I am tired of this!

[Alex1715]

Okay. Here's the thing.

I've been using reaper for good 2 years after ableton (I've found it really comfortable DAW and kinda fell in love with it). But now I hate it. And its hard to describe how many ideas I've lost because of constant crashing.

Right now Im at the point when I want to go and buy pro tools right now just hoping that it wont crash that way.

So while I remain a little bit of calm, could someone explain to me one thing: I've seen a lot of tutorials and ways where people use reaper, but could someone explain to me: How exactly do I need to use reaper to avoid crashing every half hour? Im using REALLY heavy projects (3-4 GB RAM) with kontakt, ewql and other heavy banks, a lot of virtual instruments and sometimes it just takes 3 minutes to load a project and 1 to crash.

So its not really a "I want to spend 10 hours figuring out whats wrong with my huge amount of plugs"-thread. I just want to know what could I do to avoid that. I know there are probably something wrong with very expensive plugins of mine, but Im not going to throw them out now.

Sorry for dickyness, but I can't find proper words right now.

[Andy Hamm]

Render and disable your vsti!!!

If you want to make chanes, re-enable, re-render and disable.

Every single person I've seen complaining about instability and crashing seems to be running vsti heavy sessions, but after the track is laid down there is no need to keep loading the system with it.

[wildschwein]

I guess when you're hardware is stretched to the limit something has to give. All the virtual instruments consume a lot of resources. I would personally try rendering out as much stuff as possible as audio files so you can be running less plugs in a session. Pro Tools probably won't help you unless you really spend a lot on hardware -- Reaper is way more efficient in my experience -- I was running/mixing about 50 tracks (many with plugins) on my last recording session on a pretty mediocre desktop machine and it held together till the end.

[Seventh]

Getting Pro Tools to avoid stability issues?

But yeah, some ppl had stability issues with at least ewql IIRC... try rendering those tracks and see if it helps.

[G-Sun]

Yes, freeze, render,
and monitor your pc-load
like read, write, cpu, ram.

Any specific plugins that needs attention?
Play with settings for that plugin. Buggy-mode, DFD-setting.

[nofish]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

Im using REALLY heavy projects (3-4 GB RAM) with kontakt, ewql and other heavy banks, a lot of virtual instruments and sometimes it just takes 3 minutes to load a project and 1 to crash.

Are you using 64bit Windows and 64bit Reaper or 32 bit ?
How much RAM installed ?

[Mercado_Negro]

Originally Posted by nofish

Are you using 64bit Windows and 64bit Reaper or 32 bit ?
How much RAM installed ?

And that's exactly the first two questions that should've been asked in the first place. My money is on 32bit all the way which would make sense.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

What they already said about freezing tracks, and...

Originally Posted by Alex1715

... Right now Im at the point when I want to go and buy pro tools right now just hoping that it wont crash that way.... Im using... ewql....

EWQL is a crap company that puts out crap software, and if you don't believe it, by all means get demo Pro Tools, Cubase, etc., try EWQL with them, and see if your problems go away.

[luk]

I felt similar for a while.

In my case it was windows theme-patcher that caused reaper to crash frequently.

Once I uninstalled it, reaper went back to normal.

[planetnine]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

...So its not really a "I want to spend 10 hours figuring out whats wrong with my huge amount of plugs"-thread. I just want to know what could I do to avoid that. I know there are probably something wrong with very expensive plugins of mine, but Im not going to throw them out now.

...But it is probably the plugin code that is crashing REAPER.

try freezing a bunch of VSTis and seeing if it still crashes.

Another possibility is bad RAM adresses, what kind of crshes are they? -try a memcheck...



>

[serr]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

Okay. Here's the thing.

I've been using reaper for good 2 years after ableton (I've found it really comfortable DAW and kinda fell in love with it). But now I hate it. And its hard to describe how many ideas I've lost because of constant crashing.

