As the majority of hi-tech musicians these days run lots of plug-in effects, how many simultaneous plug-ins a particular PC can run is a good indication of its limitations. A 'benchmark' test such as DAWbench (), which started life as a real-world song and then ignored the application's 'CPU meter' in favour of adding more and more plug-ins across 40 audio tracks, until audio glitching was heard, is therefore a good way to compare the relative performance of different PCs, or check whether your PC performance is all it should be.

While the original DAWbench Blofelds DSP40 test was for Cubase/Nuendo users only, this month sees the release of a new 'DAWbench DSP Universal' benchmark test that will be able to run on any multitrack audio application, and finally lets us compare the performance of different sequencers running the same plug-ins.

The new test relied on finding a plug-in that was sufficiently taxing to fully load today's fastest PCs without requiring hundreds of instances to be launched, yet was freely available to all. Over the last six months or so, Vin Curigliano and other members of the DAWbench forum have evaluated various alternatives, including iZotope's freeware Vinyl and the 30-day demo version of Sonalksis' CQ1. However, the most suitable candidate proved to be ReaXcomp, the multi-band compressor bundled with Cockos' Reaper, which is now also available in a...