Old 03-24-2014, 05:05 PM   #1
rickisabelle
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Default A Reaper Midi Nightmare

A Reaper Midi Nightmare

An artist friend and I were having a beer at a local bar called the “Last Safe & Deposit” in Lowell, Massachusetts when we found ourselves comparing war stories – not actual war experiences but, times when life had kicked our asses.

One of his tough experiences was coming home one day to find his house and dozens of paintings, he had slaved over for months, burnt to the ground.
I had a “significantly milder” but similar experience happen to me while working with Reaper. I’m writing this to help others to avoid this experience.

During my forty years of recording music I’ve only encountered a few product developers who went out of their way to stand up for the poor musician. Two of those people who immediately come to mind is Greg Mackie, who designed preamps of exceptional quality and priced them so low that even a starving musician could afford them and, the other is Justin Frankel who created Reaper, a DAW that often out preforms the best and most expensive recording software in the world yet, is priced at pennies on the dollar price.

Like Justin, I think Reaper is nothing short of amazing, however, there’s an option available within Reapers preferences that is a nightmare waiting to happen for its users and has happened to me. What makes matters worst is, this option is recommended.
I don’t have Reaper in front of me at the moment so please forgive minor details I may get wrong.

Under Options/Preferences/Media/Midi (I believe that’s the location) Reaper provides two options for storing midi files you have created in Reaper’s Midi Editor. The recommended option is to store your created midi files within the Project File. Basically, you’re embedding your midi files inside the Project File.

Here’s the problem: If you embed your midi files within the Project File and that particular Project file freezes and permanently locks you out, you will lose all of your midi files associated with that project. If you work a lot with midi, as I do, you can literally lose weeks of hard earned midi arrangements in a split second.

The second option is to handle the midi files the exact same way the wav files you create are handled, they’re stored in a sub directory apart from the project file. By selecting this option you never have to worry about your project freezing you out. If that does happen, you can very simply go into the Media Explorer, look within that Project’s “Folder” and you will find all of the Midi and Wav files you’ve created waiting for you to rearrange them.

In my opinion, the option to embed midi files within a project shouldn’t even exist. It’s not only unnecessary, it’s very dangerous.

If you, like me, followed Reaper’s recommendation and embedded your midi files within each of your Project Files, I’d highly recommend that you use Reaper’s intuitive “Export Midi File” feature and, like your wav files, separate your midi files from your Project File.

Also, go into the Options/Preferences/Media/Midi parameter and choose the option to save your midi files as a “.mid” file apart from your Project File.

I’ve been working with Reaper for a couple of years. I’ve created dozens of projects without a problem. This is the only time a project has frozen and locked me out. The lock out may have had nothing to do with Reaper. It could have been any number of other things including a combination of Plug-ins I was using.

The bottom line is this: It is possible for a Reaper Project to Freeze and lock you out so, why take a chance with you precious compositions.
Reaper does have a way to recover a Project by taking all effects “Offline” but, that, along with my back-up didn’t help me.

I hope this helps others.
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Old 03-24-2014, 05:14 PM   #2
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Hello rickisabelle and welcome to these forums. You'll find many helpful people here and a lot of useful information.

Sorry to hear about your problem with that project.

I'm certain that people here would have tried to help you recover the embedded MIDI data. Me, I would have edited the problem project file, ripped out the MIDI into another simple project file.

When you say you were locked out of the project, exactly what happens when you try to load it?
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Old 03-24-2014, 05:16 PM   #3
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That's an impressive first post. Sorry to hear about the loss, though I am surprised your backups didn't help. I have autosave set for every 7 minutes, so I have never lost more than a couple takes (still no fun.)

Any chance you can open the .rpp file in a text editor and identify the midi items? If so, you might be able to copy them into a new .rpp file. Search for "item" in the rpp file using any text editor and they might still be there.

Re saving midi files outside the rpp file, are there any downsides? I wonder why the default is the default.
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Old 03-24-2014, 05:51 PM   #4
Andy Hamm
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One thing that amazes the hell out of me is that musicians aren't rendering their vstis to audio. I do understand that you may be writing as you are recording and you might want to change this or that here and there, but having three or four sample playing instruments running constantly seems like begging for something to crash to me.

Render your VSTi to audio, and mute (or disable the vsti) on the original tracks. When you want to work something out, re-enable the VSTi and mute the rendered track and render a new audio track when you are done.

For me the difference between running a piano VSTi vs the rendered audio track is fairly significant resource wise, and I also notice an improvement when running 8 separate rendered tracks vs my drum VSTi as well.
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Old 03-24-2014, 08:35 PM   #5
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Hi Rickisabelle, and welcome!

I´ll join the other users´questions because I simply cannot understand how can it be that you can´t access the midi items (those that you call "embedded midi files") in your project.
If I´m not wrong, the only scenario (at least with a machine running reasonably fine) in which one couldn´t be able to get to the data in a project would be with buggy plugins crashing and locking one out at startup, as you say. But it´s really surprising that holding down Ctrl + Shift while you open the project from File/Recent Projects does not help you. Are you sure that you tried this in the way that I´m telling you? A project with all Fx offline shouldn´t present any problem to reach the items.

