Waves Reverb unusable with cakewalk - why?

[bhuether]

Everyone,

Try this: Start a cakewalk project with a single audio track. Add a waves reverb instance to that track. See if the CPU jumps to 50-60% just from that one instance.

I run an athlon thunderbird 800MHz with 256 MB RAM and am amazed that the Waves reverb can't be used. TC reverb works great.

I had a friend do the test and he got the same result. If anyone else finds the same thing, let me know.

Too bad such a good plugin is so impractical in the real world!

-brian

[rcj]

Mine does too but I usually use it on an auxilary send and process several tracks to put them all in the same acoustic space. I would love to be able to use it individually though on several tracks. It sounds great but it makes it hard to apply many other effects.

RCJ

[ThunderRoadPost]

You could apply it destructively to the individual tracks, thus freeing up your CPU for other tasks.

Just a thought.

[vinch]

The CPU consumption of Renaissance Reverb is indeed hi. This does not mean its not usable. The fact that it may load the CPU to 60% is part of what makes it sound so nice=).
When we released TrueVerb, it was considered a CPU hog while nowadays its not but it still sounds the same and consumes the same overall CPU cycles.
We usually have a list of technologies which wait for the commonly available computer resources to be adequite for using at least 1 instance in real-time. When this limit is realistic, the future prospects are only becoming better as CPU power is rapidly growing.
Using lighter Reverberation algorithms from Waves - "TrueVerb", or from other parties will reduce the CPU consumption but it won't be Renaissance Reverb which we feel is definately lined up with top most quality reverberation algorithms available.
If we can further optimize it wothout compromizing its sound, we will do so. Until then applying effect to audio or using in send mode are commonly practiced methods to workaround the limited shared resources that the computer offers. Calculation resources are always the trade off between ultra efficiency and uncompromized sound quality. This concept is as "real world" as can be.
The choices are rightfully in the user's hands.

Amir Vinci
Product manager,
Waves Ltd.