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Old 04-26-2020, 12:58 PM   #161
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Reaper.fm > bottom of page download > old versions > top right of page 5.x versions
Ok firstly when I try to load the project with the old version (I tried version 5.99). I get this error msg:

https://stash.reaper.fm/38974/Reaper...%20Warning.png

As for the performance, its more or less the same. If I am being generous I would say maybe its slightly quicker to respond, at this stage I just don't know, but still every time I reposition the playhead the audio drops out and tears up, muting/unmuting tracks its still slow and painful, and forget about smooth seeking during playback.
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Old 04-26-2020, 07:14 PM   #162
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Reaper often becomes unresponsive or hangs then crashes for me - this has been a problem for a few years and getting worse rather than better.
A project I have at the moment is borderline unusable because of this. There are only 6 (relatively sparse) midi files and 6 audio files, each about 30 minutes long.
However there is a lot of tempo map information and I have been wondering if Reaper might be very inefficient with that info. Unfortunately it seems impossible to set midi to a time base rather than a beat base by rendering the midi to a new file that uses the tempo map to reposition the midi information in a final form, So I cant test whether it is the tempo map causing the problem
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Old 04-26-2020, 07:24 PM   #163
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Reaper often becomes unresponsive or hangs then crashes for me - this has been a problem for a few years and getting worse rather than better.
A project I have at the moment is borderline unusable because of this. There are only 6 (relatively sparse) midi files and 6 audio files, each about 30 minutes long.
However there is a lot of tempo map information and I have been wondering if Reaper might be very inefficient with that info. Unfortunately it seems impossible to set midi to a time base rather than a beat base by rendering the midi to a new file that uses the tempo map to reposition the midi information in a final form, So I cant test whether it is the tempo map causing the problem
For what its worth, I also have tempo changes in this project...
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Old 04-26-2020, 07:42 PM   #164
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For what its worth, I also have tempo changes in this project...
maybe that is it then - some interaction between tempo changes and certain plugins - Falcon is the main plugin I am having trouble with (and always have). It is not just Falcon as exactly the same files / setup in FLStudio is far quicker to load and far more responsive
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Old 04-27-2020, 06:13 PM   #165
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maybe that is it then - some interaction between tempo changes and certain plugins - Falcon is the main plugin I am having trouble with (and always have). It is not just Falcon as exactly the same files / setup in FLStudio is far quicker to load and far more responsive
Yep at this point I would never recommend Reaper to anyone, and I used to in the past.

The funny thing is there is tons of threads of people complaining about large projects being unusably slow and there is no response from devs as to why they don't (or cant?) fix it. It just not good enough.

And in all these threads there is always some people who jump on just to tell the person with the problem that it is their fault their projects are large. I have seen this in response to someone who complained about not being able to have 1000s of tracks in a project like he could in other DAWs because his work flow demanded that number (film scoring, orchestral work etc...) and in response to people who couldn't even get their project to be responsive when they only had a couple of hundred tracks, to someone who merely had 100 or so. The response was always the same: "that's too many tracks". I bet if I came on here saying my project consisted of 50 tracks still someone would show up and say they don't use that many tracks therefore I am using too many tracks.

Funny thing is noone can say what is the upper limit of track count that we can safely use with Reaper.
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Old 04-27-2020, 06:50 PM   #166
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Funny thing is noone can say what is the upper limit of track count that we can safely use with Reaper.
When theoretical track count is unlimited, performance doesn't work that way. It is not a fixed number and is a moving target. I could give you 100 project combinations and all of them fail at a different track counts as tracks are so elastic -meaning they can have who knows what in all types of combinations. There is always a ceiling to be had and someone will always find some combination of the myriad of items and features that hits it and others that do not. There's no fault towards the user there, it just is what it is.

I do believe, that good project management efficiency and organization, always allows projects to be larger and less issue prone than they otherwise would be (performance is always an N-1/pennies turn into dollars scenario). Not that you aren't, but it does affect the performance ceiling eventually if someone doesn't.

But... We still don't know the root cause of your issue.
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Old 04-27-2020, 08:09 PM   #167
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When theoretical track count is unlimited, performance doesn't work that way. It is not a fixed number and is a moving target. I could give you 100 project combinations and all of them fail at a different track counts as tracks are so elastic -meaning they can have who knows what in all types of combinations. There is always a ceiling to be had and someone will always find some combination of the myriad of items and features that hits it and others that do not. There's no fault towards the user there, it just is what it is.

I do believe, that good project management efficiency and organization, always allows projects to be larger and less issue prone than they otherwise would be (performance is always an N-1/pennies turn into dollars scenario). Not that you aren't, but it does affect the performance ceiling eventually if someone doesn't.

