Poofs in REAPER!

[Tod]

I get a lot of "Reaper is not responding" if I've got Kontakt open. This forces me to shut down and has been happening for a long time, so I've got my backups set for every 10 minutes.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by DarkStar

^^Do you have any links to the problem explanation or the fix?

I tried Googling but must not be using the right words.

This is as far as I got which was disabling acceleration. See nofish's post.

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=200424

I never applied that workaround because I have a shortcut that closes all FX windows - when it hangs, it is really severely delayed and I can click the shortcut key, and 30 seconds later they all close and the problem goes away (because it occurs when one or more FX are visible) - it is intermittent enough for me that I preferred not to try the workaround.

@Tod and others...

^Many interpret a hang as a crash because they don't know to wait, they instead click around, GUI turns grey, they force close when it may have eventually recovered. That is not always the case, sometimes it's a true deadlock but mentioning just in case.

[DarkStar]

Thank you. I see that FabFilter says "With some graphics cards and host software combinations, the GPU-accelerated graphics acceleration system in our latest plug-ins might cause problems." So maybe it is a core OpenGL problem?

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by DarkStar

Thank you. I see that FabFilter says "With some graphics cards and host software combinations, the GPU-accelerated graphics acceleration system in our latest plug-ins might cause problems." So maybe it is a core OpenGL problem?

That was my guess but wasn't sure. The symptoms did seem to support something like that though and I never had the issue until after I installed Waves and/or updated FabFilter to VST3 - been awhile so that thread is all I remember.

[Coachz]

Originally Posted by Tod

I get a lot of "Reaper is not responding" if I've got Kontakt open. This forces me to shut down and has been happening for a long time, so I've got my backups set for every 10 minutes.

I get that a lot too. I know it's a plug-in but Reaper doesn't tell me which one anywhere that I know to look. Does Reaper have this information somewhere of why it's not responding? That's another reason I freeze so many of my tracks to get plugins out of the picture. I have a singer supposed to be coming this afternoon and all the tracks that she's singing on are already Frozen so I know there won't be that problem.

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by Coachz

I get that a lot too. I know it's a plug-in but Reaper doesn't tell me which one anywhere that I know to look. Does Reaper have this information somewhere of why it's not responding?

Probably not... One thing to do though is when you can, when this happens, go get coffee or take a break just to confirm it never comes back or if it is truly deadlocked.

The problem with locks, race conditions and deadlocks is that they use little or no CPU and likely very difficult to know the culprit without deeper investigation such as a set of hang dumps - but... it is good to know if it ever comes back on it's own aka is it just a terribly long contention for a lock or a true deadlock.

I don't think I've ever had kontakt hang on me though just FWIW.

[Coachz]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

Probably not... One thing to do though is when you can, when this happens, go get coffee or take a break just to confirm it never comes back or if it is truly deadlocked.

The problem with locks, race conditions and deadlocks is that they use little or no CPU and likely very difficult to know the culprit without deeper investigation such as a set of hang dumps - but... it is good to know if it ever comes back on it's own aka is it just a terribly long contention for a lock or a true deadlock.

I don't think I've ever had kontakt hang on me though just FWIW.

For me it's about 50/50. Sometimes I wait 2 minutes and Reaper just keeps on working and other times it's dead and process has to be stopped and Reaper has to be restarted. I wish it was easier to find out what the problem is. Any ideas I want to check ?

[karbomusic]

Originally Posted by Coachz

Any ideas I want to check ?

Not really beyond process of elimination because it's usually threads competing for the same resource so you can't really tell without symbols, source code and a set of memory dumps say 30 seconds apart - so you can actually see at what the threads are doing between dumps, who's got what locks and so on. One could have some success without symbols/source and just dumps but it would be a total PIA.

[Coachz]

that's a bummer. Too bad we can't easily find it.

[Tod]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

Probably not... One thing to do though is when you can, when this happens, go get coffee or take a break just to confirm it never comes back or if it is truly deadlocked.

I've been trying to load samples into Kontakt all morning by dragging them into Kontakt from the sample folders. I did manage to get 4 sets of samples, out of 8, loaded without a problem.

Then it went south and Reaper became very very buggy, too buggy to work with. It would come back after a minute or 2, but as soon as I touched anything with the mouse, the spinning doughnut would start again.

I saved Reaper and reloaded but it remained buggy. I've got other portable installs with different versions of Reaper and they also got buggy as soon as I loaded the Reaper project file.

I finally ended up loading the samples from within Kontakt itself.

[foxAsteria]

I'm never willing to lose more than 2 minutes of work, so that's how often I set Reaper to auto-save. All I have to do is empty the backup folder from time to time.

But yea I've experienced this as well and it sucks because usually no crash events are logged. I think once I caught AmpliTube doing it.

[chip mcdonald]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

There are some conflicts possible if Waves and FabFilter are both installed that will randomly cause GUI to freeze when the plugins are visible. Possibly other combos could cause this?

Interesting. A superficial guess for me is that there is some sort of bad synergy between Waves and my Kazrog plugins, or possibly Air Music DB-33 B3. I'll have to look up the registry fix.

