Stereo Tool

I am running ST v3.14 with Winamp v5.351
Toshiba Satellite LS35 notebook.
XP Pro SP2, 1.46GHz Intel Celeron and 1GB RAM.
Prior to start up, system is idling at 4-5%, upon starting Winamp with ST, jumps to 77-89%, with significant slowdown of system.
I have used ST 2.x prior to installing 3.14, and 2.x did not respond well with Winamp 5.351 as well, but in previous releases of Winamp it had little problems.
Now when I go to minimize ST to tray, it takes about 30 seconds to respond. Moving my cursor anywhere is slow and painful. Any other applications running are slow as well, of course.

Hi Lazarus,

In Stereo Tool 3.x, I have performed a lot of optimizations to make the CPU usage lower. But I have also added a lot of new features, that all use some CPU. On newer systems it usually takes up about 10% of the CPU with everything enabled.

On older systems, the best way to get a decent CPU usage (even lower than that of Stereo Tool 2.x) is to disable everything that's new.

The easiest way to do this is:
- Press the "RESET" button. Now everything is disabled.
- Set "CPU Usage" to Low. That's still better than any of the 2.x modes.
- Turn on the Multiband compressor. DO NOT enable HQ mode, Post Filtering or Clipping. Leave "pre-limit input" at OFF. (or, in Advanced mode, leave the pre-limiter off).
- Turn on the final limiter. (NOT the final pre-limiter).
- If you want to use stereo filtering, turn on the Stereo Image filter. Make sure that "Fix AZIMUTH" is turned off.

This should use less CPU than version 2.x did.

Please let me know if it works!

tried all you suggested and it basically works. has brought down the cpu usage to 30-40%, with spikes to 100 at the beginning of a track, but briefly. BTW, forgot to mention, the majority of my music is in FLAC.
also, maybe a suggestion: make a version that works with foobar2000 :)
I just also unloaded a lot of native WA plugins that I have no use for, and it shaved 5-10% off the cpu usage as well.

Thank You for your help!