But... We still don't know the root cause of your issue.
Ok sure, I get that, but what I am trying to say is that when everytime there is some sort of complaint about Reaper's inability to handle larger track counts (not just by me but by other users as well, some of whom are professionals with far more expertise and experience than me), the go to response by some people seems to be that the track count of the user is too high, then it would suggest that the people making that accusation would have some kind of upper limit in mind as to what a reasonable track count for a project would be.

So if they are telling people that your 100 or so tracks are too many tracks then it does beg the questions, 1. on what basis are you drawing that conclusion and 2. if it is the case that you are correct then you must have surely also worked out what is a reasonable track count that Reaper can handle without glictching like this, even if that number is more of a ballpark.
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Old 04-27-2020, 08:11 PM   #168
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Ofcourse what i am saying above is just rhetorical, I know that these people don't know what track count is within reason and what is too high, I am merely pointing out that it seems like ill informed kneejerk reaction by Reaper fanatics designed to shift blame for the issues onto the user and its unhelpful...
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Old 04-27-2020, 10:01 PM   #169
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Thats it for me - 1 instance of Falcon - sometimes works sometimes not - but the general will it wont it unreliability of Reaper has done it for me as far as anything midi goes. I have projects to finish off and then will only use it for audio - just not anything with midi. Shame there is nothing else around that is as good for audio and does midi as I often combine both. Maybe Cubase? Live? Bitwig is not audio friendly at all, the new Cakewalk?. I quite liked the working method of Samplitude but it was as unstable as Reaper. Hmm ...

[winding back to v4.x has improved things a bit]

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Old 04-27-2020, 10:20 PM   #170
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reaper fanatics

what about pdc?

the more plugs you have that creates pdc, the more lags you will see while playing and jumping around and while not playing and jumping around

i made a quick test with some tracks (1024 and more) with one sforzando loaded with a violone-sfz and a REAVERB set to produce 16384 samples pdc, on each track a midi item with some midi motes so the sforzando and the VERB had to do something)

the more tracks i have the more lag i have in the gui and overall reaction, while REAPER seams to show good will to deal with audio first.

windows i7 64bit

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Old 04-28-2020, 12:00 AM   #171
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The Bunker, have you tried comparing across older versions?

I've just had what I would think of as a typical Reaper experience. The program was unusable on a project - could not even get a sound out of Falcon. So I thought I'd try some older version -portable installs (which is what I always use)> tried a v4 - worked, tried a v5, worked. went back to v6 - worked.
Now I saved a new version of my project - that worked in v6, went back to the unworkable version - that also worked now in v6.

It is this sort of experience that has me looking to find an alternative - Reaper has still been fine for me using audio files only - and has a lot of good aspects to audio editing, but to be so unreliable as it definitely is for me makes it unusable in any serious project where I am being paid - or even if it just for fun coz there is no fun in something that works then stops working an hour later when the program and project have not even been shut down and restarted.
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Old 04-28-2020, 01:08 PM   #172
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So if they are telling people that your 100 or so tracks are too many tracks then it does beg the questions,
No one is saying that here (or shouldn't be), my entire reply was saying the max is different for every person/project/config/machine so it's impossible to advise of a max count.

There is such a thing as "that's too many tracks for your current project/setup" but is based on whatever combination of near infinite combinations. There is no standard number of tracks because there is no standard track, there is only the ceiling an individual hits based on a myriad of variables.

I'm sure I could plop in 500 tracks without problems right now with some lightweight VST, but not if I throw CPU chewing Nebula on every one of them; then I might only get 30 before maxing out. I've run at least 120 tracks with 250 VSTs without issue on my setup - I'm sure there are others using more tracks than that but an overall max number expectation for all, is the wrong way to think about it.

But since we don't know true root cause, even the project being large has not been proven to be the problem, only that it has to be big to hit it. Yes, performance can be a chicken/egg bitch like that.
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:04 PM   #173
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what about pdc?

the more plugs you have that creates pdc, the more lags you will see while playing and jumping around and while not playing and jumping around
How does PDC explain Reaper hanging for a good 3-5 or even 10 minutes? PDC is calculated in milliseconds and seconds if extreme, not minutes!
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:36 PM   #174
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Continuing my recent experience, I reproduced the latest project to give me issues in demo copies of Studio One and Bitwig and they had zero problems - and were much faster at loading the large Falcon libraries and much smoother with the graphics handling - even when I created and tested some smaller projects created specifically to test Reaper, S1 and Bitwig.
I am now just waiting for good deals on both of those - I'll still be keeping Reaper as a multitrack audio editor tho
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:39 PM   #175
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The Bunker, have you tried comparing across older versions?
I tried 5.99 and it was more or less the same. Even installing a portable install and trying this itself is sooo time consuming, which version am I supposed to try? Everytime I install a new portable install, I have to first scan my VST folder which takes ages and only then I can actually open the project. I can do this once, twice, three times maybe, but surely I can't be expected to go back and try random previous versions indefinitely until I find the magic version.
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:44 PM   #176
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No one is saying that here (or shouldn't be),
Not in this thread, but I have seen others...


