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Old 05-29-2018, 10:04 AM   #1
Swi
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Default Better handling of high track counts and VEP

After 6 weeks of building the template and coding reaticulate and learning Reaper, in general, I am slightly crushed but still, want to use Reaper. It's so much faster and more fun to use than any other daw.

I am hoping that I have made an error in my settings and someone can help me figure this out.

Where Reaper and I get into trouble is with high track counts.

I'm running windows 10 with a 5960X OC@ 4.4gHz

I ran a test today. I opened an empty project and added 4000 tracks. Nothing attached no plugs, nothing bussed. When I press play all 16 cores in my cpu are pegged in the task manager.

3000 tracks 3 of the cores are pegged and the others look like they are at 80%

2000 Tracks and my cores are at 70%

I then went back to 4000 tracks and muted them all, pressed play and my cores were pegged. Then I deactivated all of the 4000 tracks and pressed play and again, all cores were pegged.

I have the "Do not process muted tracks" feature on in my prefs.

Is there something I am missing? 4000 deactivated tracks should behave like an empty project. No?
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Old 05-29-2018, 10:16 AM   #2
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Default Ignore tracks without data

This would be a nice feature. I should not have to mute a track. It should be ignored until I select it or put data on it.

And it should actually be like it's not there at all until I select it.
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Old 05-29-2018, 12:28 PM   #3
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Swi View Post
Is there something I am missing? 4000 deactivated tracks should behave like an empty project. No?
Nope, empty tracks still need some "housekeeping CPU" to go about with multiprocessing enabled, but when those tracks actually do some processing, the increase in CPU usage is not as terrible as one might expect. This is by design in Reaper.

Relevant thread: https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=152217,

And "from the horse's mouth": https://forum.cockos.com/showpost.ph...99&postcount=5


Also don't forget: all tracks that send to another track are processed on the same thread, which means that thread needs more CPU juice to go around.
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Old 05-29-2018, 01:19 PM   #4
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Default Thank you evil dragon

Many thanks,
I guess Reaper's not going to work for me then. The time it would save me while creating will go away when I load instruments.

If Reaper had an "ignore empty tracks" option that actually did ignore the empty tracks then I could work with it.

I will use it to make quick times then...
I spent 6 weeks trying to figure this out and I really like this daw and would prefer to work in it.
I should have run this test first. This is crushing.

Thank you and goodbye for now.
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Old 05-29-2018, 01:28 PM   #5
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And just for the record. I also need all tracks to be auto armed and not glitch every time I select a new track.
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Old 05-29-2018, 01:53 PM   #6
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Why the heck would you need such a high number of tracks? And why do you think Reaper wont work just because you find out it can't handle thousands of muted tracks which is ridiculous?

I worked with a lot of DAWs and Reaper for sure is the most cpu friendly of them all. So we wish you good luck finding a better one which can handle 4000 muted tracks.
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Old 05-29-2018, 02:04 PM   #7
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Must be a very quiet tune exceptional hearing perhaps?

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Old 05-29-2018, 02:08 PM   #8
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There has to be a better organizational way of doing whatever you are doing.

like, If I'm going to organize my closet, I'm not going to stuff it full of empty boxes first. Then maybe I gotta take a few boxes out just to open up the box I want to start putting stuff into.

Why not break things up into sections? Pull in track templates as needed.

If you find a DAW that actually does what you are wanting, please let us know.
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Old 05-29-2018, 02:39 PM   #9
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Originally Posted by Eliseat View Post
Why the heck would you need such a high number of tracks?
Orchestral template. Pretty normal thing to have hundreds and even thousands of tracks in them. Lots of sounds, orchestral instruments with all their articulations ready to go at a drop of a hat. Pretty standard workflow in those circles.

I do think that perhaps figuring out some ways to condense the routings so that template gets lighter would be a good idea. 4000 tracks is a lot but I bet it can be reduced.

