Hi all, just noticed the thread, I hope it's not too late to chime in.
The problem is most likely due to a denormal bug. However, I have not been able to see it, in fact the machines (two not-so-new Pentium-4 and one fairly old Pentium-3) I can access for testing don't exhibit any such issue. TAP EQ has been rock solid on all of them (I use it extensively). I suspect that many others have the same experience, since I haven't been flooded with bug reports. This certainly does *not* mean the problem is not real. However, I have come to suspect that (1) denormal behavior is very very processor dependant and thus fairly unpredictable across different processor types (maybe processors newer than mine are getting even worse?), OR (2) there is more to excessive CPU usage than a denormal problem. Regardless of which is true, it seems I'm unable to provide a fix since I cannot test whether a particular "denormal fix" macro does the trick. I just can't make a reliable difference. So, I would be very happy if someone who does have these problems would try out the various methods discussed so far, and report which of them works (if any). It should be possible to provide a replacement for the FLUSH_TO_ZERO macro defined in tap_utils.h. Replacing that macro should (positively) affect not just the EQ, but all other plugins as well. If you get this far, please please please make a patch of it and send it to me (or this list). I will merge it and release a new version of TAP-plugins. I can't think of anything else I could do. Tom