I liked to use multiple DSP plug-ins but I can't ever seem to find a stacker that doesn't tend to crash and take Winamp down with it. Is this due to the plug-ins themselves (they seem to be very stable on their own)?
Is there a more robust stacker? It would also be helpful if the individual plug-ins crashed themselves but didn't affect the whole application.
A little dated, but I joined the community so... I can tell you what I run that works for me and what has failed, so hopefully something useful comes out of this. For years I have used my computer for everything audio and have constantly tried to improve, well, everything. What I am currently running and why...
Actual playback is Winamp, but I also run J. River Media Center (x64 v23) because hands down it has the best audio processing, and it is very reasonably stable as a native vst/dsp plugin host. If you don't know anything about J.River, it is a stand alone media player and very good, but it's best heard and not seen if you know what I mean. J.River comes standard with a WDM driver which allows you to be able to choose it as a sound output device (basically a sound card), With this setup you get everything wiinamp and the best audio out along with stable vst/dsp abilities.
I have used about every vst wrapper out there (bluecat, ddmf, bias, jbridge, etc.) and crammed them into about every sound configuration you can do and I have always had problems and/or they are a mess to setup and configure to work local. Other than J.River, I am not aware that there is a media player that natively supports vst plugins for dsp, and considering that is the crux of the problem... There is a vst host plugin for Foobar but that goes back to the original problem.
Without getting into detail about vst's and hosts, the biggest problem is the resources required. Vst's, are for the most part, pigs. They are also designed to work in DAW's and not media players. Media players don't allocate the resources that DAW's do so even if you can get one, maybe two, crammed into your media player through a wrapper/host that is stable, the media player has to contend with not only doing with it is supposed to be doing, but to have it try and swallow the metric ton of information that the vst's are sending to it breaks it very quickly. Also, the host is probably not very happy at this point also because they are generally not designed to be fed from a lowly media player buffer. If any one of them fails the entire thing fails. That is pretty much the reason you don't see media players supporting it. Also, as if audio processing wasn't intensive enough, a lot of vst's have fancy lights and meters bouncing all over so the vst gui alone can easily break a host just because it looks fancy. About every host/wrapper touts stacking a bunch of plugins in it regardless of the application, but that is not reasonable in most scenarios.
The major caveat with any setup like this though is if you have a x86 host you will be limited to x86 plugins. Unfortunately that is the nature of the beast. And not all vst plugins play nice with proper hosts (e.g. Waves Audio plugins), but a lot do. I certainly encourage looking into vst/dsp processing because it can make a huge difference in sound quality, particularly if you're playing back from any kind of lossy format such as mp3. There are a lot of free vst plugins that are really good and make this very worth it.
If you have any questions feel free to let me know and I would be happy to answer them. I have spent more time than I will admit to getting solid dsp functionality through media player playback and if I can save anyone time, broken keyboards, and frustration I will feel better.
I currently can run (and sometime do) up to about 10 vst dsp plugins simultaneously and using yet another program, although indirectly, I can use any plugin regardless of x86 or x64 architecture and not only stable but no buffer issues, static, or delays. So I guess, yes it is very possible to get the dsp you want and hopefully without the headache of doing it.
I am around if you have any questions...