Last edited by EvilDragon; 05-29-2018 at 02:45 PM.
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Old 05-29-2018, 03:52 PM   #10
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I do think that perhaps figuring out some ways to condense the routings so that template gets lighter would be a good idea. 4000 tracks is a lot but I bet it can be reduced.
considering that each track in REAPER is basically a 64 x 64 track mixer in itself and that there are 16 MIDI busses available, and 16 MIDI channels, I'm mathematically positive that a 4000 track orchestral template could be reduced to -4192 tracks.



hyperbole aside, I know there are organizational tradeoffs at play here. I would love to know more about the reasoning for such large templates.
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Old 05-29-2018, 04:00 PM   #11
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1000 tracks is pretty typical in film scoring work. My Reaper template has about that many with Kontakt on just about every track. I keep the Kontakt instances offline and have the tracks muted as well and then use a custom action to bring Kontakt online and unmute the track I want to use/audition.

The problem is that when you have a lot of Kontakts online in a large template, Reaper gets very slow at certain things. For example, doing a save can take 15 seconds or so (even with Kontakt set to save minimal undo states). Which when you have auto-save set to 10 minutes is a real drag. Also, there's a lot of random issues such as a temporary hang when you hit play (can sometimes take up to 15 sec before playing) or hitting stop while playing. Scrolling has been an issue as well although that has been improved in 5.9.

Is the track count high? Yes. However, out of 1000 Kontakt instances, there's usually never more than 100 active and online at the same time. In my opinion, there is a lot of room for optimization. Could some of this be the fault of Kontakt? Certainly. But from what I've seen Reaper is partly to blame for some of this.

Although 100 active tracks of Kontakt might seem like quite a lot for most users, it's also equivalent to around 6-7 fully loaded multi-instances of Kontakt which really isn't a lot at all. Reaper seems to have a lot of issues with high track counts and the Reaper project file sizes get incredibly large and unwieldy as well. At least from what I'm seeing, Reaper acts very differently in a project with 900 Kontakt instruments offline and 100 tracks online vs a session that only has 100 tracks online.

Maybe if there was a way to take a track completely offline so Reaper ignored it until online vs just the plugins being offline that would help?
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Old 05-29-2018, 04:20 PM   #12
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Default food for thought

If I pay for a library from Spitfire, Orchestra tools, cine samples etc. I want to have access to that sound. I am not going to remember which violin sample it was in a list inside Kontakt. Has anyone seen Sable strings (now called something else thank you spitfire) I will, however, remember the color of certain tracks in a list and where it falls in a list/screenset. Because most of the libraries consist of key switching I need a separate reaticulate for each one. The list just gets long after a while. I think the biggest track count I ever used at once was 170 on a horror film.
When I'm writing I just want to select a track to hear the sound. I don't want to have to forage through lists in Kontakt and wait for it to load. And as the previous person has said if you get to much in your ram of your daw, Save times go way up. Presets add a lot of data to a daw session so if you have a lot of presets loaded that alone can turn your session file into 700MB and your waiting for 4 seconds just to save it on an SSD.

I thought "Maybe I can just use track templates and bring them in as I need them" but then bussing and screensets will be a mess.
"Maybe a subproject for each bus in my template" so I can put strings in one subproject, Brass in another, Woods, Choir... There's 26 in my template and 32 in some of my friends.
15 years ago I had a hard time finding the money to pay for libraries.
Now I have a hard time finding a place to put them all.
I have not seen another software that can create 4000 tracks in 5 seconds like reaper does.
You can build a computer with 1TB of ram today and host a ton of libraries on it. I only have about 600GB of ram on my slaves. With flash memory and other ram substitutes coming I don't see how this issue will ever go away. You will never want to load all that memory locally. It will take a half hour for your sessions to open.
In my fantasy world. Reaper ignores empty tracks so there's really no limit and I can build a slave machine with 1TB of ram that has Reaper running and I tie that Reaper session into my Daw session (with Reastream?) when I need it. I don't care if I need fiber to make it happen I just want it.

Because more is more and then some more...
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Old 05-29-2018, 04:58 PM   #13
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Also to chime in on what Swi is saying, the name of the game in film scoring is efficiency. So being able to select a track quickly and hear it is paramount. The only real way to do that is have a lot of stuff loaded. Because you are just constantly jumping around from strings to brass to percussion, synths etc. being that you don't know what a cue will need until you start working on it. My template has around 250 tracks of strings alone. And you also have to work at an extremely fast pace to get enough minutes on the board for the day. We've been working this way with a ton of stuff loaded even going back to the pre-gigasampler days using Roland and Emu samplers. If there was a better way we would have found it by now.

