A full day of largely programming. Prometheus and SFXEngine have been updated to make a switch to 64-bit versions relatively easy. Both programs and plugins compile in 64-bit without warnings, and 64-bit Prometheus works with a test plugin; I'd have to spent a day recompiling them all to get it fully working. It can't load any programs or sequences saved from the 32-bit version, as the save-file structure sizes vary between versions. I'm confident that 64-bit SFXEngine would be the same.
There are two key benefits to 64-bit versions. Firstly, that 32-bit programs are limited to 4Gb, and potentially memory-hungry programs like these would benefit from more memory. I've only once (in 24 years) touched upon running out of memory with Prometheus, and the recent options to switch off interpolation on a per-sample basis actually save lots of memory, but larger capacity can't hurt. It would make some tasks, like making SFXEngine capable of processing full songs, or long tracks for audio books, would be a good thing. It may be capable of doing that now, but there's no harm in increasing the capacity. The second reason is that 64-bit programs on a 64-bit system are 20% or 30% faster. Prometheus is already faster than its ever been, and would have to go a long way on this PC to slow below real-time, but there's no harm in increasing speed either.
The downsides are minimal. A 32-bit program is smaller and has a lower memory footprint, but both programs remain small. 64-bit Prometheus is 1.03Mb, vs 834Kb for 32-bit. Plugins are 10Mb; perhaps then 15Mb for 64-bit. MuseScore 4, by comparison, is 81Mb, yes 8 times bigger, yet less powerful. The biggest downside is that I'd need to make new file formats for everything, the 6th new file format for Prometheus (the program needs to detect and import all older formats). This means new data structures for everything that can be saved/loaded, identical in all but size. SFXEngine would be the same, though it is less complex.
Today's changes took until 3pm, and SFXEngine v2.02 is now published.
After that, much music admin. I hand-checked every ISRC code for duplication and found 3 or 4 more duplicates. These were not too serious as all duplicates were for the same tracks with very slight changes, 2 or 3 seconds shorter, for versions shared between a core album and a compilation. Of these, only one version of any track is currently released on digital platforms, so the admin burden is low and not too important. Still, each track needs a unique ISRC, so new codes were created for the offline tracks. Since 2001 I've recorded and registered about 70 music tracks per year, so today's checks involved 300 or 400 text-file searches to check that each code was correctly assigned to a unique recording. This was 2-3 hours of tedious clicking, but it's all done now, my first such check in 24 years.
