Audiogridder - Tech Magic to the Rescue!

Several months ago I was considering building a second computer specifically to run nothing but a particularly CPU-intense plugin. For those curious, Adaptiverb by Zynaptiq is the plugin in question. Anyway, it's probably the biggest CPU hog I've ever come across, especially if you want it in Live mode. I thought by offloading it to a completely different computer it would ease-up on my DAW machine. I'd been thinking in terms of running audio back and forth between computers. Then however with a little research I stumbled upon Audiogridder.

In short, without running any kind of cables other than existing ethernet infrastructure, you can offload CPU processes to the other computer. The Audiogridder system consists of two different plugins: a host, and a plugin.

You run the server somewhere else on your network, and you run the plugin (VST2 /VST3/AAX/AudioUnit) on your DAW machine. While there is some latency, it's totally within acceptable parameters.

Some of you will now be saying that sounds like Vienna Instruments' Ensemble Pro, and you'd be correct, however Audiogridder is shareware.

There's another added bonus that you may not have thought of, the plugin works in macOS, Windows and Linux. That means if you have plugins that only work on Mac or Windows, you can - in my case - get an older Mac Mini and just let it sit there hosting that plugin. Have any plugins that aren't supported after a particular OS versions? Same thing. Setup a small server and let it just run the plugin. You can have as many hosts as you like, though each plugin instantiation can only access a single server at a time. No biggie. I currently have both a Mac Mini and a Windows tiny PC running as servers to offload the CPU drain. It works perfectly, like Magic!

More about Audiogridder:

https://audiogridder.com/