Windows on Arm Support

We support Windows on Arm as of Bitwig Studio 5.3, which is in beta as of today (November 21, 2024) and will be officially released in December 2024. This article explains how it's implemented and what to be aware of regarding audio drivers, plug-ins and controllers when using Windows on Arm. Many companies are working on this transition, and as soon as all these puzzle pieces are in place, it will become a very powerful platform for music production.

What is Windows on Arm? Arm is a CPU architecture that Windows the operating system (OS) of Microsoft now supports. Learn more about Arm here.

For Windows on Arm there are two ways to compile applications. Bitwig Studio 5.3 is a native Arm64 application that uses the full power of a computer running Windows on ARM. As far as we know, we're the first digital audio workstation to compile natively on Arm.

The other DAWs that have announced or released Arm support have decided to use the second option, Arm64EC ("Emulation Compatible"). This enables them to load x64 plug-ins in-process. As Bitwig Studio can host non-native plug-ins in a separate process, we have chosen the native Arm64 implementation, which gives us maximum performance. We have internally benchmarked Arm64 to be up to 20% faster than Arm64EC on Snapdragon X for certain algorithms.

Plug-ins: Due to our sandboxing, Bitwig Studio is able to load Arm64 and Arm64EC* plug-ins seamlessly alongside with emulated Intel 32-bit and 64-bit plug-ins. However, you will probably have certain plugins that refuse to install on Windows on Arm. For example as of today (November 21, 2024), any plug-ins using iLok are currently incompatible. These problems are not specific to Bitwig Studio.

Audio Drivers: WASAPI is available (for audio output only). To get reliable low-latency audio on Windows, you need an Arm-compatible ASIO driver for your audio interface. Certain manufacturers have announced forthcoming ASIO drivers, and Microsoft is developing a generic ASIO driver for USB Audio devices.

Hardware Controllers: Almost all USB MIDI devices will be supported out of the box, as they will work with the USB class-compliant driver. If you didn’t need to install a custom driver before, it should also work on Arm.

* Bitwig Studio 5.3 has no Arm64EC plug-in host, so Arm64EC plug-ins will be loaded inside the x64 plug-in host instead. While the plug-in host code is emulated, the plug-in itself runs natively, so the impact on performance should be small. This is due to lacking Arm64EC compiler support, which we expect to get resolved in early 2025.