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my entire reply was saying the max is different for every person/project/config/machine so it's impossible to advise of a max count.
Yes I get that you haven't been saying that and for the sake of clarity I am not suggesting you are one of those people, I appreciate that you have been trying to be very helpful and I thank you.

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There is such a thing as "that's too many tracks for your current project/setup" but is based on whatever combination of near infinite combinations.
Yea but that is what I am trying to say and maybe I am not explaining myself clearly, what I am saying is in all of those scenarios with infinite variables, Reaper ALWAYS seems to be the weakest link in the chain. When somebody says that using the exact same machine and same plugins and same work flows they they get better fperformance out of other DAWs than they do with Reaper then those infinite variables all of a sudden don't seem very relevant. Others have in other threads clearly states that they can't do things on Reaper that they easily can do on other DAWs.
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:47 PM   #177
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Continuing my recent experience, I reproduced the latest project to give me issues in demo copies of Studio One and Bitwig and they had zero problems - and were much faster at loading the large Falcon libraries and much smoother with the graphics handling - even when I created and tested some smaller projects created specifically to test Reaper, S1 and Bitwig.
I am now just waiting for good deals on both of those - I'll still be keeping Reaper as a multitrack audio editor tho
S1 and bitwig eh?

Hmmm maybe worth looking into for me as well.

Which would you say is better?

For me there are some feature I really need in order to consider it.

One of those is the ability to have multiple Mixer windows.

The other is the ability to have different track visibility for the arrangement windows and the mixer window.
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Old 04-30-2020, 08:59 PM   #178
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S1 and bitwig eh?

Hmmm maybe worth looking into for me as well.

Which would you say is better?

For me there are some feature I really need in order to consider it.

One of those is the ability to have multiple Mixer windows.

The other is the ability to have different track visibility for the arrangement windows and the mixer window.
honestly have not looked at those aspects you mention and it may be either or both have other ways of working that get you what you want. Only demoing can tell. Studio One could definitely replace Reaper - does both midi and audio and very well as far as I can tell so far. Of course there are bound to be differences. I am probably going to buy it but will keep demo-ing
Studio One has a fully functional 30 day demo

Bitwig has a demo but you cant save - I am definitely going to get it. It is nothing like Reaper, it is a production environment for midi and audio, with the ability to edit both but with some strange omissions eg stretch on the timeline. But for production it is like and much easier version of Live with Max4live - and probably no less powerful. It is going to make a lot of what I do so much easier

Not surprisingly both have more coherent interfaces and better graphics performance. Although Bitwig does not work with video natively, there is a cheap add-on.

Anyway early days for me but the chance of me getting both of those is very high
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Old 05-01-2020, 11:58 PM   #179
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How does PDC explain Reaper hanging for a good 3-5 or even 10 minutes? PDC is calculated in milliseconds and seconds if extreme, not minutes!
Pdc is no explanation for it.

I noticed an effect on gui reaction with very high trackcount with pdc on each track.

Maybe somekind of a bug. But likely more a thing of "pushing it to the limit" (concerning my test setup)

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Old 05-11-2020, 10:15 AM   #180
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honestly have not looked at those aspects you mention and it may be either or both have other ways of working that get you what you want. Only demoing can tell. Studio One could definitely replace Reaper - does both midi and audio and very well as far as I can tell so far. Of course there are bound to be differences. I am probably going to buy it but will keep demo-ing
Studio One has a fully functional 30 day demo

Bitwig has a demo but you cant save - I am definitely going to get it. It is nothing like Reaper, it is a production environment for midi and audio, with the ability to edit both but with some strange omissions eg stretch on the timeline. But for production it is like and much easier version of Live with Max4live - and probably no less powerful. It is going to make a lot of what I do so much easier

Not surprisingly both have more coherent interfaces and better graphics performance. Although Bitwig does not work with video natively, there is a cheap add-on.

Anyway early days for me but the chance of me getting both of those is very high
Hey Eddy, do you know if there is an easier method of transfering a project from Reaper to another DAW other than saving every instance of every plugin as a preset and then loading it track by track, instance by instance in the new DAW?

I know in Reaper you could at least do templates or save FX chains, but those things obviously don't work across DAWs, is there something out there that lets you do something similar but across DAWs?
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Old 05-11-2020, 09:28 PM   #181
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Hey Eddy, do you know if there is an easier method of transfering a project from Reaper to another DAW other than saving every instance of every plugin as a preset and then loading it track by track, instance by instance in the new DAW?

