.73

[Justin]

...with fun threading to help ease large numbers of tracks into working...

[Art Evans]

Hey, slow up will you? I'm supposed to be making the lunch! :)

[Justin]

And just uploaded a fix, the old one could hang if you set worker threads to 0 while playing, but fixed now..

[fluffy]

Doggone Justin! Wow! Great update. Everything now works absolutley perfect! (I don't have any FX on the project right now, I want to rule that out of any of my problems).

Down here in Texas, we say:

"That's why they call You Dad!"

You earned it with this one! :)

EDIT: CPU is also down significantly.

[Justin]

Updated again with configurable prebuffering levels.

Let me know how the sound stability is for you, everybody. Using this RME card at the lowest setting (1.5msec or whatnot) it's working good for me at 4 threads, 128 blocks, 33% prebuffer, at least with 20 tracks..

-Justin

[shane]

Good release. Worker thread are working...ah...dammit...well here, although it's kinda bizarre to hear only a few of the tracks start crapping out when the CPU bogs down. Kinda like that photo from Back to the Future...

[Art Evans]

Hmm, doesn't make any significant difference here using my normal test, but perhaps that's because it's geared more towards effects load than large numbers of tracks. (It's 12 tracks of 16/44.1 with four instances of "Ambience" reverb, again). Changing the new settings has no perceptable result - pagination still causes a crackle every time (unless I raise latency to unacceptably high figures).

The results I'm getting are in line with expectations, however - the test is quite severe.

Looking at the Windows Task Manager performance display I can see that only half the CPU is being used - it looks like no hyperthreading is going on. I get a significant reduction in crackling if I set affinity to one CPU.

[Justin]

OK .74 is up which adds NINJAM session loading (which works, but can use a lot of CPU/memory on long sessions, since it ends up being thousands of ogg files), and improves multithreading performance a bit more..

-Justin

[fluffy]

OH! Finally broke the 1 Meg mark! :)

[Justin]

OH! Finally broke the 1 Meg mark! :)

No, 1 meg is 1024kb, this is 1001kb. There is hope. :)

[fluffy]

Ha Ha! :)

'Tis true.

[fluffy]

She'll play at 1.5ms now, if I turn off all effects. I had to turn it up to 23ms before. Just for reference, Samplitude will play the same project with all the effects on at 1.5ms. (To be fair, Samp's go a 14 year head start :) )
The fact that Reaper will almost do it after only a couple of months cracks me up. Talk about fast progress!

Great job Justin!

EDIT: For further refernce, the project contains 30 tracks, and my box is a 1.47ghz AthlonXp.

[Andre]

OK .74 is up which adds NINJAM session loading (which works, but can use a lot of CPU/memory on long sessions, since it ends up being thousands of ogg files), and improves multithreading performance a bit more..

-JustinHi Justin - on the subject of compressed files, a feature which would be excellent to see in Reaper is the ability to record wavpack files.

I've already looked into this - not much around at the moment for live encoding with wavpack. It's an impressive algorithm - possibly superior to anything else out there - especially in lossless mode.

Have a chat with David @ http://www.wavpack.com/ - maybe you guys can cook up something.

All the best,

Andre

[pipelineaudio]

might be something interesting to add to the consolidate feature, or the "save project and media as" dealy

In case you dont see those two you gotta bug Justin for em :)

[fluffy]

Do I understand "consolidate" correctly? Your talking about bouncing a single track down, and having the new file replace the multiple files that were on that track?

And the Save feature You just mentioned would svae the project and audio files zipped into one? Like a cakewalk bundle file, or acid zip?

[Andre]

Yep - a "compress and archive project media as... wavpack / ogg / crepe suzette etc" would be handy as well. :)

Fluffy - in this case, "consolidate" refers to an entire project... you'd simply create a new archive folder and direct Reaper to export / copy all project data there, using whatever compression format was on offer.

If you wanted, you could further compress your project archives with http://www.izarc.org/ or whatever flavour of zip you like.