Right now Im at the point when I want to go and buy pro tools right now just hoping that it wont crash that way.

So while I remain a little bit of calm, could someone explain to me one thing: I've seen a lot of tutorials and ways where people use reaper, but could someone explain to me: How exactly do I need to use reaper to avoid crashing every half hour? Im using REALLY heavy projects (3-4 GB RAM) with kontakt, ewql and other heavy banks, a lot of virtual instruments and sometimes it just takes 3 minutes to load a project and 1 to crash.

So its not really a "I want to spend 10 hours figuring out whats wrong with my huge amount of plugs"-thread. I just want to know what could I do to avoid that. I know there are probably something wrong with very expensive plugins of mine, but Im not going to throw them out now.

Sorry for dickyness, but I can't find proper words right now.

The reason I upgraded from Protools HD to Reaper was because of all the constant crashing in Protools. There was no fix (except to go back to version 7 or 8 which ran on different and proprietary hardware).

I'm not saying that Reaper is 100% perfect. But it's a lot more stable than Protools! Protools will literally crash at least once every 30 min (even the simplest couple track session with no plugins up).

Before I say any more, first check your firewire or usb cable. Modern computers can still operate with a slightly damaged cable - it slows them down rather than stopping them in error making this even more fun to troubleshoot. Make sure your hard drives are behaving too.

After that...

The only thing I've found that takes Reaper down is a buggy plugin. In my collection it's UAD and JS (one of the 3rd parties that came tagging along with Reaper originally). I don't use any JS for any reason now and I only use UAD for final mixing (no tracking and absolutely not for running live sound).

I have studio sessions with 200 tracks and at least as many plugins (24/96 and 5.1 even) with no issues. I have 5 years of running live sound gigs with Reaper under my belt now. Zero issues and I have multitracks of every show with perfectly captured tracks (assuming my mic technique and preamp level was on point anyway).


I'm not trying to make you any more upset by trying to downplay your troubles! Just saying that based on my experience, I think some plugin is causing your troubles.


It was serendipitous that I decided not to ever use UAD plugs for live sound. I wanted to be able to use a laptop in a pinch and not be tied to their old obsolete pci card. Mostly Waves, a few Soundtoys, and some Rea-plugs. Pretty happy I just never had occasion to try any JS live either. That sure could have been embarrassing in front of an audience!

I only discovered issues doing studio work when track counts went up into the hundreds. Buggy behavior out of nowhere with only 7 - 14% cpu ever being used (the 8 core i7 just idles no matter what you throw at it). Misbehaving plugins. If you're running OSX, that's really all it could be. None of the culprits are instrument plugins either BTW.

Somewhat insidious to track down at first too. You have to cross a line with a combination of track count, plugin instances, and automation envelopes before the bugs come out. But then the root cause is in fact those plugins.


Do this:
Start rendering some of your tracks. Pick the ones with the most suspect plugin first.

When you find the misbehaving plugin and freeze that track, all the bugs will stop.
You'll probably end up freezing a few tracks in a number of projects and simply knock them back to the point that the system works with the bugs and not actually find the ringer at first. But then you'll stumble across it soon enough. You can still use that plugin. You'll just know to render it immediately.

[Alex1715]

Thanks for all the nice replies guys, I kinda lost my temper hour ago (feel bad about that)

Originally Posted by Andy Hamm

Render and disable your vsti!!!

If you want to make chanes, re-enable, re-render and disable.

Every single person I've seen complaining about instability and crashing seems to be running vsti heavy sessions, but after the track is laid down there is no need to keep loading the system with it.

I kinda know what you mean. I love to keep a lot of plugins there so I change the sound all the time.

I know there are Freeze option in Cubase, but I've never seen it in Reaper. I can render the track and disable all plugins on channel, sure. But does im not sure it gonna free some RAM space. (or what you mean by "keep loading the system with it.")