I know in Reaper you could at least do templates or save FX chains, but those things obviously don't work across DAWs, is there something out there that lets you do something similar but across DAWs?
sadly no - It would be very difficult to do as Reaper has that universal track design, which I like a lot, but a lot of DAWs dont. I am going to try and finish what I can in Reaper and start new ones in Studio One and Bitwig. But some projects that were half started in Reaper look like they will be easier just to start again in Bitwig because of the modulation improvements

Anyway I bought both Bitwig and Studio One - they can be resold so it is not a huge drama if I need to get rid of them later

There are strange things missing in Studio One tho - no track templates for example, they have another system, import from song, which would be good but is still underdeveloped. So it is not a straightforward "this is better than that" and I have to keep reminding myself that I am new to Studio One and that Reaper just couldn't handle how I use Falcon and Kontakt, which is a major problem for me.
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Old 05-12-2020, 11:16 AM   #182
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There are strange things missing in Studio One tho - no track templates for example, they have another system, import from song, which would be good but is still underdeveloped. So it is not a straightforward "this is better than that" and I have to keep reminding myself that I am new to Studio One and that Reaper just couldn't handle how I use Falcon and Kontakt, which is a major problem for me.
Ah that sounds like the way Pro Tools does track templates.
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Old 05-14-2020, 03:43 PM   #183
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And just when I thought I had seen it all I just noticed a new symptom of this neverending source of torment that is this Reaper project...

So apparently looping a section of a song and browsing samples at the same time through the Media Explorer window is also impossible as everytime I go to the next sample the whole playback from the project as well as the audio coming from the Media Explorer's audition output glitches. Not sure if this gives any clues as to why things are the way they are but here is another piece of the puzzle regardless...
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Old 05-18-2020, 12:21 AM   #184
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NEW UPDATE:

Ok so I bit the bullet and setup my other computer which is a laptop with the same plugins as my main PC and transferred the project to the laptop to see how it would perform, and it is WAAAAY smoother, even though it still crackles on pausing playback and then slows down a little immediately after playback and repositioning it is I would say a good 80% or so smoother. And the interesting thing is I my laptop is less powerful than my main computer. So the issue is definitely related to my computer, but what could it be? How can I work out what is causing this behaviour?
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Old 05-18-2020, 04:58 PM   #185
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Hi,

Don't have an answer, but its great you've eliminated reaper as the culprit. Not because of fan boy angle , but I was starting to wonder if ,when i get a capable computer I might have issues with larger projects.

I'm buying a used dell i7 tommorow.:-)

Good luck finding the issue on your main PC.

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Old 05-18-2020, 08:09 PM   #186
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Hi,

Don't have an answer, but its great you've eliminated reaper as the culprit. Not because of fan boy angle , but I was starting to wonder if ,when i get a capable computer I might have issues with larger projects.

I'm buying a used dell i7 tommorow.:-)

Good luck finding the issue on your main PC.
Actually since yesterday I imported the settings from the other computer and it went to behaving sluggish again, I reverted to my laptop's old Reaper settings and it stayed sluggish so now both are pretty much on par with each other.
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Old 05-18-2020, 11:11 PM   #187
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Hi,

Don't have an answer, but its great you've eliminated reaper as the culprit. Not because of fan boy angle , but I was starting to wonder if ,when i get a capable computer I might have issues with larger projects.

I'm buying a used dell i7 tommorow.:-)

Good luck finding the issue on your main PC.
Also if I were you and putting together a new computer for Audio work I would seriously re-consider using Reaper as it is too unreliable on some systems and noone can work out why or what to do about it. The only reason I am trying to stick to it as much as possible is because I already have a project in it that I want to finish, otherwise I would not start any new projects in Reaper.
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Old 06-08-2020, 01:07 PM   #188
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Well after trying Mulabs, Cubase, Pro Tools Ultimate, mixbus and Studio One and getting frustrated by their shortcomings I am back here... namely that none of those DAWs seem to apply delay compensation properly when it comes to high latency plugins such as linear phase EQs. How the fuck do people do any work on those DAWs????

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Old 08-23-2020, 03:22 PM   #189
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Well after trying Mulabs, Cubase, Pro Tools Ultimate, mixbus and Studio One and getting frustrated by their shortcomings I am back here... namely that none of those DAWs seem to apply delay compensation properly when it comes to high latency plugins such as linear phase EQs. How the fuck do people do any work on those DAWs????

Hey man, I feel your pain. I've read through this entire thread, hoping for a solution, to no avail.

I have spent ages perfecting my own mix template in Reaper and it currently contains exactly 100 tracks with 361 FX in total. It has, just as you describe, been getting successively slower and slower over time. I have the exact same problem with the play cursor causing massive RT CPU >100% spikes (seen it go up to 2200%). Clicking directly on items does not cause those spikes. This smells of bad programming.

