I could throw in Cubase (haven't look at BitWig), and....am drawn to Reaper more than any others. Low cost helps too.

I might have missed something, but AFAIK Jack1 is not deprecated, but just an older, non multi threaded, implementation of the same protocol. jack2 is more modern, multithreaded, and all. Yet I think, the future for Linux audio systems is Pipewire. It is a modern, multithreaded implementation of the jack protocol, as well as the PulseAudio protocol, and its own. Therefore it's a drop in replacement for Jack and PulseAudio. It's much easier to configure, than Jack, provides the same routing capabilities, and can be used as easy as PulseAudio. Kind of best of all worlds. If it's stable with your distribution, prefer PipeWire. Else use any version of Jack. Jack1 has the networking capabilties, that AFAIK both Jack2, and Pipewire lack. That might be a good reason to still use Jack1.

@@christofdonat2702 yah, he asked about jack, i don't think he's aware of the other alternatives, some distro's still have oss. i've always found jack cumbersome, both versions, so i just avoid it, easy when it's only one person doing a thing. i don't remember why it's 'considered' deprecated by many distros, it may be the lack of threading or lack of dev. you may have also given an alternative to the suggestion i gave to arthurph, if jack1 is still really viable.

it might be fun to find out if the load can be passed off to another system over network, there's a LOT of client server based cooperative processing projects out there, some old, maybe some for audio. a quick search on a good search engine finds audiogridder, might be a kind of fish adam should be slapped with, to see if it makes him smell funny. waves audio, not foss. looks like either is a good start, if you can get some DIRT cheap very power efficient computer systems through a network switch set up, you'll have it solved, some systems will do it at a few watts.

Try 'freezing/unfreezing' tracks that you are done with. This will free up resources for you. Reaper Mania Link; kzfaq.info/get/bejne/e8CppciamNymmYU.html

bearing in mind, the pcduino3 nano is pretty old by now, i picked up 2 last year for 15cdn bucks each. low power, full desktop capable, an sata port, which is very rare on an sbc, arduino headers. plenty still out there and with those headers can get a hidef audio card attached and a console only RTOS, several each running 3-4 tracks of heavy effects out to a multichannel mixer, an art mx822 for instance, once you have over the network capability, you get so many interesting options.

Have you tried to print some of these tracks with all effects to new tracks, and then only play back them while recording? So you record one track, print it with amplitube, an all other effects. Then you play the printed version back to record the second one, while the original track is muted. You print that second track to yet another track, etc. When you've finished recording, you can get rid of all the printed tracks, and resume working with the original recording. Or reprint the tracks, you're changing the settings of any of the plugins. Then the plugins only have to work on those tracks, that you're actually working with, and therefore work even with older, less powerful CPUs.

Thank you so much for the suggestion! I will definitely give this a try!@@christofdonat2702