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Old 05-31-2018, 02:32 AM   #41
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Strange that the numbers differ so much.
I have a very powerful X299 / 7820x system at 4,3GHz and this is my figures:
(perf mon inside reaper only)

2000 tracks:
15% CPU / 7% RT, same on playback.

4000 tracks:
35% CPU / 15% RT, same on playback.

Generally the windows perf mon will show total CPU usage around 10% higher that reapers.
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Old 05-31-2018, 03:46 AM   #42
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Seems weird to me.
-Michael
No, weird is, that the decrease just happens once and stays then. So the drop goes from 30 % to about 16 % after playing and then doesn't go up again.
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Old 05-31-2018, 04:40 AM   #43
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Even weirder.

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Old 05-31-2018, 12:08 PM   #44
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Originally Posted by EvilDragon View Post
Orchestral template. ... 4000 tracks is a lot but I bet it can be reduced.
4,000 tracks is ridiculous. I do orchestral mockups and the beauty of Reaper is that you can use track templates far more efficiently and won't have to spend minutes scrolling through endless tracks to find what you're looking for.

With track templates I can load as I go. If I want Albion One strings, I simply right click and tell it to load. I can guarantee that takes less time than scrolling through hundreds of tracks AND saves on CPU usage.
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Old 05-31-2018, 12:36 PM   #45
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FWIW, I went through a tremendous amount of testing when I was designing OTR (Orchestral Template For Reaper). I did not see anything remotely similar to the 4k issue some of the users are reporting. My "basic orchestral template" - which includes very complex routing - has about 1.5k tracks (mostly Kontakt) and runs smoothly at 24/48k and a buffer of 384. I can usually start with a buffer of 256, and move to 384 depending on the sample libraries used. At mix down, I will of course go anywhere from 512 to 2048 for the buffer. This was on a 5k iMac, 4.0ghz i7. I rely heavily on Track Templates as well. And, if I recall correctly, I think I was successfully running somewhere north of 2000 tracks with a wav file placed on each track during testing. I am not near my DAW right now to test, but I do remember that 4000 tracks of audio playback was not possible on my DAW with wav files on every track at the playhead.

Also, for a NEW test, I just loaded a fresh Reaper 5.9 install on my 13" 2017 i5 MacBook Pro (it is not used for audio, so I thought it'd be a good test). I get about 36% CPU usage at idle, 35% at play on the blank tracks after adding 4k tracks at 48k, 512 buffer using the system audio sound card.
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Old 05-31-2018, 05:01 PM   #46
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Whereas for me with 4000 tracks Reaper will crash when I look sideways at it.

Mini dump here (Reaper 5.90 on Windows 10 x64)
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Old 05-31-2018, 06:13 PM   #47
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Originally Posted by Eliseat View Post
So I also tested it on my 64bit win7 laptop with i7 2630qm CPU 2000 GHz.

2000 tracks run completely smooth at 0.3 cpu usage at all. 3000 tracks show about 30 % CPU which decrease at about 16-20% while playing. Insane 4000 tracks means a hard increasing of CPU usage until 40-50% BUT with NO big difference if playing or idling.D

I am very curious what setting you are using? I just put my buffering setting to Auto Detect and thread behavior to "automatic (experimental) and was able to play the 4000 empty tracks and get about 75% CPU usage but I am running an 8 core 5960X at 4.4GHz and would expect it to perform better than an older laptop. This DAW will be 4 years old so its no spring chicken.

my template is using 74% of the cpu just to play the 3776 empty tracks. I muted half the tracks and it went down to 72%. If I can figure out how to get the cpu down to 50% when I hit play on and empty session then I can use it.

Could you share some of your prefs tweaks on that old laptop?
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Old 05-31-2018, 06:32 PM   #48
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Also. regarding my CPU usage percentages. These percentages that I have posted are taken from the task manager in windows. When looking at the performance meter inside Reaper, I find those numbers to be much lower, but if I get my RT CPU usage up to 45% and the total CPU usage meter up to 70%, then it's "crackle time".

The total CPU meter in Reaper is about half of what the task manager says it is.

