Please help me with these issues I'm having!

[DJ KE]

I've been test driving Reaper for about a week now, and I've loved every moment I've worked with the program. It's a fantastic DAW that's so reasonably priced I'm giving it heavy consideration for a purchase. I was just about to pony up the cash yesterday, but discovered a few bugs that made me put my card back in my wallet.

First let's start with the first issue. I'm having a bit of a problem exporting mp3 files at 320 Kbps at maximum quality. There are artifacts on the tracks, and it's driving me insane! I've tried everything to fix the issue, and discovered that the only way to avoid artifacts is exporting at 128 Kbps, but the mp3's sound less than pleasant at that bitrate. Please help me fix this issue. I'm sure it must be isolated since I haven't read anything on this after a few searches.

Second issue I'm having is playing videos. I'm attempting to edit audio in a WMV HD video my friend sent me, but the video is skipping frames, moving at about 1 frame every 4 seconds, and that's when I have my computer on power saver. On high performance it runs smoother but skips at every bar in the sequencer. My processor is a core i7 quad core at 2 ghz, when on power saver it's 800 MHz, and it turbo boosts to 2.9 ghz on high performance, but when I monitor the performance it barely breaks 20% usage, so it can't be my processor. What's the issue?

Please help me resolve these issues. It will be greatly appreciated! I need a fully functional Reaper. It has the best work flow of any DAW once I got the hang of it, but these issues are killing my enjoyment.

edit : forgot to state that I run it on Win7 x64

[Jedi]

I don't think it's a "REAPER thing"... sounds like a computer
issue to me. How much RAM do you have? What's your processor
and speed? Hard disk type and speed?

Sounds to me that something in your computer just isn't
keeping up with the demanding tasks demanded of it.

Jedi

[DJ KE]

I have 8 GB of RAM and my processor is a second generation quad core Intel i7 processor clocked at 2 ghz. It's much higher than the recommended specs for running REAPER. FL Studio performs these functions with ease on the same computer. Also my hard drive is 7200 rpm 500 GB

[Jedi]

Originally Posted by DJ KE

I have 8 GB of RAM and my processor is a second generation quad core Intel i7 processor clocked at 2 ghz. It's much higher than the recommended specs for running REAPER. FL Studio performs these functions with ease on the same computer. Also my hard drive is 7200 rpm 500 GB

Gotcha.... Well, we can pretty much rule THAT out.... Will have to wait for others
to chime in on what the problem is. But I can assure you it's NOT reaper

Jedi

[nofish]

About your video issue,
I'm not much of a video guy myself so can't help much but maybe this summary will give you some hints:

http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=82459

[ivansc]

Originally Posted by DJ KE

I've been test driving Reaper for about a week now, and I've loved every moment I've worked with the program. It's a fantastic DAW that's so reasonably priced I'm giving it heavy consideration for a purchase. I was just about to pony up the cash yesterday, but discovered a few bugs that made me put my card back in my wallet.

First let's start with the first issue. I'm having a bit of a problem exporting mp3 files at 320 Kbps at maximum quality. There are artifacts on the tracks, and it's driving me insane! I've tried everything to fix the issue, and discovered that the only way to avoid artifacts is exporting at 128 Kbps, but the mp3's sound less than pleasant at that bitrate. Please help me fix this issue. I'm sure it must be isolated since I haven't read anything on this after a few searches.

Second issue I'm having is playing videos. I'm attempting to edit audio in a WMV HD video my friend sent me, but the video is skipping frames, moving at about 1 frame every 4 seconds, and that's when I have my computer on power saver. On high performance it runs smoother but skips at every bar in the sequencer. My processor is a core i7 quad core at 2 ghz, when on power saver it's 800 MHz, and it turbo boosts to 2.9 ghz on high performance, but when I monitor the performance it barely breaks 20% usage, so it can't be my processor. What's the issue?

Please help me resolve these issues. It will be greatly appreciated! I need a fully functional Reaper. It has the best work flow of any DAW once I got the hang of it, but these issues are killing my enjoyment.

edit : forgot to state that I run it on Win7 x64

Popular wisdom seems to be to turn off turbo boost and power saver features when working with audio.

Worth a try disabling everything like that and at the same time running dpclat.exe to see if you have any cpu spikes affecting performance. Anything in the orange even is going to need sorting out, never mind spikes in the red.
You'll understand what I mean when you run dpclat if you don't already use it.
I assume you already know about spikes generated by wireless internet adapters and certain of the antivirus programmes?
Good luck!

[Justin]

Hmm, try converting the video into another format, it may end up performing better...

[DJ KE]

Thank you all for your help. I've been able to single out the cause of the mp3 export issue.Turns out I have a drum track made in GarageBand for iPad that Reaper didn't like. Once I removed it everything went well. Must be an issue with the format GarageBand exports in. It's AIFF 16-bit 44.1 kHz.

As for the video issue, I haven't been able to resolve it yet, and instead have a new issue I discovered. Happens on any video format I place. When the videos and accompanying audio reach the end of the track, the video windows freezes up on the last frame or goes black, and it won't play along with the audio. If I try to delete the video track Reaper crashes on me.

I previously tried checking for DPC latency and it's in the green when my ASIO driver is active and wireless is off, so that probably isn't the issue.

I guess I'll just have to do without video sound editing until I'm able to resolve the issue. REAPER has too good of a work flow for my music to pass up over this issue.