I also just remembered Airwindows seems to also be involved when poofs happen (but not the g-loc "white out" freezes.

[karbomusic]

Just an aside for "poofs" which should mean you are using reaper and it just completely disappears without warning and isn't even showing in task manager. That usually occurs when a memory allocation fails or other issue where the problem itself means showing a dialog or warning either isn't possible or can't be trusted.

Going white, hanging etc. then dying/crashing/poofing is a completely different thing - I'm sure we know that just mentioning.

[cfillion]

The crash dialogs may also be disabled in Windows 10. They can be reenabled: https://superuser.com/questions/1246...king-d/1349113.

[Valle]

OK ... looks like Voxengo SPAN is (at least) one stone in the shoe when it comes to poofing REAPER. Never thought of it ... but I just found out that when choosing a different preset (SPAN) while the song is playing, it just won't cope ...

[IXix]

I think I might have had SPAN open on the rare occasion that REAPER disappears on me. It was updated quite recently so perhaps something broke?

[JamesPeters]

If anyone is looking for a replacement for SPAN even temporarily, here are two JS plugins that are good candidates:

https://github.com/JoepVanlier/JSFX (Description/screen shot is near the bottom of the page. This plugin is also in ReaPack. Plus check out the other plugins on this page!)

And:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=213501 (Plus definitely check out ReEQ while you're at it.)

[Tod]

Originally Posted by JamesPeters

If anyone is looking for a replacement for SPAN even temporarily, here are two JS plugins that are good candidates:

https://github.com/JoepVanlier/JSFX (Description/screen shot is near the bottom of the page. This plugin is also in ReaPack. Plus check out the other plugins on this page!)

And:

https://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=213501 (Plus definitely check out ReEQ while you're at it.)

Hi James, I'm a big Span user, what do these plugins have that Span doesn't.

[JamesPeters]

I wasn't actually claiming that they're better than SPAN. Two people here have mentioned having crashes which are possibly related to SPAN, so I pointed out that there are a couple alternate solutions at least for now.

Some people might prefer one of these alternate plugins depending on their workflow, though. The first of the two is quite fully featured and has at least one feature SPAN doesn't (sonogram), plus the ability to zoom in on a frequency range (which I don't recall SPAN having, but it might). The second plugin isn't as fully featured but it's still quite good, and has a piano key display you can toggle (which some people might appreciate).

Of course you could have downloaded and tried these to know for yourself. They're free, and I provided the links.

Also: these two plugins work on any OS, since they're JS plugins. For people who use Linux, they're quite welcome plugins.

[uksnowy]

as an Englishman the title of this thread tickles me everytime

[morgon]

I'm offended, the thread title sounds like 'Reaper going to hell in a handbag'.

That's not only incorrect, it's politically incorrect.

[Valle]

Originally Posted by uksnowy

as an Englishman the title of this thread tickles me everytime

Originally Posted by morgon

I'm offended, the thread title sounds like 'Reaper going to hell in a handbag'.

That's not only incorrect, it's politically incorrect.

That has been sorted out earlier in the thread. It's not like it's the first time the expression "poof" is used to describe the issue that's brought up in this thread. And my intentions were never to harm or offend.

But the "poof" stays in the title – as an onomatopoeic expression to describe something that suddenly disappears.

[JHughes]

Originally Posted by Valle

But the "poof" stays in the title – as an onomatopoeic expression to describe something that suddenly disappears.

Thank you, it should. Some people will be offended by anything since somehow it validates their existence.

Now, I'm off to enjoy an extra large bag of Cheesy Poofs.

[morgon]

So it's ok to not be offended? Excellent, I feel so empowered now.

It's as if my offendedness wasn't real in the first place..

[Coachz]

[chip mcdonald]

Originally Posted by karbomusic

That usually occurs when a memory allocation fails or other issue where the problem itself means showing a dialog or warning either isn't possible or can't be trusted.

Memtest86 doesn't find anything wrong, I've got 24 gigs and performance meter doesn't report any memory constraints - I'm not doing big libraries or tons of tracks.

[chip mcdonald]

Originally Posted by Valle

OK ... looks like Voxengo SPAN is (at least) one stone in the shoe when it comes to poofing REAPER. Never thought of it ... but I just found out that when choosing a different preset (SPAN) while the song is playing, it just won't cope ...

I've recently been using SPAN a lot, never really in the past. Hmm.

[Valle]

Originally Posted by chip mcdonald

I've recently been using SPAN a lot, never really in the past. Hmm.

I've been using SPAN since its early days. I love the plugin and I use it A LOT (because I'm a guy who gladly mixes with his eyes, see).

I have never had this issue with SPAN before, though. Could be its newest update (october 7), could be something else.

Two plugins that often, not always, poof (my) REAPER is CLA MixHub and SPAN. CLA MixHub is the brutal one: it will, out of the blue, freeze everything, consume all resources in a few seconds and then ruthlessly kill REAPER. SPAN just poofs, when I change preset.

My workaround so far is that I have configured REAPER to back up every minute ...