And in terms of routing, having one instrument in a single instance is much much easier to route than using Kontakt multi-outs. If the mixer calls me and says I have to change where the celeste is routed, right now all I do is grab the celeste tracks and throw them in another folder and they're re-routed. If I'm using Kontakt multi-outs, I have to find each instance of Kontakt that has a celeste, change the routing in Kontakt, save the multi and then double check that each one is showing up where it should.

And I would even be slightly ok with a 700MB project size. Mine are usually around 2GB. Which means each auto-save backup is also 2GB. And since you can't limit the number of auto-backups, I'm eating up a crap ton of disk space.

So right now, Reaper becoming very inefficient at high track counts is a pretty serious detriment for film scoring work. Long save times, random hangs on playback, etc. greatly reduce efficiency which reduces the amount of minutes you can put up a day. And I'm on a 32-core Xeon rig with 256GB of RAM and an 8TB NVMe RAID that pulls about 6GB/sec. There's not a lot out there much faster. Which is too bad because Reaper is so good at so many other things - and nothing else has the scripting ecosystem that Reaper has.

Again, I can completely understand why people would think 1000 tracks is ridiculous and unnecessary but it's neither. It's the most efficient way to work in the film world. I'm not sure what the solution here is, but like I said maybe if there was a way to completely offline a track then Reaper wouldn't get so hung up on large track counts? I don't know.
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Old 05-29-2018, 06:02 PM   #14
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Thank you Kalngfarben.
And just to clarify. We don't want workarounds. We just want it to work as quickly and cleanly as it works when there are only 20 tracks in it.

The features, the speed that it loads, the scripting and the community is like no other.

Make it great!

"Ignore empty tracks"
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Old 05-29-2018, 06:07 PM   #15
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Thank you for that explanation I should not have quipped!
I am sheltering under a blanket as I write.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Klangfarben View Post
Also to chime in on what Swi is saying, the name of the game in film scoring is efficiency. So being able to select a track quickly and hear it is paramount. The only real way to do that is have a lot of stuff loaded. Because you are just constantly jumping around from strings to brass to percussion, synths etc. being that you don't know what a cue will need until you start working on it. My template has around 250 tracks of strings alone. And you also have to work at an extremely fast pace to get enough minutes on the board for the day. We've been working this way with a ton of stuff loaded even going back to the pre-gigasampler days using Roland and Emu samplers. If there was a better way we would have found it by now.

And in terms of routing, having one instrument in a single instance is much much easier to route than using Kontakt multi-outs. If the mixer calls me and says I have to change where the celeste is routed, right now all I do is grab the celeste tracks and throw them in another folder and they're re-routed. If I'm using Kontakt multi-outs, I have to find each instance of Kontakt that has a celeste, change the routing in Kontakt, save the multi and then double check that each one is showing up where it should.

And I would even be slightly ok with a 700MB project size. Mine are usually around 2GB. Which means each auto-save backup is also 2GB. And since you can't limit the number of auto-backups, I'm eating up a crap ton of disk space.

So right now, Reaper becoming very inefficient at high track counts is a pretty serious detriment for film scoring work. Long save times, random hangs on playback, etc. greatly reduce efficiency which reduces the amount of minutes you can put up a day. And I'm on a 32-core Xeon rig with 256GB of RAM and an 8TB NVMe RAID that pulls about 6GB/sec. There's not a lot out there much faster. Which is too bad because Reaper is so good at so many other things - and nothing else has the scripting ecosystem that Reaper has.

Again, I can completely understand why people would think 1000 tracks is ridiculous and unnecessary but it's neither. It's the most efficient way to work in the film world. I'm not sure what the solution here is, but like I said maybe if there was a way to completely offline a track then Reaper wouldn't get so hung up on large track counts? I don't know.
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Old 05-29-2018, 06:53 PM   #16
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I worked with a lot of DAWs and Reaper for sure is the most cpu friendly of them all.
I wanted to take a second and address this because I think there's an important distinction being missed.