I have not used any other monitoring software but my figures are from the Task manager.
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Old 05-31-2018, 06:33 PM   #49
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I have not used any other monitoring software but my figures are from the Task manager.
Same here FYI and reaper.exe only. Open the Audio Device Settings window in preferences and watch what happens.
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Old 06-01-2018, 05:15 AM   #50
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Originally Posted by Swi View Post
I am very curious what setting you are using? I just put my buffering setting to Auto Detect and thread behavior to "automatic (experimental) and was able to play the 4000 empty tracks and get about 75% CPU usage but I am running an 8 core 5960X at 4.4GHz and would expect it to perform better than an older laptop. This DAW will be 4 years old so its no spring chicken.

my template is using 74% of the cpu just to play the 3776 empty tracks. I muted half the tracks and it went down to 72%. If I can figure out how to get the cpu down to 50% when I hit play on and empty session then I can use it.

Could you share some of your prefs tweaks on that old laptop?
Hi, Swi. I have to confess I didn't change anything to optimize the buffering. Only once I had a project with lots of FX and tracks which forced me to change the device settings. I ended up with the primary driver and lots of buffer and use it now for mixing and editing but not for recording because of its horrible latency.

I post the pictures of my settings and the 4000 tracks. But I didn't look at the windows performance in task manager but rather inside Reaper info window.
First screenshot of tracks shows the 4000 tracks at idle. Second one shows at playing. And as I already mentioned its not possible to work with 4000 track because anything really gets laggy. Even the menu opens only after 1 or 2 seconds. And I didn't try to actually run media or midi items.
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Old 06-01-2018, 05:29 AM   #51
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So to complete the mystery. Here are two screenshots of my windows performance meters of all 8 cores. As you see in the first picture, there is a starting peak at about 70% but after that the idle levels at about 45-50%. In the second picture you can see the graph while playing the 4000 tracks for about 35 seconds. (without items of course) There is no significant increase or decrease while playing. It just stays inside the normal fluctuation. So I guess there must something odd going on if your high tech system gets outperformed by my old laptop.
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Old 06-01-2018, 05:37 AM   #52
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Could it be your system? I mean I heard about a similar case with a graphics software running pretty laggy because windows didn't get manage to run all the CPU cores. At the end the software wasn't able to use the full power of the system. Just a thought. But I have no idea.
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Old 06-01-2018, 06:54 AM   #53
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Hi, Swi. I have to confess I didn't change anything to optimize the buffering. Only once I had a project with lots of FX and tracks which forced me to change the device settings. I ended up with the primary driver and lots of buffer and use it now for mixing and editing but not for recording because of its horrible latency.

I post the pictures of my settings and the 4000 tracks. But I didn't look at the windows performance in task manager but rather inside Reaper info window.
First screenshot of tracks shows the 4000 tracks at idle. Second one shows at playing. And as I already mentioned its not possible to work with 4000 track because anything really gets laggy. Even the menu opens only after 1 or 2 seconds. And I didn't try to actually run media or midi items.
Your buffer and audio driver will completely change the performance of your DAW. For example, apogee and rme devices have the best performing drivers on the market. Anything else can cause results to vary. If you are on windows, are you using ASIO? That’ll make a difference. And if your buffer is not set correctly, you can max out your cpu easily with too low of a buffer. Your buffer is your air traffic controller for the flow of audio in your system. I would never trust an “auto” buffer setting. That is something that needs adjusted as required.
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Old 06-01-2018, 08:57 AM   #54
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Default Thank you Eliseat

Thank you for taking the time to post these picks. I turned off "Allow live FX Multiprocessing on:" and unchecked the 2 boxes above this like you have but my results did not change enough. It's still "crackle time" when I open up one of the projects I was working on.
There are only about 30 tracks being used in that project. It's all the empty tracks that are killing me.
I really can't go back to loading instrument only when I need them.

I am running a 512 buffer and using A RedNet PCIe card. If it was the hardware, my other software would have the same issue.

I split up the tracks into different screensets which made them more manageable although I did want more screensets. This also limited the tracks I could select from the midi editor to the tracks available in the screenset.