Originally Posted by wildschwein

I guess when you're hardware is stretched to the limit something has to give. All the virtual instruments consume a lot of resources. I would personally try rendering out as much stuff as possible as audio files so you can be running less plugs in a session. Pro Tools probably won't help you unless you really spend a lot on hardware -- Reaper is way more efficient in my experience -- I was running/mixing about 50 tracks (many with plugins) on my last recording session on a pretty mediocre desktop machine and it held together till the end.

Well, I've got i5 2500K, 8gb bla bla. Its actually kinda average good modern setup, but not sure that its gonna work well with 50 tracks, havent tried that much tracks yet (love to keep things simple as possible). Well if Im going to buy SSD I'd try this for sure.
Whats your setup?

Originally Posted by serr

Do this:
Start rendering some of your tracks. Pick the ones with the most suspect plugin first.

When you find the misbehaving plugin and freeze that track, all the bugs will stop.
You'll probably end up freezing a few tracks in a number of projects and simply knock them back to the point that the system works with the bugs and not actually find the ringer at first. But then you'll stumble across it soon enough. You can still use that plugin. You'll just know to render it immediately.

Will definitely do.


I really hope that after rendering stuff it will help me out. So basically rendering stuff is the only way to go here.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

I know there are Freeze option in Cubase, but I've never seen it in Reaper. I can render the track and disable all plugins on channel, sure. But does im not sure it gonna free some RAM space. (or what you mean by "keep loading the system with it.")

See these:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=141412
http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=141378

I'm running a buttload of tracks with Kontakt and EWQL btw. I get some crashes but I don't think for a second it's Reaper's fault. If I did, I'd jump ship.

[Andy Hamm]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

...
I kinda know what you mean. I love to keep a lot of plugins there so I change the sound all the time.

I know there are Freeze option in Cubase, but I've never seen it in Reaper. I can render the track and disable all plugins on channel, sure. But does im not sure it gonna free some RAM space. (or what you mean by "keep loading the system with it.")

You don't have to disable all of your plugins, just your VSTi.

You may work differently than I do, which is fine, but generally I have musicians that have all of their parts and arrangements worked out on their time, and I am recording their performances. My input on arrangements etc will go out to a group of people via email for discussion, and then parts will get re-recorded based on those discussions. This is all done prior to mixing.

The next part of the process is to clean up all of the tracks, making sure that everything is aligned and that short of thing which is all purely technical. If someone decides to make a change at this point in the arrangement, it means that time is being wasted and it is costing someone money. So I never move on to this step if the arrangement is in question.

The last step is mixing and production. This is the part that I like to do and if a musician wants to change something in the tracks or arrangement at this point, it's like pulling the e-brake on a train.

My point is that there are three separate processes that take place - writing and arranging, the technical process itself and then the mixing process. This is the way things have worked for decades because it's productive.

From my point of view the issue you are describing is a result of how you choose to work. Having VSTi loaded and using resources every time you play a track is totally unnecessary. To me it's allot like driving a tractor trailer around town as your personal vehicle and then complaining about fuel consumption.

Now I totally understand that some people are home recording musicians and you may be clumping the whole process together as you are trying to do everything at once and want instant gratification. I can see your need to have quick access to change a track that you have recorded, but having a muted, disabled vsti on one track and the rendered audio on the track right next to it really isn't such a big deal. You just buss the audio from your vsti into the audio track, enable the vsti when you want to make a change and record arm both tracks. Don't send the vsti track to the master, as it is routed through the audio track and put all of your vst plugins on the audio track. Doing this gives you more functionality and stability and you aren't loosing anything to get it.

[Alex1715]

Originally Posted by Andy Hamm

From my point of view the issue you are describing is a result of how you choose to work. Having VSTi loaded and using resources every time you play a track is totally unnecessary. To me it's allot like driving a tractor trailer around town as your personal vehicle and then complaining about fuel consumption.

