>Again, I think we are speaking of slightly different things. I am talking >about the time when (for example) the synth at the head of the chain has >stopped playing notes. A reverb with this as it's input would be told 'your >input is now silent'. It has a tail, of course. It can be marked silent >when it's tail is done. Once it is silent, it does not need to be >processed._
this sounds very dangerous to me. your description sounds OK. but ... my kawai k5000 is an additive synth with a moderately interesting FX bank. its still producing sound for most patches long after all of its "voices" are off. if someone were to write a plugin modelled on this kind of design, you can't really know when the top of the chain is silent. i have a gut feeling that this will turn out to be the common case, so common that trying for this optimization is a mistake. i could be wrong, of course. --p
