external computer for DSP for plugins

would ardour benefit for the ability to have us use a external computer device to run DSP for plugins under linux on it or any os that you run. for linux i would like the ability to run plugin dsp on a arm board or raspberry pi board from my main board n case it doesnt have enough cpu power for it.

the complications from doing things this way are generally going to make it MUCH MUCH simpler and maybe even more cost effective to make sure your “main” computer can run all the desired DSP.

Several companies have created products that do this sort of thing (Waves’ SoundGrid is one, UAD is another). It represents a very significant engineering effort to get it to be even close to the ease-of-use of “native” plugins, and that doesn’t include be able to open plugin editors (“GUIs”) on the main computer’s screen(s).

Running the external “DSP computer” like a hardware insert doesn’t take a lot of work but is extremely inconvenient on many different levels.

i understand, maybe we have reached a point in technology where its not necessary

@mrskytown

I would suggest we have. Most DAWs including Ardour support multithreaded processing, andCPUs these days are advancing in both power and core count (See AMD threadrippers for instance) so that what used to take racks of equipment can be done on a single moderately priced computer these days. The people that really utilize the above solutions that Paul mentioned are either after a particular plugin in many cases (UAD) or running on a lower power system like a lightweight laptop, or running in the live sound space where plugins are still fairly rare(Waves Soundgrid) in the manner we think of them (Which is a selling point for Avid consoles for some people, and soundgrid for others)

       Seablade