It's mostly for the specialized tooling the application has for wave editing (which go beyond the Wave Editing in the DAW, or the Audio Editing in an NLE like VEGAS Pro). since the DAW has effects that are generally better than those in Sound Forge, anyways. But for something like Samplitude, you barely need it for the effects it has. Sound Forge is, to me, most useful as a companion to a DAW like Samplitude Pro Suite or an NLE like VEGAS Pro - which can launch it as an external editing or destructive Wave Editing/Cleanup. You'll have the same tools across all of your Audio/Video Products, without the need to switch builds to access them. They ship with VST2/3 plugins, 32- and 64-bit, as well as AAX. You can get those as low as $9.99-29.99 on sale, pretty routinely. Those iZotope plugins are really old (6+ year old, or something?), and are outclassed by their Elements products, these days. I use SF Pro 10 (or 11) when I need a particular plug-in from the mastering suite.Ħ4-Bit matters mostly for plug-in compatibility, but most VST plugins are still shipping VST2 and both 32- and 64-bit plugins. I suspect the mastering suite will run in the x86 version of Pro 12. My Ultrafunk DX plug ins will not run either, but the SCS legacy DX plug-ins run in all versions (go fiqure).
The Sound Forge / iZotope Mastering Suites 1&2 I have/had are DX (Direct X) and do not run in 64 bit SF Pro 12. The different Pro 12.1 versions can be downloaded from links in a post. they can be installed concurrently but I have not tried it. Pro 12 has both 64 bit and 32 bit versions. All versions of Sound Forge, prior to AS 12 and Pro 12 are 32 bit (x86). " Is version 10 32 bit only and version 12 64 bit?"