Speakerphone 2 continues to be amazing for me; yes, it's fairly CPU hungry and crashes occasionally in Ableton Live 8. When you need more free cycles, choose "Disk" streaming instead of "Live"; there's a touch more latency but when mixing, that's fairly inconsequential.

It has MANY good presets, such a varied bunch… about 500 of 'em. If there was a weak point, it'd be more sounds that emulate tape, VHS, and other mediums with "character". It has the basis to do this, of course. Maybe I should contribute my settings to Speakerphone 3.

I wonder if you would give me some advice on using Speakerphone 2 with Ableton for live effect-processing, possibility on incoming audio?

Just as the highly expensive Nord Electro 3 synthesizer is worth owning purely for a small portion of it's features (it's B3 organ emulator+effects) – I suspect the same is true of Speakerphone 2 and it's vinyl record degradation emulator. I've heard Izotopes Vinyl and appear to be less impressed than you were! I would find uses for all the other Speakerphone features, but vintaging things up would be a main reason for purchase.

Is Speakerphone CPU hungry? We expect things that sound good to feast on clock cycles, but sometimes that's not the case. I emailed Audioease and asked them, and they assured me it required very low CPU usage, but they're bound to say that. What do you think? I'm using the latest Mac mini and want to separately effect audio-clips and live-vocals.

(Another question – does it have enough pre-sets to last you a lifetime? I'm not a sound-designer, I'm just a keyboard player and adding a bit of vinyl distortion is about as far as I go with sound design!)

Cheers
BEN

Thanks alot!