My reverbs are killing my CPU....

steffeeh

steffeeh

New member
For a long time I've had issues with too heavy CPU usage in my projects. I've done everything I can to lighten the pressure, and a lot has improved, but there's still a lot of issues.
And just now I realised that my reverb plugins are causing a lot of heavy CPU usage (not kidding, switching on/off a single unit makes a major difference).
I mostly use the Smart Electronix Ambience, but even the FL Studio stock reverbs causes a lot of extra CPU usage.

Where do I go from here? Are there any CPU-light reverb units that sound as dense and good as Ambience?

I could freeze the reverb of a sound by itself, but that's a lot of extra work as I don't use normal parallel routing for my reverbs.
Oh and no I can't use reverb sends, it simply doesn't work for these tracks (plus then I'd still have CPU issues from only 1 reverb instance added).
 
The only thing I can think of is bouncing everything to audio. Whenever you find yourself happy with a reverb bounce it to audio and keep the reverb in the project file (or another one) so you can tweek it later if you need to. This is what I've seen many guys do when facing this kind of problems. :/
 
Yes, ultimately it will come down to you having to "commit" to some sounds. It's nice to have options, but that is also one of the "cons" of recording in the DAW world.

GJ
 
i use glaceverb for big reverbs but for basic stuff either the kjaerhaus free reverb or tal reverb 2 work just fine. i find using a very low amount of reverb wetness with a 2-4 sec decay time works great depending on the sound its applied on. variety of sounds epicverb is decent too
 
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If you assign certain reverbs to their own FX track (return) then you can freeze them once their sources are good enough to print.
This has some other advantages in that you can then edit the FX track and drop them in and out or shift them, reverse them, whatever.
You could even put more effects on those effects, such as a trance gate or whatnot.
It would allow the reverbs to do some stunts that wouldn't be possible as live plugin VSTs.
And of course, it would save CPU...
 
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I've tried the Valhalla reverbs, though I've only tried A/B-ing them with Ambience (there was some difference in CPU), gotta try inserting them in a DAW project and see if they work well CPU wise, but they seem pretty nice :)
 
If you can't use a send for a lot of tracks, not much else you can do other than exporting those channels and importing back into the project as audio files.

If you're mixing and don't mind the high latency, increase your buffer and this will help a lot to bring down processor usage.
 
Are you using a separate Audio Interface? The internal audio card (if PC) will tax the CPU. Audio interfaces should over come that.
 
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