The funny thing is, this computer was built 2 weeks ago and the project was transferred over to this one from my old computer because I thought my old computer was beginning to reach its limits. This computer is an Intel i9-10900K running at 4.7 GHz (stability tested over 100 hours in Prime95, OCCT, Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and Memtest86) with 64 GB RAM. Reaper behaves as if this is an Intel Pentium from a decade ago.

I'm very seriously considering switching to Cubase, but your post about delay compensation worries me. I'll have to look that up.

Edit: It's either switching to other DAWs, or learning to cope with this shit in Reaper and work with really small projects. I thought about breaking my project up into smaller pieces, using sub projects or something similar, but that breaks all the work I've put into my template. My tracks are routed in a pretty advanced way, with quite a bit of side chaining going on. Breaking the project up into smaller pieces nullifies that effort I've put in, so I'll have to adjust even more in that case. It doesn't feel worth it.

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Old 08-28-2020, 04:41 AM   #190
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Hey man, I feel your pain. I've read through this entire thread, hoping for a solution, to no avail.

I have spent ages perfecting my own mix template in Reaper and it currently contains exactly 100 tracks with 361 FX in total. It has, just as you describe, been getting successively slower and slower over time. I have the exact same problem with the play cursor causing massive RT CPU >100% spikes (seen it go up to 2200%). Clicking directly on items does not cause those spikes. This smells of bad programming.

The funny thing is, this computer was built 2 weeks ago and the project was transferred over to this one from my old computer because I thought my old computer was beginning to reach its limits. This computer is an Intel i9-10900K running at 4.7 GHz (stability tested over 100 hours in Prime95, OCCT, Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and Memtest86) with 64 GB RAM. Reaper behaves as if this is an Intel Pentium from a decade ago.

I'm very seriously considering switching to Cubase, but your post about delay compensation worries me. I'll have to look that up.

Edit: It's either switching to other DAWs, or learning to cope with this shit in Reaper and work with really small projects. I thought about breaking my project up into smaller pieces, using sub projects or something similar, but that breaks all the work I've put into my template. My tracks are routed in a pretty advanced way, with quite a bit of side chaining going on. Breaking the project up into smaller pieces nullifies that effort I've put in, so I'll have to adjust even more in that case. It doesn't feel worth it.
Yes, you are experiencing EXACTLY what I have been so its good to know we are not alone. If you are used to the features of Reaper and rely on them it is very hard to switch to other DAWs specially if you are mid-project like I was unless you want to start everything from the ground up.

The delay compensation issue I mentioned was only apparent when I was using Linear Phase EQs so unless you are doing that you probably won't have any issues. I have since just come back to Reaper and accepted the shortcomings and have frozen tracks as workaround (even though every diagnostic tool was telling me I had lotsa headroom with my CPU and other computer resources) at the end of the day every DAW seems to have limitations and to me the feature limitations of other DAWs were worse than the performance limitations of Reaper at this point. But if you have simpler projects with less complex routing then something like Cubase should be great for you.
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Old 08-28-2020, 06:03 AM   #191
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Yes, you are experiencing EXACTLY what I have been so its good to know we are not alone. If you are used to the features of Reaper and rely on them it is very hard to switch to other DAWs specially if you are mid-project like I was unless you want to start everything from the ground up.

The delay compensation issue I mentioned was only apparent when I was using Linear Phase EQs so unless you are doing that you probably won't have any issues. I have since just come back to Reaper and accepted the shortcomings and have frozen tracks as workaround (even though every diagnostic tool was telling me I had lotsa headroom with my CPU and other computer resources) at the end of the day every DAW seems to have limitations and to me the feature limitations of other DAWs were worse than the performance limitations of Reaper at this point. But if you have simpler projects with less complex routing then something like Cubase should be great for you.
Yeah, I agree. The workflow and quickness of working in Reaper in general, is so nice, it is hard to switch to other DAWs. I tried Presonus Studio One and it was so unintuitive. Cubase was a bit nicer but still felt very ancient. I too have accepted the performance issues in Reaper and found that freezing tracks is the optimal way for me to continue working with my template project.

Ny theory is that there are, aside from the issues of PDC inducing plugins, issues within my project that are causing a lot of serial processing instead of parallel.

An example is the snare bus and how it flows through the project. My drums come from addictive drums 2, routed out to individual tracks. The snare track consists of several snares blended together. They go to their snare bus which they reside under, so to speak (folder track). The snare bus is side chained to the guitar bus to allow for some ducking of the low mids in the guitars when the snare hits. The guitar bus in turn is sidechained to the orchestra bus, to duck the bass/low mids of the orchestral instruments when the guitars are playing.