I also agree that Reaper is very CPU efficient. And I've used Digital Performer, Pro Tools, Logic, Ableton and Cubase/Nuendo prior to Reaper so I've got a pretty good idea where most DAWs sit in terms of CPU usage.

The distinction here is this. If I create 1000 blank tracks in Digital Performer and hit play, CPU usage is minimal. The expected behavior in most DAWs I have used is the same - that a blank track without anything on it uses very minimal CPU and some DAWs none at all (for example an inactive track in Pro Tools or a disabled track in Cubase/Nuendo). Thus a whole lot of blank tracks will also use very minimal CPU.

Reaper seems to function differently in that it seems to grab a certain amount of set CPU per track regardless of whether the track is blank and not doing anything. Thus if you create 2000 blank tracks and hit play like Swi was saying in the first post, you see significant CPU usage which is not expected behavior in most DAWs. If there were online plugins and or audio/midi data on those tracks, yes, it should light up like a Clark Griswold holiday light montage in Christmas Vacation. But not with completely blank tracks with nothing on them. The CPU usage should still be minimal.

Now, I could very well be wrong in that assessment and I'm sure Justin could easily confirm/deny. But Swi and I are both seeing very similar behavior in large templates on different systems - both of which have pretty beefy specs. So again the distinction is that even though Reaper is indeed very cpu efficient, the fact that it seems to allocate a set minimum amount of cpu/resources per track regardless of whether the track is blank or not means that Reaper actually becomes much more inefficient than other DAWs when the track count is high. Which is the opposite of the expected behavior. It also means that file sizes are going to be incredibly large in high track count projects even with blank unused tracks. Again, not expected or efficient behavior.

Perhaps this could also have to do with the fact that a track in Reaper can literally be anything - and different things at the same time. But even with that being the case a large amount of blank tracks shouldn't be using so much CPU. Because in that case the only feasible solution for using Reaper is to limit the amount of tracks you use. Which goes completely against the tagline of Reaper which is "Audio Production Without Limits".

Last edited by Klangfarben; 05-29-2018 at 07:11 PM.
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Old 05-29-2018, 08:47 PM   #17
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It also means that file sizes are going to be incredibly large in high track count projects even with blank unused tracks.


For what it's worth to you Klangfarben. My track count was 3774 and I made a sort of action comedy cue before I had to switch back and the file size was only 22MB which I found to be extremely small. It has take great effort in my other sequencer to get these file sizes down to 150mb. In my other sequencer I found that the giant file sizes were due to the presets in the plug ins. To be lear is the not the samples inside Kontakt but the present in Kontakt on in my case VEP that was making the file size giant. There is an A?B funtion that I use to the VEP instances are on the "B" setting which has an "empty" preset which is only a few kb of data compared to the "A" version that I switch to connect to the servers with. The "A" version of the preset is 5 to 10 times the size of the "B" version. I don't know if this helps. Again to try to clarify. the preset is the little file that gets saved in your documents / native instruments / Kontakt folder if your referring to Kontakt.

I hope this hleps
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Old 05-29-2018, 08:57 PM   #18
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Thanks for that info Swi. Do you have "Save State as VST Bank" on or off for Kontakt? I'm actually loading everything inside Reaper on one machine, not with VEP so I'm not sure I could do the A/B trick (which is clever btw).

Last edited by Klangfarben; 05-29-2018 at 09:41 PM.
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Old 05-29-2018, 11:18 PM   #19
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All my Kontakt stuff is on other machines hosted in VEP so I don't open it up that much on my daw. I was only writing with it for 6 weeks and was working on a guitar project then so I could use my smaller "no VEP template" so I didn't really run into this problem until I decided to jump in with both feet. It took doing to build the template. I wanted to get to know it first on a simple all recorded audio project first.
The "VST preset size issue" I never had with Reaper, probably because I just didn't have time to build up presets.


To answer your question though I do indeed have a check next to "Save state as VST Bank" in the add fx window for Kontakt.