If cockos figure out how to make empty unused tracks eat less of the cpu I will be back. I hope they figure it out. I'll be watching.
Thanks to everyone for all the help.
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Old 06-01-2018, 09:14 AM   #55
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4,000 tracks is ridiculous. I do orchestral mockups and the beauty of Reaper is that you can use track templates far more efficiently and won't have to spend minutes scrolling through endless tracks to find what you're looking for.

With track templates, I can load as I go. If I want Albion One strings, I simply right click and tell it to load. I can guarantee that takes less time than scrolling through hundreds of tracks AND saves on CPU usage.
I just tested this and it does work with VEP as long as everything associated with that VEP instance all goes in the track template.

Thanks for this tip. Reaper is an altogether different workflow so I can probably get used to this.

It did load very quickly and was bussed correctly, verbs and all. Thanks for this.
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Old 06-01-2018, 09:27 AM   #56
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Another thing to try (which was mandatory with my large templates), was to turn off the chase cursor feature in preferences. If all of the tracks on the screen are auto scrolling, the graphics engine can cause spikes in CPU. Turning this off was the biggest CPU saver (and single handedly removed any crackle problems I had).
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Old 06-01-2018, 09:46 AM   #57
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I just tested this and it does work with VEP as long as everything associated with that VEP instance all goes in the track template.

Thanks for this tip. Reaper is an altogether different workflow so I can probably get used to this.

It did load very quickly and was bussed correctly, verbs and all. Thanks for this.
Also, to RobGB’s point, if your template is designed correctly to add track templates, then you also do not need to worry about the global sends. The only thing you need to worry about are sends that are specific to the tracks you are inserting. In that case, it still makes sense to include those in the Track Template.

In OTR (for example), the master templates have global sends set up on parent tracks. All you have to do is right click and insert a track template with Kontakt/VEP/etc under the parent track. Everything is prerouted. If you need something specific like a reverb that is tailored for a certain VST, then include that in the Track Template. Sounds like that is what you managed to do, so that is great to hear!

However, I will emphasize that a properly built template will not require funky routing or strange designs. The common roadblock most people converting to Reaper have is a mindset of “this is how it is done in ProTools/Logic/Cubase.” If you try to replicate those workflows, it isn’t going to turn out to well for you because those were never designed for a digital world. They were designed to replicate an analog world. No one had 4000 tracks in the analog world, so a DAW designed to replicate an analog workflow is never going to be the best approach. Realistically, I still don’t understand the “I have to have 4000 tracks available and only use 30 of them.” Regardless of DAW, it is a tank on system resources. Track Templates are the way to go here and work so well in Reaper that it makes other DAWs approaches seem antiquated. If I inserted all of my track templates, I’m sure I’d clear north of 4000 tracks. But instead, I have about 1000 tracks loaded in my template and add additional ones to my template as I go. If I stripped out the VIs, I’d have around 300 tracks in just the design and architecture with sends etc.
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Old 06-01-2018, 10:04 AM   #58
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I tried 4K tracks on my machine and was over 70% utilization. I changed the thread priority to idle and that dropped to under 10%:



I can't say I know the implications of this change. My assumption would be that it would increase your likelihood of dropout. I threw my most challenging project at it and it ran just fine, no dropout, but I'm not scoring films here, so YMMV.

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Regardless of DAW, it is a tank on system resources.
Actually, as several people have reported in this thread, this isn't true. There are DAWs where unused tracks have little to no impact on CPU utilization. This thread exists because Reaper is an exception.
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Old 06-01-2018, 10:40 AM   #59
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Another thing to try (which was mandatory with my large templates), was to turn off the chase cursor feature in preferences. If all of the tracks on the screen are auto scrolling, the graphics engine can cause spikes in CPU. Turning this off was the biggest CPU saver (and single handedly removed any crackle problems I had).
Hey thanks for this. I'm going to see if that helps. I'm not sure I can live without auto-scrolling though. It's pretty necessary for anything project that has a lot of measures.

