Two days ago I realised things were a bit wafty with my DAW setup, but now it’s time to do a proper cleanup, because upgrading to Reaper 5 64-bit has shown:

• My plugin stack is running 32 bit, but some plugins are starting to creep into the 64 bit territory.
• Half my plugins won’t run under 64 bit without upgrading them.
• Revalver is annoying the hell out of me and really just plain broken
• IK Multimedia just doesn’t quite work on the interface side of things anymore anyway.

Guitar

As I mentioned last time, I’ve found some replacement plugins and FX for the tone experiments I was doing in March 2018 (omg where does the time go?), so I’m now free of Revalver, but I had to reinstall everything with updated 64-bit versions. The only one I couldn’t do was MVerb, for which there are no 64-bit binaries available.

I’ve downloaded a few other all-in-one guitar effects racks and amp sims to try, so see if anything in there is particularly inspiring.

Orchestra

I’ve finally managed to kill off the IK Multimedia bits (synths and auth manager) and done my best to excise them from the hard drive. If I need to reinstall, I can, because I took care to make sure I had the original backups. It was so damn out of date that half the uninstallers wouldn’t work because they wanted a PPC system and I no longer have an OS that supports Rosetta!

I have no replacement yet.

Synth

Got Komplete Start 8 (I think?) up and running. There’s a slightly strange hoop jumping exercise where you need to install their plugin manager and then make a request for the Start suite through their site. It’ll all then show up in the plugin manager to download and use. I can see some interesting possibilities with Reaktor and Kontakt having got a keyboard to work with, which is very different from the last time I did anything with Native Instruments.

For now, this’ll have to take the place of the orchestra.

Final thoughts

So current state is that I’m on Reaper 5, 64bit and I’ve written off a chunk of money. Maybe I’ll get them working under Windows in some alternate future timeline.

This means I’ve got some old projects that I won’t be able to tinker or remix without some degree of effort, but then, that’s to be expected with software and it’s always going to be a moving target. I’m sure if I go back far enough I’ll find Guitar Rig 3 stuff, and that’s definitely not going to work well now.

The 32 to 64-bit switch over reminds me of switching processor back in the 2000s. Everything’s kinda the same, but not quite, and it all feels a little wobbly when you first realise you’ve got to reinstall everything.

Thinking about it in terms of business it really hammers home how sensitive the timing of system upgrades can be with larger projects. I can’t imagine being in the middle of a 4 - 6 month project and having to do this switch over. I’d also have to take a few days out to rebuild and retest everything to make sure that I can do what I did before. And if I had templates to speed me up? They’d all need recreating.

I’m not a “professional creative”, so trying to “keep up” with software releases (especially paid ones) could be a big financial drain for little gain. My lesson here is to think about that investment and if I’m going to be using it enough (or believe the company who makes it are going to support it enough) to make it worth while.