If we look at this from the perspective of the orchestra, which consists of a bunch of Kontakt instruments, they will start calculating when MIDI data tells Kontakt to play a sound. This goes to the orchestra bus, but since guitars are routed there, the orchestra bus must wait for the guitar bus to finish calculating. Meanwhile, the guitar bus has to wait for the snare bus to calculate. The snare bus has the longest vst chain in the project, consisting of some 12 plugins or so, some which induce PDC. To top all of that off, once everything is calculated, they have to go through the master chain with some pretty heavy PDC going on (ozone 8 elements being the heaviest of them).

I'm guessing this is the problem. But it doesn't explain why the edit cursor makes Reaper choke from stuttering when moving the edit cursor while the project is stopped, because this does not happen while the project is playing. I can put the edit cursor anywhere while the project is playing and it is much better.

But I had to find out if my i9 was really not much better than the i5 it replaced, so I actually tore it all out and reinstalled my old mobo, cpu and ram in my pc case 2 days ago. I needed to test audio performance in some kind of standardized way and to my rejoice, I found out about DAWbench. I ran DAWbench and went through the process carefully.

Here are the results:
i5-9600K @ 48 buffer size score: 65
i5-9600K @ 256 buffer size score: 116

i9-10900K @ 48 buffer size score: 191
i9-10900K @ 256 buffer size score:272

Safe to say, Reaper does utilize the i9 pretty well and the i9 kills the i5 so hard.

But still, Reaper can't handle the edit cursor moving around while the project is on stopped. I can't really understand why right now.
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Old 10-08-2020, 01:59 PM   #192
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Yeah, I agree. The workflow and quickness of working in Reaper in general, is so nice, it is hard to switch to other DAWs. I tried Presonus Studio One and it was so unintuitive. Cubase was a bit nicer but still felt very ancient. I too have accepted the performance issues in Reaper and found that freezing tracks is the optimal way for me to continue working with my template project.

Ny theory is that there are, aside from the issues of PDC inducing plugins, issues within my project that are causing a lot of serial processing instead of parallel.

An example is the snare bus and how it flows through the project. My drums come from addictive drums 2, routed out to individual tracks. The snare track consists of several snares blended together. They go to their snare bus which they reside under, so to speak (folder track). The snare bus is side chained to the guitar bus to allow for some ducking of the low mids in the guitars when the snare hits. The guitar bus in turn is sidechained to the orchestra bus, to duck the bass/low mids of the orchestral instruments when the guitars are playing.

If we look at this from the perspective of the orchestra, which consists of a bunch of Kontakt instruments, they will start calculating when MIDI data tells Kontakt to play a sound. This goes to the orchestra bus, but since guitars are routed there, the orchestra bus must wait for the guitar bus to finish calculating. Meanwhile, the guitar bus has to wait for the snare bus to calculate. The snare bus has the longest vst chain in the project, consisting of some 12 plugins or so, some which induce PDC. To top all of that off, once everything is calculated, they have to go through the master chain with some pretty heavy PDC going on (ozone 8 elements being the heaviest of them).

I'm guessing this is the problem. But it doesn't explain why the edit cursor makes Reaper choke from stuttering when moving the edit cursor while the project is stopped, because this does not happen while the project is playing. I can put the edit cursor anywhere while the project is playing and it is much better.

But I had to find out if my i9 was really not much better than the i5 it replaced, so I actually tore it all out and reinstalled my old mobo, cpu and ram in my pc case 2 days ago. I needed to test audio performance in some kind of standardized way and to my rejoice, I found out about DAWbench. I ran DAWbench and went through the process carefully.

Here are the results:
i5-9600K @ 48 buffer size score: 65
i5-9600K @ 256 buffer size score: 116

i9-10900K @ 48 buffer size score: 191
i9-10900K @ 256 buffer size score:272

Safe to say, Reaper does utilize the i9 pretty well and the i9 kills the i5 so hard.

But still, Reaper can't handle the edit cursor moving around while the project is on stopped. I can't really understand why right now.
Hey sorry for the delayed response. Your complex signal chains inside Reaper and general folder structures and all that sound very similar to my kind of project. I also use drum VSTs with lots of layering and parallel processing and so on, thick guitar sounds, synths etc etc... and yes as you say each element just slowly makes the system become more and more unresponsive which is totally different to say how Pro Tools handles resources. In that environment whenever I am working on a project everything is always fine and smooth and then BAM it suddently just stops working and it tells you you have hit your CPU ceiling, and then you remove that one offending plugin and your back on track. But not in Reaper its like it just slowly sort of starts falling apart before you have ever hit any such ceiling. And then there is that weird issue with the cursor which I am glad someone else is also noticing.
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Old 12-04-2020, 04:28 PM   #193
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I've had similar issues as of late as well.