For me it's not so much the CPU usage at high track count that's a problem but unresponsive laggy GUI, issues when scrolling/starting/stopping and long save times. I'm using an Nvidia P4000 which can handle a pretty serious workload so my guess is Reaper needs some graphics optimizations in this regard. I'm not seeing any of these issues at lower to medium track counts.

Being able to fully offline a track would still be immensely valuable because the most online tracks and kontakt instanciations I would have is around 150 and I'm not seeing GUI issues and long save times at that track count. It would also cut down the project file size by a considerable amount.

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Old 06-01-2018, 11:14 AM   #60
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Being able to fully offline a track would still be immensely valuable because the most online tracks and kontakt instanciations I would have is around 150 and I'm not seeing GUI issues and long save times at that track count. It would also cut down the project file size by a considerable amount.
No, that wouldn't change save times or file sizes. Even if fully offlined, Reaper would still need to write all track data and plugin state chunk(s), so you'd end up with the same filesize as before.
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Old 06-01-2018, 12:06 PM   #61
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IActually, as several people have reported in this thread, this isn't true. There are DAWs where unused tracks have little to no impact on CPU utilization. This thread exists because Reaper is an exception.
I don’t want to go tit-for-tat here since every daw does handle it differently, but every daw will experience performance degradation to some extent with higher track counts. It doesn’t matter where the resources are hidden. But it would have an impact. Muting tracks in Reaper should deallocate cpu resources for them, but there is still a marginal amount of resources allocated to it. Whether it is graphic redraws, etc. the same for other daws. If you are pushing a system to the max, these marginal resources add up over time and can be the difference in a template running smoothly or tanking.. if you have the resources, you may not see it depending on the daw. And by tank, I meant unnecessarily consume cpu cycles/Ram/audio buffer blocks/graphic performance/etc which can lead to dropouts, higher buffers, crackles, etc. - especially with complex routing. That’s all I was saying. Hope that clarifies a bit.

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Old 06-01-2018, 12:47 PM   #62
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+1 for better handling of large track templates.
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Old 06-01-2018, 02:17 PM   #63
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some extent [..] an impact
We're talking about 80% CPU utilization. The point, presumably, is that there are DAWs where empty tracks have very little -- i.e. negligible, unimportant, choose your adjective -- impact, such that you can have 4K empty tracks without issue, whereas in Reaper the impact is far enough above 0 that multiplying it by 4K renders your project unusable.

The OP is trying to move his established workflow into Reaper. He could never have established that workflow if it didn't work in another other DAW. Helping him troubleshoot, find workarounds or alternative workflows is productive. Telling him it's the same in every other DAW, when a fundamental premise of the thread's existence is that it's not, is not productive, IMO.
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Old 06-01-2018, 04:12 PM   #64
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Hey guys, very interesting topic.
I'm not using VE Pro, I'm going for the same approach as Klangfarben, also for the same reasons mentioned.

I recently "ported" my Cubase template to Reaper and added some new instruments, too. My track count is at around 1500 at the moment.
The GUI gets slower for sure (especially when zooming, scrolling, etc...),
however, I usually hide unused tracks, which makes the GUI react faster again.
But this isn't a solution for the mentioned 4000 tracks. I tried it (as Tack, it failed several times, Reaper crashed). But when it worked, Reaper became very slow and unresponsive. Idle is around 2% here, when I hit play the CPU goes up to 69%. I also tried to mute all tracks, but this didn't result in less CPU usage.

Since the project sizes go up as well, I was already considering setting up a sophisticated track template approach. Something, that would be just as quick, as scrolling/searching for a VSTi. But I haven't started with planning for this, yet.
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Old 06-01-2018, 08:54 PM   #65
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We're talking about 80% CPU utilization. The point, presumably, is that there are DAWs where empty tracks have very little -- i.e. negligible, unimportant, choose your adjective -- impact, such that you can have 4K empty tracks without issue, whereas in Reaper the impact is far enough above 0 that multiplying it by 4K renders your project unusable.