It may be something worth looking at that's all.
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Old 05-29-2018, 11:57 PM   #20
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just a thought... we have similar desires to yours for dealing with spitfire libs and kontakt... and have been working on a template for that also...

but not using rearticulate or key switches....

so take one of the strings lib's for example...

the problem is there are more than 16 articulations for each so we need several intances of kontakt...
One loads [for example] all the violins and the first 16 articulations and each of those is in kontakt on it's own midi channel... there there are below that
16 midi tracks, each sending on the proper channel for each articulation to that instance of kontakt...

the midi tracks are named by the instrument and articulation...

but then we need another instance of kontakt and the next 16 articulations

As I recall, it takes three instances of kontakt, se up this way to have all the articulations loaded and at your fingertips...

So OK, then do the same for the other instrument libs....

lotta tracks for sure but nothing near 4000
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Old 05-29-2018, 11:57 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by Klangfarben View Post
Thanks for that info Swi. Do you have "Save State as VST Bank" on or off for Kontakt?
IIRC this option bears no difference for Kontakt because Kontakt doesn't report its presets in a bank - it only has one state, one "preset" that it reports to host. There are other plugins that operate in the same way, like Zebra, from the top of my head.

Last edited by EvilDragon; 05-30-2018 at 12:04 AM.
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Old 05-30-2018, 02:14 AM   #22
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Ok now i got it. I had no idea that such libraries get so out of hand. But wouldn't it then make more sense to invest in say three systems which separately run instances of Reaper synced to each other? System one percussions, system two strings, three brass ... i don't know. I mean if those massive orchestral libraries hit the boundaries of any DAW, then there should be a way to use them as they are supposed to.

And of course there is also the official way to find comrades and make a request to ask the developers for an adjustment. Maybe its not a big deal at all to disable tracks in the desired matter?
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Old 05-30-2018, 03:09 AM   #23
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Disabling tracks still leaves you with idle load of empty tracks, they'd still take CPU.
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Old 05-30-2018, 04:07 AM   #24
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Out of curiosity I just tried adding 4000 tracks, indeed they takes a lot of CPU on their own. Also the GUI/response get very laggy, which I sometimes also expeience on much smaller projects (but still big and CPU intense).
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Old 05-30-2018, 07:30 AM   #25
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Quote:
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I guess Reaper's not going to work for me then.
If not: What software would, on the same hardware ?

(Usually Reaper is said to be especially CPU efficient.)
-Michael
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Old 05-30-2018, 07:48 AM   #26
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I have this Template running in Cubase and it takes about 48% of my CPU just to press play on a blank session but that's with 5 master bus plugs and a few plugs on the busses. I'm not sure Cubase could make 4000 tracks in a few seconds the way Reaper does.

Reaper's is such a unique software and community. I really wanted to use it.
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Old 05-30-2018, 08:01 AM   #27
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Reaticulate does both key switching and midi channel selection. I found it much better than anything I've used before. We left our libraries unlocked for key switching though and did not use the UACC stuff. You can also put 4 layers inside a single instance of Kontakt.
Using all the key switches is a good way to consolodate your track count.
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Old 05-30-2018, 08:56 AM   #28
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Out of curiosity I just tried adding 4000 tracks, indeed they takes a lot of CPU on their own. Also the GUI/response get very laggy, which I sometimes also expeience on much smaller projects (but still big and CPU intense).
Yes, this is the basic problem that we are seeing with high track count. Very high cpu usage, laggy/unresponsive gui, long save times, etc.

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(Usually Reaper is said to be especially CPU efficient.)
-Michael
Michael, See my post #16 in this thread regarding this. Yes, Reaper is very CPU efficient. Until the track count becomes high. Then the CPU usage becomes very inefficient because Reaper is dedicating higher CPU resources to those tracks even when they are blank/unused. The end result is if you have a lot of unused tracks in a template, CPU usage is extremely high and Reaper becomes much more unresponsive.

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just a thought... we have similar desires to yours for dealing with spitfire libs and kontakt... and have been working on a template for that also...
Hopi, yes there are people that run Kontakt this way. I used to be one of them. There are three main issues with this workflow. First, when you use one instrument per Kontakt instance, each of those instruments will be running on its own thread. When you have 16 instruments per Kontakt, each of those instruments is sharing a thread. So for example with instruments like legato strings that are used quite a bit, it's very easy to max/overload the available CPU/processing for that one Kontakt that has all your legato strings in it because you are using several of those instruments at the same time. You can try and balance the load by splitting certain instruments into different Kontakt instruments but that becomes a very difficult and complicated dance versus just using one instrument per Kontakt instance.

