PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

What's the verdict on this should I be running 64 or 32 with 5.1 ?
https://www.ableton.com/en/articles/64bit-myths-facts/

unless you really, really need to use a whole heck of a bunch of Kontact or similar large streaming libraries at the same time, use 32bit. many vsts and the sts samplers and xtc mode don't work in 64bit.

if you were doing serious video editing or cad/cam, 64bit would be the choice.

as Ableton suggests...

if you have a 64bit operating system can you run Scope 5.1 in 32bit?

no.

I tried 64 bit twice now and found it to be nothing but trouble. I use Ableton Live with 3 PCI Scope Cards and will be using 32 bit until I change my hardware to something other than my PCI cards. With 64 bit I gained nothing, as 90% of my sounds are Scope synths, but yet I lost Scope plugins, like Huidrums, my favorite drum source, as well as Osirus XP. I also noticed my Scope cards physically got much hotter with 64 bit. Ableton remains the same in 32 or 64 bit except for the fact that in 64 bit Ableton you loose all your 32 bit VST plugins. Again, in my experience I lost my favorite VST plugin, Wok Cromina String Machine. I don't see ANY advantages to 64 bit.

Slightly O/T as I'm not an Ableton user, but you can try what I've done and run both (dual boot). For me the 64bit install was worth it because the machine already had 8GB RAM and I use Kontakt a lot.

But there are other advantages, and also some disadvantages.

Boot up on Windows 8 is a lot quicker than it ever was on XP32, so from power on to music making the workflow is snappier.

On the down side I had to upgrade some of the software to get both ends of 64bit rewire happening. And tweaks, setups, problem solving, licensing, downloading and patching etc all the native stuff takes a while to get a new O/S up and running.

On the Scope side, a fair bit of copying of DSP, DLL and DEV files etc as I loaded up all the 3rd party devices for the first time. I also had to track down all my Scope license numbers and centralised them - which is probably a good thing.

So, upgrade was expensive (Windows 8 itself was the cheapest part of the software upgrades) and time consuming, but system is now stable and better supported into the future when running the latest patch / versions of everything.

You can still run Ableton in 32 bit on a 64 bit system. According the Ableton themselves, it's actually recommended to run the 32 bit application UNLESS you really need the extra memory provided by the 64 bits for huge sample-library stuff.