I am trying to use it on a track in Sound Forge 11 and it won't do anything. When I load it up I can play with it in preview mode and make changes I can hear (well, once I figured out that you had to turn wet/dry up it is at 0% by default for some reason) but when I hit ok it doesn't actually change the audio any. Other non-melda plugins work fine, but it isn't interested in actually processing any audio.
 
Is there something I'm missing?

Here's a nice guide by Bitflipper that may help
http://soundbytesmag.net/spectraldynamicsdynamiceq/
 
Here's a thread discussing it, that I picked that link up from
http://forum.cakewalk.com...ics-work-m3216341.aspx

I understand how to use the controls, I mean that it won't apply any of the settings to the audio. It is just not processing when I hit "ok".

Right now, I am exceedingly unimpressed with this thing. It has pretty serious issues in any host I've tried it in.
 
-- In Sound Forge 11 (VST2 32-bit), it just doesn't work. You can use it in preview, but it won't commit any audio changes. Pretty useless.
 
--In Sony Vegas 13 (VST2 64-bit) it causes severe stuttering and dropouts if GPU acceleration is enabled. Disabling that makes it work properly, it seems, though I haven't done a ton of testing. It did apply some changes to the audio at least.
 
--In Sonar Platinum (VST3 64-bit) it screws with soft synths. When I put it on the master bus, soft synths start dropping notes and so on. Take it off, things are fine. Not maxing my CPU, not even hardly touching it in fact (I have a pretty heavy hitting system) but for some reason it causes playback failures.
 
This thing is proving to be worse than useless: It actively causes problems.
 
Worse than that is that I want to like it. I'm amazed at the improvement it can make to sound without a lot of effort, which is good because I'm not a skilled mastering engineer. However getting it to actually let me apply that improvement to the sound I want is proving to be nearly impossible.
 
I hope I can get this fixed, it was not a particularly cheap plugin :P

I can't speak to SF or Vegas as I have neither. But my current SONAR project includes MSpectralDynamics and is (for me) unusually synth-heavy: TTS-1, SampleTank3, 2 instances of Zebra, 7 instances of Kontakt, 4 instances of Omnisphere. There have been no dropped notes or other weirdness.
 
Maybe your soft synth issues are related to the GPU issue. I can think of no other reason why a dynamics processor should mess with soft synths.
 
You might try substituting the VST2 version and see if that makes a difference. I don't use VST3 plugins.
 
I do know that GPU acceleration can have issues with specific video adapters. When Vojtech first introduced the feature, I couldn't use it. But I reported the problem to him and he went to a lot of trouble to get it working for me, sending me a debug build so I could get him the information he needed to troubleshoot it. GPU acceleration works great for me now. You might try reporting that problem on the official forum - be sure to include your exact video card model - and see what happens. Vojtech has always been very responsive.

In SF10, I was able to commit changes to a file. Don't have SF11 to test.

I reported the Sound Forge problem via the in plugin interface and he responded:
 
"I have checked the Sound Forge myself and sadly I must say they don't implement VST standard correctly, they simply don't save the plugin state at all. Also from previous experiences Sony has no actual support, so they apparently don't care, so I'm afraid I just added first hosts to "unsupported" ones and that's this one and Sony Vegas."
 
That's BS in my opinion, Waves, iZotope, Tone Booster, etc all work in Sound Forge no issue.
 
I'll have to try SF10, I have a license for that too.

In relation to my GPU, if they have problems with it then, well, they suck. I have a GeForce GTX 980 which is one of the heaviest hitting GPUs out there. It has power for days. Also nVidia has very good, stable drivers.
 

It hasn't anything to do with how awesome your video card is. It's more about the fact that there isn't any standard interface or methodology for stealing GPU power for non-video applications. Consequently, it's a tricky thing to implement and requires many exceptions and alternate methods for different makes and models of graphics cards.
 
Furthermore, one plugin's GPU acceleration may interfere with another plugin's GPU acceleration. The whole thing's a bit of a kludge that video card manufacturers never intended, so it may never become a universal standard. In fact, there are only a two other vendors that I know of who even attempt it, and only one of them (Fabfilter) seems to have gotten it right.

Well, it wasn't intended back in the day, however with DX11 and DXGI 1.3 there are pretty standard interfaces for sharing acceleration and using a GPU much like a CPU. Works quite well, but does require updating one's knowledge and code to the latest standards, and of course having hardware that supports it.
 
That aside I don't mind turning of GPU acceleration, I've loads of CPU power, I mind the "Oh we don't support Sound Forge" garbage. That annoys me. I'd buy it if there were numerous things that had problems with Sound Forge, but this is the first plugin I've heard that doesn't work with it. Likewise the plugins apparanlty didn't work right with Wavelab until Wavelab 7 and they can't complain about improper VST implementation there since, well, Steinberg decides what the VST standard is.