Now I totally understand that some people are home recording musicians and you may be clumping the whole process together as you are trying to do everything at once and want instant gratification. I can see your need to have quick access to change a track that you have recorded, but having a muted, disabled vsti on one track and the rendered audio on the track right next to it really isn't such a big deal. You just buss the audio from your vsti into the audio track, enable the vsti when you want to make a change and record arm both tracks. Don't send the vsti track to the master, as it is routed through the audio track and put all of your vst plugins on the audio track. Doing this gives you more functionality and stability and you aren't loosing anything to get it.

Good point. Well, I think way more experienced composers can do most of the job using three step system. When I work on my own project I love to discover something new, go from third step to first and back. Kinda love that stuff. Great piece of advice though, thank you!

Originally Posted by AmmoniumNitrate

See these:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=141412
http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=141378

I'm running a buttload of tracks with Kontakt and EWQL btw. I get some crashes but I don't think for a second it's Reaper's fault. If I did, I'd jump ship.

That thing is amazing. The guys who wrote freeze macro should have their own sit in heaven.

[EvilDragon]

EastWest along Kontakt? Bound to have problems sooner or later. PLAY is just bad coding.

[Alex1715]

Originally Posted by EvilDragon

EastWest along Kontakt? Bound to have problems sooner or later. PLAY is just bad coding.

Not at the same time, lol. I was just saying that I use some really heavy banks here and there. Whats PLAY you are talking about?

[EvilDragon]

PLAY is EastWest's sampler, used for EWQLSO etc. for quite some time now.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

Not at the same time, lol. I was just saying that I use some really heavy banks here and there. Whats PLAY you are talking about?

Play is the EWQL software that runs when you use EWQL libraries. It's software written EWQL. When it messes up, it crashes Reaper. Windows will tell you Reaper stopped working, but that's EWQL's fault, not Reaper's.

I have 50+ instances of EWQL Play and Kontakt in my projects, but by Freezing a lot, I'm not having problems.

[Alex1715]

Haven't touched Reaper yet (Im planning to get back for it tomorrow), but thanks to everyone for replies. You guys are great.

[crimsonmerry]

Huge fan of Pro Tools for +6 years, and 2 years ago i personally switched to REAPER. Never regret it

[electricthing]

Originally Posted by luk

I felt similar for a while.

In my case it was windows theme-patcher that caused reaper to crash frequently.

Once I uninstalled it, reaper went back to normal.

Hi, do you mean Windows aereo theme pack? Or something else?
Just curious cause I use it and had some crashes on Windows 7.
I better stop using it to be safe.

[Dan-Jay]

Every time I use PLAY in Reaper it crashes eventually. I just always make sure I save.

However, I think it is best to use PLAY in something like Vienna Ensemble Pro 5. PLAY seems to be the most stable in that program and VE Pro would probably not crash Reaper.

[inertia]

Reaper crashes a lot for me too. Every session without fail. I have to constantly hit Ctrl-S to make sure I lose no work but invariably I edit some plugin settings and the fateful crash dialog box pops up.

I am not sure where the fault lies...mostly the plugins, I would say...but sometimes it reports the ATI card dll as the reason.

I don't have any other DAW to test the stability but I am glad I am not the only one experiencing this.

[wildschwein]

Originally Posted by Alex1715

Well, I've got i5 2500K, 8gb bla bla. Its actually kinda average good modern setup, but not sure that its gonna work well with 50 tracks, havent tried that much tracks yet (love to keep things simple as possible). Well if Im going to buy SSD I'd try this for sure.
Whats your setup?

Windows 7 64-bit on a consumer desktop machine I got from China via eBay a few years ago for about $300AU. I think it's about a 2.8GHZ Intel processor, 8GB ram, + 500GB hard drive, and I have an extra 80GB hard drive I chucked inside to record to rather than recording on the system drive -- I think this helps with system efficiency (at least that's what my old Pro Tools install told me). I use Reaper 64 with a MBox 2 Factory as my interface. No SSD or anything like that. There's no way I can get 50 tracks going in Pro Tools though -- maybe 20 if I was really conservative with plugins and did a lot of bouncing to burn effects to each track etc. Reaper is amazing in terms of how it uses system resources.