The second issue is one of routing. Anyone who has done a lot of routing in multi-instances of Kontakt know that it is a giant pain especially versus the ease of use in Reaper's own routing. Now you can of course bite the bullet and set all this routing up in a template and most of us have at one point or another, but the biggest issue comes up in what I described earlier when you have to make a routing change mid-project. This happens frequently because when you work with different mixers they want different instruments routed to different places. So you have to change the routing to accommodate them. Or if you are working with other composers and one has routed instruments/stems a certain way, the rest of us have to match that. Having to go through each Kontakt multi to change that routing for the specific instruments in question is extremely arduous and makes you want to put a bullet in your brain and just end it all (at least for me it certainly does). This versus using Reaper's extremely flexible folder routing and just grabbing those particular tracks in question and dragging them into a different folder. Job done.

The third issue applies specifically to Reaper which is even if you have less Kontakt instances, you will still need 16 midi tracks for each of those instances. In Reaper a track is a track - midi/audio/video etc. And the fact that you've added another track means that your total track count is going to actually end up higher. So CPU usage will in fact be slightly worse. Let's say I cut my Kontakt instances down and use an average of 10 instruments per Kontakt (to make routing and grouping slightly easier). So instead of 1000 tracks of Kontakt I now have 100 tracks of Kontakt. Well, each of those 100 Kontakt tracks will need 10 more equivalent MIDI tracks, so my template will now actually have 100 Kontakt tracks plus 1000 MIDI tracks, so I will actually have increased my template by 100 tracks. Again as far as Reaper is concerned a track is a track so in this method I will actually have increased Reaper's CPU usage even further because more CPU is being used for those extra tracks.

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empty tracks still need some "housekeeping CPU" to go about with multiprocessing enabled, but when those tracks actually do some processing, the increase in CPU usage is not as terrible as one might expect. This is by design in Reaper.
ED thanks for all the great info and for the clarification on how Save State as VST Bank works in regards to Kontakt. I read through the threads you posted including the one from Schwa himself and I think the basic problem is this. The design of how Reaper scales CPU never took into account this manner of working that film/tv/media composers normally adopt - that we keep a whole crapload of tracks in a project so that they can be instantly or near-instantly accessed.

Even though Reaper scales extremely well, the issue is that I'm always going to have a project where I'm using 100-some tracks or so and I'm going to have another 900 blank ones not being used. I need those 900 blank ones there because I need instant access to those sounds/samples. There's really no other possible way to deal with it when you have so many different libraries, instruments and articulations. It's going to be hundreds or thousands of tracks you're dealing with whatever way you slice it. So in that case, those 900 or however many blank unused tracks I have in the session are crippling me even though they aren't being used at the moment. The efficient scaling here doesn't really apply because like I said, I'm never going to actually be using all 1000 tracks. I just need instant access to them hence why my template is that many tracks and not 100 tracks.

Like I said earlier, if there was even just a way to offline a track completely like with a plugin so that Reaper totally ignored it and didn't scale for it until it was actually online I think that would help immensely. At the end of the day, I don't know a film composer that doesn't work this way with the exception of John Williams. So right now, that is a serious impediment to our workflow unless a possible solution like the above could be implemented.

Maybe some of the other guys like Stevie or SRDMusic that use high track count templates could chime in and give their experience/opinion?

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Old 05-30-2018, 10:45 AM   #29
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REAPER is designed to work well doing things "on the fly". Like being able to create and arm another track while recording for instance, or being able to drop media of different formats into a project while playing, etc. I think this paradigm is likely why empty tracks do take up resources.

There could be some balance here, some option that will facilitate extreme track counts. Would be cool to see, it's difficult to tell how interested the devs are in implementing something like that.

I'm really curious about these types of workflows for more orchestral oriented production. A lot of it baffles me. "4 point" or source destination editing for example - every time I see someone discussing that it just get so confused. Everything involved in that I would just do by grouping items, using takes, and slip editing, and use comps. (however I do have my own comping focused scripts that extend the ease of use of comps)

I migrated from Vegas to REAPER, so I've basically been using this paradigm for the entirety on this millennia And I know I'm comfortable with things that would probably take 18 years for someone else to "get".