The OP is trying to move his established workflow into Reaper. He could never have established that workflow if it didn't work in another other DAW. Helping him troubleshoot, find workarounds or alternative workflows is productive. Telling him it's the same in every other DAW, when a fundamental premise of the thread's existence is that it's not, is not productive, IMO.
I think you misunderstood and I certainly do not mean to come across as any of the things you mentioned above. I think you’ll find my history of posts on VIC and here support this as I always attempt to postivively contribute and help others if there is something that I can contribute. I’ve used every daw on the market just as many others have as well. Nothing was intended to be defensive. If so, I apologize. If anything, my comments were intended to be objective as someone who has a large history of large workflows across the various daws. I’ve provided several suggestions for workarounds - including the graphics issue. There is certainly something going on with GUI lag in Reaper with high track counts, but it can be largely rectified by turning off the chase cursor function. It isn’t ideal, but it largely solves the problem. But when it comes to porting high track count workflows into Reaper, the proper approach is to see what capabilities the tool offers rather than try to use the tool to do something it isn’t designed to do. And when you do, you might find it more efficient at reaching the result you desire, though it may very well require modifying existing workflows. If that approach isn’t for you, then you should stick with the tools that you are most comfortable with (not you per se, but whoever is approaching Reaper). However this comment should really apply to approaching everything in life, not just daws, so hopefully that clarifies any disconnect you may have found in my previous post.

I do hope we can move past any personal disconnect in the dialogue so as not to derail this thread. It is a very beneficial thread and there are clearly some technical issues that do need to be explored further regarding the mute function and variances in high track counts. Hopefully Justin can chime in on what we are technically experiencing and what his thoughts are on the subject.
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Old 06-01-2018, 08:56 PM   #66
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I did split up the 3776 tracks into screensets which made then very manageable and easy to find and eliminated the GUI issue. I never experienced any lag. I just couldn't make it to mixdown without some "crackle time". I just ran this (4000 track) test a few days ago and it really took the wind out of me. I know it sounds ridiculous to some of you but I've been using this big template for the last couple years and it's simply wonderful just having it all there. I still troll through some sounds or program synths or play real instruments that I record but I don't go foraging for the "go to" sounds that I have used repeatedly. It makes the work go much faster. And I'm less likely to buy a library I already have, a second time which I have also performed famously...

The great thing about software is that it's not limited in ways the real world is. That's why Reaper has a convert midi to audio function that then lets you edit in lanes of both audio and midi on the same track. Because it's just an idea. This is what makes Reaper great, and this is why I have almost 4000 tracks in my template. Of course, I could do it with less and I did for many years. But I don't want to anymore. I want to use Reaper the way I want to use Reaper. I will be taking a look at my VEP setup and splitting a few things up to try to make the track template thing work. I may be able to use Reaper this way until this high track count issue is resolved. I am still excited about Reaper. Reaper is the future.

Many thanks to the Reaper community.
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Old 06-01-2018, 09:02 PM   #67
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Hey thanks for this. I'm going to see if that helps. I'm not sure I can live without auto-scrolling though. It's pretty necessary for anything project that has a lot of measures.

For me it's not so much the CPU usage at high track count that's a problem but unresponsive laggy GUI, issues when scrolling/starting/stopping and long save times. I'm using an Nvidia P4000 which can handle a pretty serious workload so my guess is Reaper needs some graphics optimizations in this regard. I'm not seeing any of these issues at lower to medium track counts.

Being able to fully offline a track would still be immensely valuable because the most online tracks and kontakt instanciations I would have is around 150 and I'm not seeing GUI issues and long save times at that track count. It would also cut down the project file size by a considerable amount.
Awesome. Hope that helps! It’d be great if you could share results from your testing on it. On my system it improved performance remarkably when the GUI issues and crackles started. I tend to just zoom out further or scroll with my mouse wheel when needed rather than chasing the cursor on really large track counts. But certainly, the underlying GUI code does seem to have something overloading.
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Old 06-03-2018, 12:31 PM   #68
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Huge numbers of tracks is standard practice for composers in film and video games. Just go and watch Junkie XL on YouTube.

I would also like to set up a template this way, but Reaper seems to struggle when you get into high counts, as the op is experiencing.
I also had to remove the auto arm record feature, because it causes glitches as you move around the project.

