Interesting experience with Clarity vX

[Lawrence]

For my purposes, Waves Clarity vX is brilliant. I do a fair amount of voice recording and acoustic guitar recording and my space is fairly noisy. External noise from windows, a slight refrigerator and wine cooler hum, etc. Clarity removes a LOT of that with minimal artifacts. I’m sure there are other and newer plug-ins that do the same thing but clarity does the job for me, was very reasonably priced and is easy as pie to use. BUT:

The other day I produced a hip-hop session that had a lot of rap voices and a multitracked female vocal line. I used multiple instances of Clarity to remove the room noise, which can really build up. It was working great until I got up to about five or six instances at which time my computer went nuts. The processor bar was flying into the red constantly. I used a lot of other plug-ins during the session so I didn’t know exactly what was going on At one point Cubase simply refused to play back. Pretty embarrassing in front of a client.

In the long run, trial and error led me to the Clarity plug-in, or rather the amount of instances used. My computer is pretty old, (2019 Intel iMac) but I have never run into a chokepoint like that since I bought it. Subsequent Googling confirmed it, it really is a thing. The solution was simple, group the vocals and track in sensible ways and use less instances.

I doubt a lot of you have the same challenges that I do when recording live in my living room with an older computer (or are even Clarity users) so just an FYI.

[Guy Rowland]

It is thirsty. Weirdly, in Pro Tools on my older rig it would fall over when previewing it in Audio Suite mode. That's offline processing! Real time was a lot better, but it was still quite demanding.

Maybe you'd ran out of cores, and it then inadvertently attempted to run 2 instances on a single core.

In general when I wanted to use it in real time on a bunch o tracks, I'd route it all via a group (aux in PT terminology) and insert just 1 instance on that group. If you need to separate for a final mix you could offline process the clips maybe?

[Lawrence]

….which is what I ultimately did, Guy. Maybe my post lacked, ummm….clarity?

(I mean the group thingie, not the offline processing. I’d always rather stay live if possible.)