First, let me thank the developers for creating the only piece of software like this, and making it work so well. It’s a brilliant piece of kit, and fills a really desperate gap in my engineering work.
But! There’s always a but.
I’m having very different experiences with the plugin on Windows and Mac, and I wonder if anyone else has anything similar.
My goal is to use SurferEQ as a realtime processor during vocal practice/tracking. Yes, I’m taking into account the latency that is inevitable. A little bit of doubling is fine for my purposes.
Now, for testing, I’m using the simplest possible setup on both machines: Reaper, loading SurferEQ, using very short buffers (64, for example), and nothing else processing or disk streaming. On my MacBook Pro, this works beautifully. On my Winbox (running Win10), I get loads of artifacts that sound to me more like buffer underflows than gain issues.
I’ll be digging into that Winbox to see what I can strip out, and whatever other optimizations I can figure out - and I know that this is at least much a support topic as a forum question - but I do want to know what other users have experienced with the two platforms, and what, if anything, they’ve learned.
We are not aware of any audible differences between macOS/Windows.
Performance however are tricky (and can quickly become a boring discussion with the exception of software developers ).
Few tips:
While latency is critical, with multi-core CPUs sometimes the different for 64 buffer sample to 128/256 could be huge for getting the system properly working without crackles and stuttering.
There are also many things to try in REAPER settings such as:
LIVE mode, this might be not directly related and I guess you’ve used it (though you haven’t stated it),
SurferEQ2 has a ‘LIVE’ mode button. it reduce the reported latency to the host.
It’ll trade off pitch-detection for live situations.
Make sure you’re using latest SurferEQ. with each update we fix issues. versions prior to 2.0.2 had a denormalisation issue that could affect VST/VST3 formats.
With Windows machines as there are many types of machines running Windows, it might needs some tweaking and finding drivers that might limit performance at low buffer sizes.
One more thing,
If you still see you’re getting crackles and issues. feel free to send us the project through our support and we’ll further investigate it here.
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