I have a fairly high spec pc. I7 8700k with 32gb ram.

In contrast, my coworker has a Lower clocked skylake machine running Cubase and using 128gb of ram in one vep template, and it runs flawlessly.

Maybe this is one for bug reports rather than feature requests. With the recent push on notation bringing in the composer crowd, it is important that this workflow is supported.

I see two issues here. High track counts cause slowdown even with nothing on the tracks.
Auto record arm causes glitches in playback when selecting tracks around the project.
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Old 06-03-2018, 03:00 PM   #69
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I'm not exactly sure it's a bug when Reaper is designed with higher idle load in mind...
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Old 06-03-2018, 03:18 PM   #70
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Reaper is designed with higher idle load in mind...
What does that mean? Have you read a dev blog or something that suggests using CPU on empty tracks is intentional? What offsetting advantage does it provide?

If Cubase can do X tracks while Reaper can't, that's not necessarily a bug (though it could be; bugs get fixed when they're noticed, so this workflow could have made unintended CPU usage visible), but it's a weakness in a specific area typically touted as Reaper's strength (performance). Certainly worth bringing to Justin's attention.

In addition to seemingly unnecessary CPU usage on empty tracks, there seems to be a UI thread prioritization issue when not doing playback/recording which makes the app hard to work with during heavy CPU utilization. Klangfarben mentioned it earlier in this thread "it's not so much the CPU usage at high track count that's a problem but unresponsive laggy GUI, issues when scrolling/starting/stopping and long save times", and it came up independently on reddit today, too.
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Old 06-03-2018, 03:28 PM   #71
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From the developer's mouth:

https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.ph...99&postcount=5



And yes, Reaper doesn't prioritize GUI, it priorities not getting audio dropouts. If Reaper needs to choose between dropping an audio buffer, causing glitches and smooth UI, it will prefer not dropping the audio buffer. Which is a good call. You cannot have it all, something's gotta compromise eventually - either will audio start glitch out sooner because CPU needs to keep the GUI smooth, or it won't.


Long save times are unavoidable when you have a metric shitton of Kontakt instances loaded with heavy instruments - saving all those plugin state chunks will take some time in an uncompressed human-readable format that RPP is. That's just how things are when you have an open format like that.

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Old 06-03-2018, 04:09 PM   #72
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Quote:
Originally Posted by EvilDragon View Post
From the developer's mouth:
Thanks for the link.

To be fair, that post is from 2011 and:

1. He says "REAPER is designed to idle at a higher CPU usage than most other DAWs, but scale better as the load increases". That's demonstrably not true for this specific workflow, because empty tracks are adding real load that eventually renders the app unusable. I think he says that because:
2. He doesn't consider having a huge number of empty tracks to be a "real-world scenario" and suggests as a solution to "just remove empty tracks". He doesn't seem to be aware that this is a legitimate workflow used by composers in other DAWs. It was news to me until I read this thread.

Quote:
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Reaper doesn't prioritize GUI, it priorities not getting audio dropouts.
Of course. I was talking about "when not doing playback/recording". You can't get audio dropout if you're not doing audio.

I just found the option "Run FX when stopped". If you turn that off, the idle CPU comes way down. That will at least let you fix a broken project. I'll mention it that guy on reddit. Seems like that will solve his problem.

I've confirmed that unchecking "Run FX when stopped" and hiding empty tracks via the Track Manager makes Reaper's UI totally usable regardless of the number of empty tracks, as long as you're not doing any playback.

