Reaper stability on HUGE projects

[Viente]

How do you find Reaper behavior in extremely huge projects with about 80-90+ tracks and complex routing? Is it still rock solid? What kind of bugs i can encounter?

Thanks

[richie43]

I have some projects that are well over 100 tracks, with busses, complex routing, heavy vst's, vsti's, lots of automation.... the only time I ever have any issues it is caused by a dodgy plugin. Reaper has been more than solid for me for a long time.

[planetnine]

I'd like to agree with Richie here, I've used some pretty big projects with high track counts and also long media lengths (tens of gigabytes of wav files), and scores of plugins.

Then only time I have crash REAPER is with memory issues with sampler plugins or bugs in these plugins (I'm trying to reproduce one in SD2 with drum tuning that's got me a handful of times). Run these suspect plugs in their own space and save at sensible intervals and you're in safe hands.

I've never used a DAW as solid as REAPER.


>

[Fex]

I used to have problems with 50+ tracks, on my old PC. When the CPU is maxed out, the project won't play for long, but will still render. Work-arounds include rendering tracks and disabling their VSTs, and working on parts of songs in sub projects.

Newer computers play my behemoth projects without difficulty.

[tarnationsauce2]

Reaper has a bug where if you have too many groups it re-uses group IDs. Cause me a few problems until I figured out what was happening. Not sure what the number is. But my project had ~10000 clips in it.

[fuseburn]

I'm regularly working on projects with 400-500 tracks (multi-mic double-tracking plus lots of parallel processing brings you up there quite swiftly), 96k and a boatload of items and plugins along with complex routing. RPP file reaching >100 MB on some occasions.
OK, I'm stem-rendering a lot of the stuff (I'd need like 5x the horsepower of my i7 2600k to play it back in realtime), but Reaper doesn't have the slightest problems with huge projects itself.

Just make sure you're using Win 7 64 Bit with enough RAM (16 GB here, using up to 8-9 GB of it in some cases).

[Cuppa Joe]

I regularly mix 50-70 track audio sessions on a Core i3 with little fuss. Sometimes with a few outboard devices as well. It has yet to completely crash. The only problem I regularly experience is ReaTune drifting in and out of time and pitch when rendering offline. So be careful with that plugin and you should be fine.

[Viente]

Originally Posted by fuseburn

I'm regularly working on projects with 400-500 tracks (multi-mic double-tracking plus lots of parallel processing brings you up there quite swiftly), 96k and a boatload of items and plugins along with complex routing. RPP file reaching >100 MB on some occasions.
OK, I'm stem-rendering a lot of the stuff (I'd need like 5x the horsepower of my i7 2600k to play it back in realtime), but Reaper doesn't have the slightest problems with huge projects itself.

Just make sure you're using Win 7 64 Bit with enough RAM (16 GB here, using up to 8-9 GB of it in some cases).

Wow...what kind of music do you produce?

[airon]

No problems with 50-100 tracks. My vanilla i7 920 playing projects off a WD Blue disk continues to laugh at me.

Judging by the responses, the only thing left to test is automation performance. I hope to mix more stuff with it, though I'm confident Reaper can handle it, and if we hit a snag, it'll get fixed within a few days. I just finished mixing a pilot show in Protools 9 with 60-70 audio tracks and around about 20 auxes and 30 busses(stereo, not 5.1) and the system handled that just fine at 128 samples, so Reaper will do better.

[mim]

Originally Posted by Viente

How do you find Reaper behavior in extremely huge projects with about 80-90+ tracks and complex routing? Is it still rock solid? What kind of bugs i can encounter?

I work with Reaper and big projects (post mixing), and I have to say I think there is room in automation envelope/data handling performance. The more you write automation data, the more the project is getting (obviously) slower. Maybe it is logical, but it doesn't seems too logical to me ... especially if I have still plenty of free RAM, where all the envelope of the project could be stocked till the end of the time.
I think there is still performance room with high items counts (Although it's better than V3)
Latest beta had some improvements with large project and real time CPU ( low latency + no anticipative FX), I'll check the difference when it's released.

Originally Posted by airon

No problems with 50-100 tracks. My vanilla i7 920 playing projects off a WD Blue disk continues to laugh at me.

Judging by the responses, the only thing left to test is automation performance. I hope to mix more stuff with it, though I'm confident Reaper can handle it, and if we hit a snag, it'll get fixed within a few days. I just finished mixing a pilot show in Protools 9 with 60-70 audio tracks and around about 20 auxes and 30 busses(stereo, not 5.1) and the system handled that just fine at 128 samples, so Reaper will do better.

It will do better if you use anticipative FX, but what if you'r just using the asio buffer ?
It will perform better if you send all tracks to the master and or send, but how will it performs if you use reaper's goodies like folder in folder architecture ?
Or how will it performs when individual mono track has to be turned to 6 channels to use reasurround to pan to a 5.1 master bus ?

It's question I asked to myself, didn't mean to feel angry at you

Reaper's by design is wasting some performances (no mono track, no "track to busses channel adaptor"), and invite you to use a lot of cpu for his own cool stuff (folder tracks, item FX, "real time" SRC, ...).

If you want absolutely low latency, Reaper's features and design is going to ask you for a big amount of cpu (Real Time CPU in Reaper's performance meter).

I estimated for a feature movie mixing project, with a 150/200 (reasonable) tracks; you'll need more than eight time the power of a i7 2600k to run a real world session @64 samples without anticipative FX.

Fortunately the point with anticipative FX, is you can toggle it by track.
BTW, a quick FR I made that I think might be useful for large projet / low latency : http://forum.cockos.com/showthread.php?t=96815

Oh and if you don't care about latency you can probably mix hundreads of tracks on a 386 with Reaper.

To answer your very first question, yes Reaper will be stable with a big project.

[brainwreck]

Originally Posted by planetnine

I've never used a DAW as solid as REAPER.

Same for me. As buggy as some plugins and interfaces might make Reaper look to be, it is the most stable daw software that I've used.

[jaydrake]

I mix a surround project for TV every year that is 100+ tracks, over 100 plugins, AND it's almost 2.5 hours long. This is the first year I used Reaper. Not a single glitch during the entire mixing process....

[kirk]

Once I got off xp onto win 7 and got away from a dual core with 4 gigs of ram which you only use three ,my problems ended. I am running what is essentially 8 cores and 8 gigs of ram. It's one of those creation stations 450.
I rarely run 5% cpu usage . what a delight. NEVER have to worry about a crash. I've never tried to max out the track counts, but I routinely run 60 tracks effortlessly. I also have the presonus live 16.4.2. as the front end. Hooked up seamlessly with Reaper. Now if I can just figure out out to use all of it LOL