It usually happens on larger projects (radio plays). Stuff that has a lot of folders and subfolders and generally a lot of routing as well (I basically sidechain compress most of the project to the voices). These projects range from 5 minutes to 25 minutes in length sometimes.

I mostly work with Arturia V Collection softsynths and a variety of Valhalla DSP plugins.

For some reason that I can't explain, it feels like the Arturia plugins are getting caught in some sort of loop. It's like if they saved all my undos in one instance of a plugin. Every now and again I get the symptoms described in the original post and check the file size of my project. It can go from 1mb to 800mb in 15 minutes of work it seems. Either way, once I find the culprit plugin (by rendering to stereo tracks and DELETING the original track with the midi on it), the .rpp shrinks back to a normal 1ish MBs and I'm back in business.

I'd love to understand WHAT triggers this exactly though. Nothing particular seems to do it. Sometimes I can work an entire 20 minute project from start to finish in midi, go heavy on the plugins, and nothing bad happens. And sometimes I'll be moving along and all of a sudden the project comes to a crawl. Over 2 clicks.

Any ideas?
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Old 12-04-2020, 04:35 PM   #194
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Are Arturia plugins the latest version? They fixed a very bad bug that caused memory leak and huge repetitive data to be stored in the DAW project.
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Old 04-08-2021, 04:52 PM   #195
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Default Turn of turbo boost in the BIOS

I ran across this thread desperately trying to figure out why Reaper was constantly having problems with playback, constant stuttering and just generally being almost unusable except in short spurts. I've been recording for nearly 20 years and having been a Reaper user for about half of that, never had an issue quite like this.

It didn't seem to matter how many tracks I had frozen, how many effects I disabled, how big my buffer was, disabling anticipative processing or enabling it... I tweaked for hours upon hours trying to find a solution. It was so infuriating. My CPU usage rarely went over 60% and it certainly never got close to 100%, but for whatever reason it would stutter, skip, become unresponsive, etc, etc.

Finally I decided to watch the CPU stats in ThrottleStop while it was playing back without any issues, up until the point that it would become unusable again and I noticed a pattern. Every time the processor would throttle down the clock speed Reaper would go bonkers and become completely unusable, and it would stay that way until the processor went back to a higher clock speed, then it would be fine. It was consistent and happened like clockwork.

So now I know what's happening, now I just have to figure out how to stop it from happening.. Which is not super obvious as modern processors are super throttle happy. Which is great for energy efficiency.. But it's fucking terrible for working in a DAW (especially Reaper apparently). On top of that most processors are pretty well locked down as far as overclocking features are concerned (especially in laptops), unless you're willing to pay a premium. Not to say we want to overclock our processor, quite the opposite actually, but it makes getting a, most likely lower, but consistent clock speed very difficult.

What I ended up doing was turning off Turbo Boost IN THE BIOS (this is for Intel processors, haven't tested it on AMD). Don't do it via software after the OS boots (with ThrottleStop of Intel Extreme Tuning Utility) as that seems to force it to sit at an extremely low frequency, 1.9Ghz in my case, which made Reaper even more unusable.

I also disabled DPTF in the BIOS as well, though I can't confirm that it did anything as it allows you to completely disable the ACPI driver, and doing so never fixed my issue.

Anyways, after that I adjusted the turbo boost power max TDP to 35 watts on my processor, I used the Intel Extreme Tuning Utility, but ThrottleStop would probably work as well. Don't turn on turbo boost, leave it disabled, I don't know if this would change anything, but it's not necessary.

Doing this allows the processor to run at 35 watts for a seemingly endless amount of time while maintaining a reasonable clock speed that stops Reaper from stuttering and being a PITA. Pay very close attention to your temps when you do this. I tried to go up to 45 watts, and while it did allow the processor to run at 45 watts, it was consistently bumping up against the 100 deg celcius ceiling and throttling down. Whereas 35 watts rarely gets above 80 deg, and never comes close to hitting 100 deg.

After doing this almost all of my issues disappeared and I was able to load up my tracks with way too many effects without freezing anything and Reaper never skipped a beat.

I'm on a laptop (HP Zbook x360 w/ I7 8750H), so this issue is likely much less prominent on desktops, as they generally have a much higher base clock speed to begin with (and better cooling). I certainly can't guarantee this will solve your problems, but if you've tried everything else it's probably worth a shot.
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Old 04-09-2021, 09:02 AM   #196
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Every time the processor would throttle down the clock speed Reaper would go bonkers and become completely unusable, and it would stay that way until the processor went back to a higher clock speed, then it would be fine. It was consistent and happened like clockwork.

Interesting. I think I've seen recommendations over the years that suggest all power throttling/stepping should be disabled for audio work.
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Old 04-09-2021, 01:27 PM   #197
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Interesting. I think I've seen recommendations over the years that suggest all power throttling/stepping should be disabled for audio work.
Tracking down this problem I found that out as well. Thing is, I've never had to do that before, and I've never had Reaper act up this severely before. Which was especially frustrating as my laptop is a beast for any sort of content creation, and I paid a premium for it.

