I had to reinstall Win 10 and all my plugins and now I have a super weird issue: I get audio dropouts when I INCREASE the buffer size.
Why would I want to work with higher buffer sizes? Sonnox Supresser needs at least 512 samples.
128 and 256 samples work fine but beginning at 512, I get very frequent crackles. At 1024 samples the crackles are constant.
Any idea whats wrong with my system? Could a plugin cause this?
My system:
Win 10, Reaper 5.92
RME 802 clocked with a Lucid 88192 (changing clocking to internal doesn't help)
2x UAD pci-e
I send all tracks out to analog summing and then back into Reaper. Worked perfectly fine before.
Some audio interfaces have a max block size they support.
My MOTU's don't like anything over 1024 samples or the system crashes. My Apogee Rosetta800 likes a max of 1024 samples for HD sample rates but only 512 samples for SD sample rates.
I'm told this depends on the coding in the driver (which would be the class compliant driver in OSX for the Apogee) and it sure as heck isn't a published spec.
I don't know if this is your issue. Trouble at a 512 sample block size is suspicious. And running UA plugins in Windows sounds like a red flag of course.
How are you controlling sample rate and block size for the connected interface? Reaper Preferences/Audio/Device page (boxes ticked and values entered) or 3rd party control panel (boxes unticked in Reaper preferences to disable control from Reaper)? First choice is control from Reaper unless 3rd party control is required from the interface. Might be worth a revisit to this.
At a certain point increasing buffer sizes actually increases the CPU use, because blocks of audio start getting big enough to thrash the CPU's cache... How big that is depends on the CPU, channel counts of the tracks involved, FX used, etc.