I understand what you guys are saying and you're right it doesn't apply to me not because I use simple midi synths, it's because for something important and I'm using midi I use my Kurzweil PC3 keyboard and that thing sounds at least as good as the best softsynth plugins out there and it has very cool hardware controllers to shape the sound on the front panel.

Check out my other point and that is patch changes in the middle of a song. As people get more familiar with the program, they start using F5 a lot. That allows you to do all kinds of stuff at whatever bar you want to edit including a patch change. During beta testing a person used 24 RT instruments plus another 20 or so midi patches as a test but of course she was using a GM synth for that. The entire GM soundset was maybe 1.5 gigs. If you tried using your high end VST's for 20 midi patch changes and all of them were in the 500mb-2gig range it still wouldn't work even with 64 bit and 24 gigs of ram. I agree though that's a stretch, how many times would you use that many patch changes and have all those patches be that large? Probably not that often. That's the beauty of using a hardware synth, none of that matters and no latency issues for live playing.

I completely agree if it doesn't break the bank then sure let PG rewrite the program as 64 bit but I also agree the number of people who would actually take advantage of it is very small. As people move up the food chain as to sound quality a lot of them move to hardware synths for good reasons including price. I paid $1,300 as a close out for my PC3 and I suspect you have at least that much in your VST's with all the sound libraries. The Ketron SD2 module sounds great for about $400. Everybody does things their way and if you're not a keyboard player then you certainly don't need a keyboard.

Bob

Biab/RB latest build, Win 11 Pro, Ryzen 5 5600 G, 512 Gig SSD, 16 Gigs Ram, Steinberg UR22 MkII, Roland Sonic Cell, Kurzweil PC3, Hammond SK1, Korg PA3XPro, Garritan JABB, Hypercanvas, Sampletank 3, more.