First point:
I want to remind on my findings with Cantabile + jBridge and running plugins isolated and with "performance mode" set.
You get much better performance this way that significantly shows up on Cantabiles cpu load meter too. Without I occasionally get some cpu spiking to astronomus levels (i.e. 500-2000& or so) and crackles while this disappears completely with isolating and performance mode.
Increasing audio buffer size in Cantabile does not work as effective. It reduces the allover load but the spikes remain and probably still create crackles.
I myself experienced Windows to provide strange timing behavior by it's scheduling strategies and also found that using separate processes gives much better behavior than threading in one process.
I know that many factors on a PC influence audio performace but probably it should be considered to melt jBridge technology deeper into Cantabile 3.x audio engine?
The cheapest thing I could imagine is an option to load plugins always isolated with jBridge and in performance mode...
A second point is gui activity.
When you hide Cantabiles gui and watch the Cantabile process cpu value in Windows task manager you will see a significant average cpu usage drop too.
It's probably unmanageable (or at least very much effort) but I think the best solution on a PC is to even run the gui in a separate process and make the audio engine another server process...
That's the principle I ended up with my own software to get the best timing behavior possible on Windows...
I would be pleased to hear comments on this from true development gurus - like Brad...
