Studio is like talking to someone who built the whole house of cards using ANSI (non-Unicode) almost everywhere.

    There’s an even worse situation never seen before in the history of FL Studio: the need to convert every data-container which contains “strings” to Unicode — that means converting whole C++ programs, C++ DLLs, Delphi DLLs, Delphi EXEs, the plug-in SDK, all the plug-ins, inclusive of having a sane way for the users to upgrade all their data files, samples, sound files, plug-in data files, 3rd party DLLs and everything else to use Unicode.

    Why is this Unicode issue important?

    • Suppose you write some non-English text into one plug-in and then the data from that plug-in goes into another plug-in. The non-English text is lost because the other plug-in does not use Unicode when it completes processing, or is unable to process anything because the Unicode filename becomes garbage.

    • This is evident with the MP3 LAME encoder unable to do anything with a Unicode filename, the Delphi ZIP not working, heck, everything doesn’t work once you put in a Unicode filename or any text field with Unicode characters

    • Older files created with FL Studio needs to be upgraded to use Unicode. That means, short of rewriting the whole FL Studio, there is no easy way to achieve this.

    • The FL Studio SDK does not use Unicode. The last update to FL Studio plug-in system SDK was 4 years ago. If Unicode was added to the SDK today, it would render all plug-ins useless and unusable. All the plug-ins would have to be re-written over again.

    • All the data files that FL Studio stores are all in non-Unicode. In order to update this to Unicode, the developers of FL Studio should have a sensible migration plan or it’s game over… They lost the market.

    • Since going to 64-bits means the need to update to Unicode, this is truly the situation where it’s doomsday for the developers and the developers are buying time making all sorts of promises, more and more promises they cannot keep.

    FL Studio 4 gigs issue.

    FL Studio is an assortment of plug-ins. (See below diagram). The main EXE (FL.EXE) or (FL (Extended Memory).EXE) loads up the main DLL.

    The FL.EXE/FL (Extended Memory).exe loads up FLStudio.dll with entry-point CreateFruityInstance and then loads-up the chain of plug-ins via CreatePluginInstance entry-point.

    Why are there two EXEs? One of them has a PE mark “uses more than 4GB max” instead of “2GB”.

    There are some issues with FL Studio approach with memory:

    • Many of the DLLs that FL Studio uses are not marked with “uses more than 4GB max”. Thus, the LAME encoder, ASIO, DelphiZIP and many plug-ins are not marked with this PE Mark. This means that depending on what you do, you could hit the 2gigs mark and then oops, the program fails.

    • There is massive data-copying between plug-in to plug-in. That means, you edit a large sound file, and you do in one plug-in, there is copying of most of the data for the next plug-in to work and so on. That leads to situation where if you want to make a huge music file or get very creative and use-up all the features, you’re in for a big surprise.

    • For instance, you make a huge WAV file (by reasoning you want to make a high-quality result instead of an MP3 encoded file) then you run into a road-block at 2gigs instead of the claimed 4 gigs.

    • An average machine has 4 gigs of memory. If you subtract 1 gig (used by the OS) and maybe another gig (used by Firefox, your email client, any other programs you keep open). That leaves 2 gigs left for FL studio to use. How confident are you, while browsing the rest of other sound samples, keeping other sound-editing programs open, there is sufficient memory left for FL Studio?

    • The more glaring example is FL Studio uses Delphi/ZIP which maxes-out at 2gigs. Of course, you might say, who uses a ZIP file of 2 Gigs? Then how would do a backup (to DVD, to USB drive) of your project?

    • Many DLLs used by FL Studio are from since 12 years ago. Certain files in FL Studio directory (such as dsplib.dll, ss2wav16.dll, ss2wav.dll) are marked 1999. In those days, the maximum amount of RAM was 16MB, 32MB. How confident are you that same DLL used today would process more than 2gigs or 4gigs without limitation?

    Intel Optimizations.
    The latest version of Visual Studio (2010) has SSE2/SSE3 and many 64-bit optimizations which makes processing significantly faster. This is by usage of SSE instruction-set (read: 128-bit processing) on an Intel processor.

    The Delphi language has no support for SSE/SIMD at all. The floating point is trapped in old i386/i486/Pentium with some smatterings of MMX optimizations (circa 2002). SSE was introduced in 2004 and is a feature on every Intel, AMD and Intel Compatible (such as VIA) chip since 2005 (6 years ago).

    Unless you have not upgraded your computer in the last 6 years (you are still using a Pentium II or i386SX or even 80×286 computer with MS-DOS and Windows 3.11 — used by certain Delphi developers)
    SSE is found in compatible implementations (ARM SSE — used in those Android tablets, iPad tablets)

    You might wonder who uses this stuff or why is it important? The biggest problem with computing is crunching numbers to get the final result. In case of graphics, it is crunching the millions of polygon calculations to play your favorite game (such as World of Warcraft or Black Ops or Call of Duty), reconstruction of sound elements into the final composite result, smooth video playing and speeding-up processing.

    FL Studio uses a maverick trick to get it’s job done: It uses the Intel Performance Primitive library (see: dsp_ipp.dll) and almost every plug-in in FL Studio uses it, with exception of older Plug-ins.

    6. Hey…blah….just as an outside observer….I hope you don’t own any guns…and nobody at your job
      ever upsets you (that might be hard)…..

  10. That 196 GB of RAM claim interests me…..

    What’s the most people are using for RAM on their DAW machines? The most I’ve seen in use is 8GB.

    If anyone’s running more – what’s your configuration and does your DAW take advantage of it?

    3. 32 gigs here…
      2008 Mac Pro quad 3.2×2

      Comes in handy with my day job (graphic design), and Logic loves the overhead when using multiple Omnisphere and Trillian instances.

  15. Vaporware just like the Mac Version due out over a year ago.

    Too many issues with codec and 3rd party licenses.

    Dangling dreams of 64 bit, just like the buggy delphi compiler has promised for years.

    Keep waiting, keep getting updated, keep dreaming.

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