If you give us more details and maybe upload that problematic project we can surely help you with this. There must be some missing step in your procedure...
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Old 03-25-2014, 09:47 AM   #6
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Quote:
Originally Posted by KevinW View Post
That's an impressive first post. Sorry to hear about the loss, though I am surprised your backups didn't help. I have autosave set for every 7 minutes, so I have never lost more than a couple takes (still no fun.)
Yeah, isn't creating the backup project file default behaviour in Reaper? Even if your session dies it shouldn't touch the *-bak file.
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Old 03-25-2014, 10:21 AM   #7
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Andy Hamm View Post
Render your VSTi to audio, and mute (or disable the vsti) on the original tracks. When you want to work something out, re-enable the VSTi and mute the rendered track and render a new audio track when you are done.
That's how I work too.
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Old 03-25-2014, 04:29 PM   #8
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rickisabelle View Post
Here’s the problem: If you embed your midi files within the Project File and that particular Project file freezes and permanently locks you out, you will lose all of your midi files associated with that project.
Every time I sit down with a project that I've been working on, I Save As and tack on a new version number. Always. If a file becomes corrupted, and the .bak doesn't work, I still can't lose more than a day's work. Better yet, if I find out that I screwed something up 3 weeks ago and didn't notice until now, I can go back and undo it.
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Old 03-25-2014, 05:00 PM   #9
rickisabelle
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Default Retrieving midi files from corrupt Reaper Project

This follow-up post is broken down in (2) sections. First is the description of what happens when I try to open this corrupted Project and second is how I was able to recover my midi files, which were imbedded within the corrupted project.

Section One – The Corrupted Project’s Behavior

When I try to open this particular project my monitor displays the word “Loading” beneath the Reaper Logo (Which is normal) and then the loading is immediately interrupted by an opaque screen which reads: “Reaper has stopped working.”
At that point, I have two options to choose from. I can click on option #1 which reads: “Check online for a solution and close the program.” Or option #2 which reads: “Close the program.”

Trying to open this particular project with “Effects Offline” produces the exact same results, which leads me to believe something other than my plug-ins corrupted this project file.

Section Two - Retrieving my midi files from the corrupted project

Fellow Reaper users suggested I open the corrupted project in a text editor and retrieve my midi files that way. I want to thank Dark Star, Kevin W and Soli Deo Gloria for their suggestion. This is just another testament to Reaper’s Designer and quality of his DAW and the user community he has facilitated.

I’m going to provide a very detailed description of how I recovered my midi files for those of you who, like me, aren’t used to looking under the hood of Reaper.

1. I created a new project that contained no wav or midi files. This was a blank project that had no media in it. I named it “Blank 1” and saved it.

2. I created a second new project and, I added (1) midi media item to that project. I named this second project “Blank 2” and saved it.

3. I closed Reaper.

4. On the bottom left corner of my monitor I “Right” clicked on the “Start” logo (On some computers it’s a mini Windows logo). This presents you with two choices. 1) You can “Left” click on “Properties” or 2) You can “Left” click on “Open Windows Explorer”. I “Left” clicked on “Open Windows Explorer”.

5. At the top right corner of my monitor there is a search box. Here is how I quickly found the Reaper project files I was looking for. I typed in “Blank 1.Rpp” and then “Left” clicked the search icon (a small magnifying glass).

6. Immediately “Blank 1.RPP” popped up on my monitor.

7. I “Right” clicked on the file name “Blank 1.RPP” and was presented with several options to choose from. I “Left” clicked on “Open File with Notepad”. “Notepad” is a very simply and free text editor that comes with every Windows based computer.

8. Now I was looking at the mysterious code within a blank Reaper project. I left that window open.

9. I then repeated steps 5, 6 and 7 but, this time I opened “Blank 2.RPP” with the text editor Notepad. Now I was looking at the code of a second Reaper project . The only difference between the two projects I had opened was “Blank 1. RPP” had no media items in it and “Blank 2.RPP” had (1) midi item.

10. Now, I compared the code of both projects side by side and I was able to identify what the code of a Reaper midi item actually looked like. It began with an open bracket “<”, had several lines of unintelligible code in-between and, then ended with a closed bracket “>”. Also, within the midi item’s code was the midi items file name, which really helped.

11. I then, repeated steps 5, 6 and 7 but, this time I opened the corrupted Reaper project with the text editor “Notepad”.

12. Using the examples from the two projects above, I was able to identify the midi files, within the corrupted project, one at a time. I copied and pasted each one of the these midi files, with their opening and closing brackets, from the corrupted project to the “Blank 1.RPP” project file.

13. I made sure I pasted the code in the correct location for a midi file (As determined by my “Blank 2.RPP example).

14. I saved my changes to “Blank 1.RPP”, which now contained copies of all my valuable midi files that had previously been trapped within my corrupted file.

15. I closed the text editor windows.

16. I opened Reaper.

17. I opened the “Blank 1.RPP” and all my midi files were there ready to go.

Please go to the top of this post to learn how to change your midi file preferences so you won’t have to ever retrieve value midi files imbedded and “trapped” within a corrupted Reaper project file.

Thanks again to Justin Frankel for giving us an amazing and affordable DAW. Thank you Dark Star, Kevin W and Soli Deo Gloria for assisting me.

Last edited by rickisabelle; 03-25-2014 at 05:08 PM. Reason: Misspelled Names
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Old 03-25-2014, 05:09 PM   #10
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^^^^
Yep, that's a good step-by-step version of what I suggested. Glad that you got the MIDI back.

Perhaps you could compress the problem project file (no audio samples needed) into a ZIP file and post it here as an attachment so we can have a look at it and see what's (not) happening?
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Last edited by DarkStar; 03-26-2014 at 02:05 AM.
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Old 03-25-2014, 05:29 PM   #11
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Quote:
Originally Posted by rickisabelle View Post
This follow-up post is broken down in (2) sections. First is the description of what happens when I try to open this corrupted Project and second is how I was able to recover my midi files, which were imbedded within the corrupted project.
Excellent tutorial. Thank you for writing it.
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Old 03-26-2014, 03:32 AM   #12
Ozymandias
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As it happens, this is one of the reasons I use embedded MIDI. I wouldn't even have a clue what to do with a broken/corrupted .MID file, whereas with Reaper projects there's always a chance I'll be able to harvest data from a broken file myself.
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