However, it still makes no sense to me why empty tracks should consume any CPU during playback, especially when they have no FX and no audio or input routed to them. I created 4K tracks with no input, no sends, no receives, master send disabled, and no items. They might as well not exist, yet as soon as you start playback, they chew up CPU. I can't imagine how this helps performance scale. It seems like such a trivial thing to fix: don't process tracks which are incapable of having an impact on any output (which is a big optimization strategy in so-called "functional" programming languages).
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Old 06-03-2018, 04:20 PM   #73
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Originally Posted by EricTbone View Post
They might as well not exist, yet as soon as you start playback, they chew up CPU.
I think I mentioned this already somewhere. Tracks chew some CPU because they are ready to accept media at any time, even during playback (most other DAWs don't even allow this - correct me if I'm wrong). So you can be dropping your audio items directly onto the timeline DURING PLAYBACK and it won't glitch out. If empty tracks weren't processed this wouldn't have been possible without glitches. I guess that covers for another type of workflow better (audio editing).
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Old 06-03-2018, 04:40 PM   #74
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Quote:
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I think I mentioned this already somewhere. Tracks chew some CPU because they are ready to accept media at any time, even during playback. So you can be dropping your audio items directly onto the timeline DURING PLAYBACK and it won't glitch out.
Did Schwa say something about that, too? I'm genuinely curious. It's directly at odds with the claim that it's done for performance scaling and non-visible tracks exhibit the same behavior. Also, humans might as well not be moving by computer standards. It takes an eternity in computer time for the human's hand to slowly crawl across the screen towards a drop location, while Reaper leisurely does things like highlight drop targets for them. It has all the time in the world to prepare a track to process audio before the user's desire to release the mouse button can percolate through his brain and make it to his finger.

As a developer myself, I find it hard to imagine that this is difficult to solve. Seems more like something neglected because Schwa never considered it a real world workflow. Of course, I'm probably wrong, but reasons given so far aren't very convincing.

If it really is done just to allow you to drop new media onto empty tracks during playback/recording, it should probably be an option that's off by default. I'd rather reserve CPU usage for audio processing than a feature I never use.

All of that said, I have to imagine there's a better solution to the articulation problem than thousands of empty tracks, but I don't know enough about the problem to know what that is. I just know that users will come up with seriously whacky solutions to problems when better alternatives exist. But there seem to be a lot of people saying this is a common workflow.

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Old 06-04-2018, 02:30 AM   #75
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As ED says I think the reason for the CPU usage of empty tracks is that they are "ready for action" at any time, which definitely makes sense for some workflows. But it could very well be the case that the devs haven't really thought about the workflows being descibed here, with huge track counts etc. So really, there should be an option to "unready" empty track so that these people can work better.
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Old 06-04-2018, 04:42 AM   #76
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Yep, if that's possible, that would be great.
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Old 06-16-2018, 11:36 AM   #77
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Maybe I'm missing something, or someone asked already, but it seems like the obvious solution here would be to not have 4000 tracks.

I'm honestly struggling to imagine any situation in which you could need those. Are you guys (either real or with samplers) mixing a full orchestra with twenty spot mics on each player?

If it's for workflow reasons (keeping the pizzicato and bowed string parts on their own tracks to make mixing them easier, etc), odds are very good that Reaper has a better way to do it for you.
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Old 06-16-2018, 11:47 AM   #78
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It's not about 20 spot mics, it's about having a large number of sounds/instruments/articulations available at the drop of a hat...
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Old 06-16-2018, 11:51 AM   #79
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Auditioning.

You want all of your samples libraries in Kontakt, play, etc ready to go. All of the previously used synths in a project in a template.

You want all of your samples and instruments loaded on your VEP server(s) and assigned in your templates and have everything ready to audition and record.

Otherwise you're doing what I'm doing now. I need something ethnic sounding. I rarely need these types of sounds. So I have to spent 3 or 4 hours searching and opening each of the hundreds of samples libraries across different plugins, Kontakt, UVI, Play, etc to find the one that works best. had I imported all of them into a template I would have gone through them all in less than an hour.

Also, as important you don't want to be bothered routing and stem output assignments in the middle of a project. Track template would help but the routing assignments get lost.

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Old 06-16-2018, 12:03 PM   #80
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Quote:
Originally Posted by blumpy View Post
Auditioning.

You want all of your samples libraries in Kontakt, play, etc ready to go. All of the previously used synths in a project in a template.

You want all of your samples and instruments loaded on your VEP server(s) and assigned in your templates and have everything ready to audition and record.
Okay, that makes sense. Why do you need those tracks always on and processing? You're not using them, there's nothing there, what's wrong with using the Mute button to make them take a nap?
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