[ivansc]

All of you experiencing regular crashes with reaper, DONT accept them.

There is no reason that a medium powered system with a halfway decent interface cannot del[with some pretty heavy duty projects.
I use a lot of VSTis and dont have any issues like this on a very modest AMD system.
Nor have I ever had problems like this unless I had a rogue plugin or an external factor (usually something else wanting to hog cpu or interrupts) messing reaper up.
It is worth spending some time to eliminate the root causes, really!

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Here's a fun experiment. Go to EWQL forums (http://www.soundsonline-forums.com/) and post this:

Okay. Here's the thing.

I've been using EWQL products for good 2 years (I like the sound and kinda fell in love with it). But now I hate it. And its hard to describe how many ideas I've lost because of constant crashing.

Right now Im at the point when I want to go and buy VSL right now just hoping that it wont crash that way.

So while I remain a little bit of calm, could someone explain to me one thing: I've seen a lot of tutorials and ways where people use EWQL, but could someone explain to me: How exactly do I need to use EWQL to avoid crashing every half hour? Im using REALLY heavy projects (3-4 GB RAM) with kontakt, ewql and other heavy banks, a lot of virtual instruments and sometimes it just takes 3 minutes to load a project and 1 to crash.

And watch EWQL censor the post and ban you; and then you will understand better why you are getting crashes.

[The Telenator]

EWQL and Kontakt or no, it can be a true detective story trying to determine the culprit(s) to all of this crashing business.

I decided long ago when I first made the move to recording my own projects on a home system that I wasn't going to put up with any of this crashing business. Along with this, I wouldn't dream of using anything like EWQL or any plugin that is known unstable and/or that brings along banks of a gig or more. I simply have no use for them, as good as some of them sound. There are much lighter and easier alternatives, and I'm not about creating full symphony orchestras anyway. I've encountered a couple of buggy VSTi plugins along the way -- and got good and rid of them -- and now haven't had Reaper crash on a project in more than a year.

I should also mention that, for my own projects anyway, I'm not interested at all in 50 or 100-track counts. I've arbitrarily set a limit of 48 at most. Just because I have a system that can handle more doesn't mean that I should. Somehow, fiddling with so much begins to feel too much like work again to me; it takes all the fun out of it. These days I like to keep work as work and distinct from my own creativity -- personal projects that should feel as little like real work as I can manage.

I can certainly understand why others might want to produce these totally massive studio projects on their personal systems, but to me it usually looks and sounds like excess and overkill. It smacks of the sorts of over-production that crept into '80s music, stuck around in parts, and sucked the life and grit out of many of the tunes then. This way of doing business now shows up in home recording in these large and often unstable projects we are discussing here.

More power to you if you can pull off such ordeals smoothly and without a glitch. At what price though? Today, it takes someone with a degree in mechanical engineering and costs me nearly $1000 each time to have my automobile tuned up once or twice a year. This was something I or practically any backyard mechanic could do for ourselves not so many years ago. I hope no one is making projects more complicated simply because they can, because I listen in vain to hear the improvement and virtues of doing this and I simply can't hear the merits.

Did the music of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or even Jimi Hendrix sound too thin or simple for you? Would any of those have benefited from 124 or more tracks on all songs? Even when Phil Specter was allowed to fool with and 'build up' the Beatles' Let It Be album he had limited tracks (very limited still by today's standard!).

I don't resort to bouncing tracks around like George Martin or Eddie Kramer were sometimes forced to do, but I do render groups down when I have the basic sounds I'm after, close enough to be handled by the final mix. I like to get all the stinking complexity out of the way! We have enough to click on already, don't we?