It's all good, this is non workflow-shaming discussion. :P
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Old 05-30-2018, 02:44 PM   #30
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Yes, Reaper is very CPU efficient. Until the track count becomes high.
This does not say that any other software is any better when using the same track count.

-Michael
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Old 05-30-2018, 02:55 PM   #31
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Apparently, some are, on idle load.


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The third issue applies specifically to Reaper which is even if you have less Kontakt instances, you will still need 16 midi tracks for each of those instances.
Unless you start using MIDI channels. Then you save 15 tracks right there. Sure, it's not as immediate, but it's a start.
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Old 05-30-2018, 03:47 PM   #32
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Interesting discussion.

Tricky problem, of course - a near zero resource track mode would help. 'sleep track' or something

but also feel there must be a way to create quick access to a high mem vsti like kontakt..

Probably in the hands of plugin developers but having certain preset stores on hdd so instances quickly load - or a plugin mode in reaper that refers to a state store - and a mode that isn't offline or bypassed but sort of a 'standby mode'.

Sure is possible but the need is quite niche but maybe devs like a challenge..
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Old 05-30-2018, 05:13 PM   #33
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~15% here with 4k tracks - however, I don't know a GUI in existence that can manage that very well without 'some' lag but then again I don't get out much.



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I'm not sure Cubase could make 4000 tracks in a few seconds the way Reaper does.

I have my doubts that it could - I'm guessing if it does it's going to choke somewhere else. The thing here is just because we need to or can multiply something by 1 million doesn't mean it is at zero cost, something, somewhere ALWAYS has to give since nothing in our universe is free.
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Old 05-30-2018, 05:43 PM   #34
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Could compare with the visually spectacular v 1 theme as that is super low resource.

Then again off screen stuff should neither need theme resource or GUI draw resource.

Confused myself now..
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Old 05-30-2018, 06:03 PM   #35
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~15% here with 4k tracks - however, I don't know a GUI in existence that can manage that very well without 'some' lag but then again I don't get out much.



Is this while it's playing? Or just idle? What is your processor? Curious if you have the fix for me.
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Old 05-30-2018, 06:22 PM   #36
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Is this while it's playing? Or just idle? What is your processor? Curious if you have the fix for me.
No, it isn't playing nor is their any media or VSTs loaded. I was just interested in what would happen if I loaded that many. I have an i7 2600k/P8Z68/24 GB memory running @4.5 Ghz - it's 6 years old this month actually but it has served me well - most of my big projects (non-orchestral) only run 60-100 tracks with 150-200 VSTs. Like I inferred, in general I think it would be difficult to achieve that much real-time, no lag performance across the board without something else having to give somewhere.
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Old 05-30-2018, 06:22 PM   #37
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~15% here with 4k tracks
Yeah same question. Is that number while playing?
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Old 05-31-2018, 12:40 AM   #38
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Originally Posted by Klangfarben View Post
Yes, Reaper is very CPU efficient. Until the track count becomes high.
BTW.: This also might be a memory issue, as when the OS starts swapping stuff in and out, things suddenly get slow.

-Michael
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Old 05-31-2018, 01:42 AM   #39
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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. And this on a very old laptop with lousy on board graphics etc. So it was no surprise everything got laggy and didn't react like expected. (I had to wait 20 seconds until Reaper let me close the project. )

But 2000 tracks show no significant problem and I doubt you hit the mark even with big libraries. With your mega machines I wouldn't expect no problems. And 4000 tracks is - as mentioned - a little to much as a approximation. Isn't it?

But I have to say its a bit strange how the CPU usage pops up from 0.3 % to 40 % from 2000 to 4000 tracks. This makes no sense at all. So maybe there is something buggy after all?

Edit: 2500 tracks show 1.6 % CPU usage idle and playing. If I let it play for a minute or so, it hits 30% for some seconds and drops back down to 1.6 %. So between 2500 and 3000 tracks something happens what lets the CPU cores dance samba.

Last edited by Eliseat; 05-31-2018 at 04:19 AM.
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Old 05-31-2018, 02:28 AM   #40
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tracks show about 30 % CPU which decrease at about 16-20% while playing.
Seems weird to me.
-Michael

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