Turning off throttling on modern laptops is sometimes easier said than done. As it's by far the easiest way to keep temps down. Throw in the fact that a lot of OEM's set the TDP artificially low for better battery life (and crappy thermal design), but also lock it down so we can't change it ourselves and we end up with laptops constantly cycling between high and low clock speeds. That's not likely to go away... Ever.

And base clock speeds can be absurdly low, which apparently Reaper hates, because 1.9Ghz on a 6c/12t system was completely unusable (I couldn't even play can a basic solo'd track).

I also don't keep a separate desktop setup anymore like I used to, as my laptop has more than enough juice and I spend a lot of time on the road (pre-pandemic). I know I'm not unique in that situation.

My solution is, at best, a bit of a lucky hack imo. I'm stoked that I can use Reaper normally again, I just hope they figure out a solution down the road to deal with variable clock speeds a little better.
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Old 09-08-2021, 09:12 AM   #198
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I came across this thread as I am desperately trying to find a cause for Reaper becoming unresponsive.

I am a long time Pro Tools user and started using Reaper as an FX rig extending my Pro Tools capabilities. As such I would often run around 100 instances of reverb/delay/modulation plug-ins in an overclocked i7 3930k Hackintosh. I would normally hit 60% to 70% RT CPU usage - everything happening on live, record-enabled tracks.

So I decided to make my move to Reaper full time and have since started an album project on a brand new audio optimized laptop (from a reputable studio seller).

But as soon as my first mix started getting bigger Reaper started hitting the skids.

I just managed to finish the first one and am in hot pursuit of a deadline to finish the album. Really cannot afford to troubleshoot my install but seeing that this is a brand new computer which has been working fine I will take the time to look into throttling of the CPU and relevant BIOS settings.
Anything else is off the table until I, hopefully, successfully finish the album.


My Laptop comes with a BIOS called InsydeH20 which does have an advanced tab but it seems deliberately restricted so I can't access any relevant settings.

My specs are in the signature.
Project details:
  • about 200 tracks, including busses/folders, etc. not all playing audio, not all playing at the same time.
  • I do have Arturia plug-ins (FX bundle)
  • I have plenty of plug-in use
  • Plenty of busses, parallel processing
  • around 24 I/O of hardware inserts at this point, maybe slightly more
  • Projcet size is around 100.000 lines
I took off anticipative processing as that was just killing everything, but, seeing my Reainserts, it makes sense as there is no way for Reaper to anticipate these. The result was tat my RT CPU is sitting at around 65% (ish).

One thing I am wondering:

Is there any merit in trying to run my Reainserts as separate/dedicated processes?

I did notice that, when the unresponsiveness hits, Reaper CPU in Task Manager sits around 13% - which could of course be down to the throttling - if that is the issue.

I will poke around in the BIOS but my time to do this is extremely limited. Worst comes to worst I will work in Reaper and start bouncing stuff down (remember The Beatles?) or, very reluctantly, move the album to my Pro Tools TDM system.

In my head I have made the transition away from Pro Tools and am already planning to move to PC completely and purchase a Ryzen based workstation this autumn.

With this hiccup and the resulting turmoil I am beginning to question my roadmap. Anyway, I will report back with my findings (if there are any) on this thread.

Update:
Couple of screenshots with adaptive processing disabled and enabled. I have turned it back on as the performance gain on the RT CPU is too significant (down to about 20% from 80%).
Seems to make no difference with the lag problem.

One thing that seems odd is that Intel Extreme Utility is telling me I am using only 1 core which seems highly unlikely.

Don't want to hijack somebody else's thread so perhaps I'll stop here and see how I get on with the next mixes.
Anaticipative processing disabled:


Anticipative processing enabled:
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Last edited by MixR; 09-08-2021 at 11:31 AM.
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Old 11-27-2021, 08:02 AM   #199
KuulArt
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Hi,
I am having very similar issues as everyone here. As soon as my projects get bigger with more parallel chains the play/stop and cursor move while laying getts really sluggish. It takes 2-10seconds to start or stop the playback and according to all cpu meters I have enough cpu power left.
Only thing that helps is to bypass all plugins, or sometimes only mixbus plugins before play or stop. When audio is plying I can enable plugins back without delay but I have to bypass all before stopping.

I am wondering if a custom action that bypasses all plguins before start/stop would help here cause its getting ridiculosly hard to get some work done here

Im running at 96k. There is about 60-70 audio tracks with deep nested folders and alot of routing to other places.
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Old 11-27-2021, 08:39 AM   #200
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Check to see if this bug report seems relevant: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=241308
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