Someone is asking in another thread How to Get the Sound of The Police. Aside from a couple of songs on their Synchronicity album, the answer is, AVOID just about all of the troublesome business we are mired in in this thread.

Good Luck getting Reaper to handle massive plugins, track counts and projects. It is possible. So is a manned trip to Mars. I just sometimes have to wonder the need.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Originally Posted by The Telenator

I just sometimes have to wonder the need.

I'll stop if you buy me 6 real orchestras to use instead. Even 1 orchestra has a lot of instruments, capable of a lot of different articulations, and it can make sense to separate different articulations onto different tracks.

Beethoven would have been limited to guitar, bass, drums, and a singer if your manifesto took hold.

[The Telenator]

Ring your local Salvation Army. They have an orchestra or band that will play for events, don't they?

A thought about 'real orchestras' in recordings. More and more, as I'm listening to sound tracks to movies and shows, I'm hearing less and less faux orchestras, of the sort we're talking about in these plugins. Not only are they using nearly no real orchestras, but more and more no contrived ones either. Instead, I seem to be hearing a lot of the 'lone composer with a really fine synth' doing much of the music. My guess is that fewer and fewer are wanting to bother with these beast instrument plugins, opting for a good Zebra 2 synth or similar ... with just a few oddball ethnic and 'for-atmosphere' VSTi, such as those Middle Eastern ones that keep turning up.

[The Telenator]

BTW, your Beethoven comparison? He would have been limited to at most perhaps six tracks, perhaps even less. Instruments weren't all thought of as individual instruments. And Cf. how they have recorded orchestras through the decades ... started out with only a couple of mics, etc., went from there. Point is, he would never have needed today's vast track counts. Not even close.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Originally Posted by The Telenator

BTW, your Beethoven comparison? He would have been limited to at most perhaps six tracks, perhaps even less. Instruments weren't all thought of as individual instruments. And Cf. how they have recorded orchestras through the decades ... started out with only a couple of mics, etc., went from there. Point is, he would never have needed today's vast track counts. Not even close.

Ninth Symphony: 17 parts, even when you group the instrument: http://javanese.imslp.info/files/img...nd_3_B_9_1.pdf

Star Wars soundtrack... 31 parts.

It's really not that much of pain, once you learn:

1) save your work;
2) bring EWQL online, use it, take it offline;
3) save your work.

I have low patience for crashes and technical problems. I understand your zero-tolerance policy for that; but it's not going bad with all these tracks.

[Gavinchan]

Originally Posted by EvilDragon

EastWest along Kontakt? Bound to have problems sooner or later. PLAY is just bad coding.

Soooooo true. I WAS on Protools/WIN and then moved to Reaper/OSX and my experience is 1000% better now, much less crashes, not to mention all the other benefits you get with REAPER that you dont with Bloatools, but EWQL is still buggy as hell, 5 years on they still cant get it right.

I have come to accept that there are some things you just cant expect from EWQL PLAY plugins, you have to treat them like a ticking time bomb. The sounds are fantastic, but try to do too much at once, and they WILL bring your DAW session down. Im a heavy VSTi user with a fairly up to date system, and every other plugin I use is rock solid, (Kontakt, Spectrasonics, tons of other VSTi's) EWQL really have no excuse.

So I still use EWQL from time to time, but I always save my session just before I do, and freeze those tracks as soon as Im happy with them.

[xpander]

Originally Posted by AmmoniumNitrate

Beethoven would have been limited to guitar, bass, drums, and a singer if your manifesto took hold. Good thing it didn't, IMHO.

I'm afraid none of the classical composers will serve as an example for modern excess of resources, especially Beethoven. He was "limited" to piano, organ, violin, stacks of paper and pen. You didn't really think he always had an orchestra available and waiting while he was composing? He also lost his hearing long before some of his allegedly greatest works, so not much use for the instruments there anyway.

Not saying crashes should be accepted as long as the setups are reasonable, but respect where respect is due.

