A) Reverberate is available for Mac and PC. There are no plans to support the LE versions of our plug-ins on Mac.

A) We hope that in providing high quality, useful music production tools you will be sufficiently motivated to support the good causes we are supporting. Some people run marathons for charity, but we'd rather write cool software.

A) From time to time the charities we support are reviewed and are chosen based on the impact they are making to the lives of those close to the LiquidSonics project.

A) No, but a lot is. The LE versions of all our software products are charityware and are feature complete software products capable of competing in the marketplace based on their rich feature set. We do not believe in artificially crippling the charityware such that is only serves as promotion for our chargeable products. Some products are not offered as charityware and the license fees charged are intended to support development costs of all of our software.

A) Depending on the graphics card and CPU you're using you may find that the CPU version of our plug-ins are more efficient than the GPU versions when using some buffer sizes. Many factors affect the way in which CUDA operates, and it depends on the OS you're using, the CPU, the graphics card and the various controller chips in your motherboard. For algorithms such as FIR filters (as found in many linear phase EQs or convolution reverbs) it is more efficient to work with large blocks of data. When using a GPU, this effect is exacerbated due to the mechanisms necessary to transfer data blocks across to the GPU, pass control back to the CPU to do something else while the GPU is working and then transfer the audio data back into main memory. If this can be done less often in larger blocks, the CPU can be less involved in this overall process, hence reducing CPU load.

A) At the time of development no implementations of OpenCL existed, but when they do it will be considered carefully and may be supported.

A) Early in the development of Reverberate and Reverberate LE we decided to make the distinction between the two products since they seek to achieve different tasks. Reverberate is a convolution reverb with a rich, dynamic sound achieved by providing a higher degree of movement than traditional convolution reverbs. Reverberate LE focuses only on the more traditional, static convolution reverb tasks which are much more suitable for implementation with CUDA.

To achieve the dynamism of Reverberate we use algorithms with feedback elements for the post effects (oversampled IIR EQ and linear-interpolated chorus). These algorithms are such that the next sample output is always dependent on the last, so the algorithm exposes a minimal degree of parallelism. Due to their heritage as graphics cards doing the same operation on lots of independent pixels in an image, CUDA GPUs are excellent when given massively parallel tasks that need to do the same operation independently on lots of data. They tend not to perform as well as a regular CPU when having to focus on a single data stream and work through it one sample at a time. This means key elements of Reverberate could not currently be implemented efficiently on the GPU (although this will probably change over time). Hence, Reverberate LE cuts back on what it aims to achieve in some areas to make further progress in others.

A) Yes, here.