All up, using wavpack would be a boon for project exchange via broadband. Attractive for journos and doco people on the move, as well.

Andre

[pipelineaudio]

consolidate seems to be a term now for quite a few different functions

It would be an export and a cleanup among other things

My main use would be to render tracks from start to finish, with ONLY channel operations ( normalize, fade, crossfade, etc.. )and it would automatically replace the tracks they were on.

Options should be for what would be included, envelopes, fx, channel settings etc...

[fluffy]

My main use would be to render tracks from start to finish, with ONLY channel operations ( normalize, fade, crossfade, etc.. )and it would automatically replace the tracks they were on.

Options should be for what would be included, envelopes, fx, channel settings etc...

That's what I thought You meant, something like Samplitude's bounce dialog:

http://www.newearthsound.com/bounce_dialog.png

But the ability to save a project as a single bundle which contains all of the audio data and project information is very nice, too. Particularly for archiving.

[Andre]

... render tracks from start to finish...Yes, let's keep "consolidate" as just that. :)

[@ Fluffy - sorry for the dumb comment earlier ... ;)]

Andre

[Art Evans]

When it comes to performance testing, I rather wonder what we should be looking at currently - number of tracks playable without effects, or with some effects, or fewer track with heavy effects load - or everything? Any requests from your side (for once!), Justin?

[JPV]

But the ability to save a project as a single bundle which contains all of the audio data and project information is very nice, too. Particularly for archiving.
I'm all for this too. ACID Pro has the acd-zip format which saves all pertinent data into one file. Very convenient for organizational and storage purposes. Using Total Commander I have been able to use acd-zip files, just like regular zip files, and can extract the files if I need to.

Using something like rar, if possible, would be great. I'm assuming this is what Sony has done with their acid-zip format. It has compressions ratios, for wav files, that come pretty close to Wavpack's for efficiency. And files could easily be extracted if needed.

[pipelineaudio]

save as, copy and trim to wavepak

[JPV]

save as, copy and trim to wavepak
Yeah, I just like the idea of all the files in one easy to handle archive. :D

[pipelineaudio]

good idea

Id hope to see it in a format that anyone can open, not just reaper users

perhaps a self extracting deal ? or autozip?

[Art Evans]

Skimming above I'm not sure whether it's already been said, but I'd love to see an auto-archive of EVERYTHING required to run the program - including Reaper itself with prefs, relevant effects/VSTi dll's, audio of course - something you could hand to someone else and they'd be able to run it even if they didn't have Reaper or any of the effects used on their system (yet...).

Yes, I can see problems with copying FX etc that are not supposed to be copied.

[JPV]

good idea

Id hope to see it in a format that anyone can open, not just reaper users

perhaps a self extracting deal ? or autozip?
Like I mentioned in one of my earlier posts, ACID's acid-zip files can be opened as regular zip files. I don't know if the intended it that way, but you can do it.

[Tallisman]

**still too newbish allert**

and thus I wish I knew what the hell y'all were talking about.
:)
t.

[GreyLion]

Come to think of it --

If you used only the internal Reaper effects, and loaded all your synth and sample tracks into HighLife, you could probably do this. Just copy Reaper to a key, and add the project file to it.

Yes/no?

[Lawrence]

Yeah, I just like the idea of all the files in one easy to handle archive. :D

Is that a good idea having an entire project with audio files, peaks, and all the other parts of the project file(s) all in one single large file?

If that file gets corrupted then... you lose everything? Where in the other case you still have the BWF's to import into a project.

[JPV]

Is that a good idea having an entire project with audio files, peaks, and all the other parts of the project file(s) all in one single large file?

If that file gets corrupted then... you lose everything? Where in the other case you still have the BWF's to import into a project.
I suppose that's always a risk. If it could be based on some version of zip or rar it shouldn't be too risky... I would think. Maybe I'm wrong.

Either way, if implemented, this feature should be an option, not the default mandatory way of saving. It would serve as a great way to archive a project once done, or for use on notebooks where storage space is at a premium.