[AmmoniumNitrate]

Originally Posted by xpander

I'm afraid none of the classical composers will serve as an example for modern excess of resources, especially Beethoven. He was "limited" to piano, organ, violin, stacks of paper and pen. You didn't really think he always had an orchestra available and waiting while he was composing? He also lost his hearing long before some of his allegedly greatest works, so not much use for the instruments there anyway.

Not saying crashes should be accepted as long as the setups are reasonable, but respect where respect is due.

I have so much respect for Beethoven it's scary. I actually compose for orchestra away from the computer/instruments, on paper or in my head, but unlike Beethoven, I don't find a lot of orchestras asking to play my compositions, hence the DAW.

[xpander]

Ok, fair enough. Composing in head and on paper seems to be a rapidly vanishing skill on our times, so I commend you on that also.

[wildschwein]

Going off topic I think, but in the end you're only limited by your hardware, your budget and most importantly your imagination. Les Paul was doing 24 track recordings with Mary Ford in the early '50s and it was amazing. All the artists mentioned above like the Beatles, Hendrix and Beethoven all pushed the boundaries of what was available at the time. Just 'cause they were limited by the track count of their day we are not and we don't have to be -- and although there is nothing wrong with using just a few tracks if that's what the song calls for, it can equally be argued that there isn't anything wrong with using a lot either if that's what you have to do to get the song to where it is in your head. I don't set out to do big projects but sometimes it just grows and as you record you hear more and more possibilities. It doesn't mean you have to have 100 tracks all going at once though. A lot of modern Pop tunes mixed in the box can have up to 200 hundred tracks; although they're not all necessarily active at the same time. The point is there are no rules except the ones we impose on ourselves and the limits of our technology of the day.

[Mink99]

Hi Alex

Ewql and Kontakt are available in 64 Bit versions. And the most important feature of 64 bit processing is that you can overcome the 2 or 4 gig limitation of 32 bit operating systems.

If you have a load of 3-4 gig from your sample players in an operating system that can only handle a maximum of 3.2 gig at all and a maximum of 2 gig per running application, the samplers all switch to disk streaming mode, and the PC is at its limits.

Now, if the smallest thing goes wrong in the machine, eg, some driver trying to reconnect to its device, a disk rearranging sectors, whatever, you will either have a ruined recording or a serious crash.

[alextone]

I'm currently using a project template that has:

251 tracks
15 instances of Kontakt running orchestral sample libs (including Mural from Spitfire Audio, and the complete Sonic Implants/Sonivox symphonic collection among others...)

this is on:

intel sandybridge i7 8 core
64GB of ram
OS and sample libs running on 3 SSDs.

64bit Kontakt (5.3.1)
64bit reaper (4.62)
64bit wine (1.7.19)
64bit debian "8" (jessie)

No crashes, aside from one rotten nki instrument converted from gig that went in the trash afterwards.

When the template is running, Reaper uses approx 18% of CPU, and RAM usage is about 30GB. (CPU goes right down to 6-7% when transport is running)

Are you sure your hardware is capable of running the project you want?

For what it's worth, i took a nice jump forward in stability, when i had my studio box built with 3 SSDs, not only for Reaper, but in general, when handling Audio streaming. Don't know how it is in Win and Mac land, but in Linux, i can set parameters for the drives to maximise disk read efficiency. (using what's called a Fstab configuration file)

I would recommend using SSDs for OS/audio streaming, based on my own experience.

Alex.

p.s. I'd also say run everything 64bit if you're not already. 32bit is yesterday's news...

[The Buddha Rats]

Reaper isn't the problem here, the way you're working is the culprit.

Just a word of advice: It's less taxing on your CPU to playback audio/wav's vs. driving all those heavy soft synths during MIDI playback. Force yourself to commit to the sound you want and render your MIDI to wav. You can then re-save your file and disable or delete the vsti.

Heh. PLAY. What can anyone say about that piece of software that hasn't been said already? Stick to Kontakt.