[SOLVED] Reaper Dropouts - Not Enough Computer? Or?

Rich_S

Member
#4 Kid has been playing around with Reaper and some DSK Orchestra plugins. She's writing new-age, orchestral kinda stuff, along the lines of the fantasy games and anime movies she likes.

Her first experiments went well, but as she added a few more tracks (a half-dozen or so) she started getting dropouts on playback. Sometimes the playback drops out and then comes back, sometimes is drops out and stays out, sometimes in freezes Reaper and requires her to close and re-open the program.

To try to get a handle on what's happening, I grabbed some screen shots of resource monitor with Reaper doing various things. If you're interested in the details, the screen shots are posted here: Edie's Laptop Woes - Album on Imgur

The short version is, she has a Sony Vaio with a dual-core i3 running at 230 GHz, with 8 GB of RAM. The laptop is not exactly state-of-the-art, but it was a pretty powerful machine in its day. I'm running a similar processor in a Dell laptop (my CPU speed is the same as hers, but I have 1/3 the cache size). I've never had a problem with Reaper, but I've been mixing small 4-8 track projects of audio files. She's running plugins.

Tonight at dinner, it was revealed that 1) #4 Kid is having problems with Reaper on her Vaio, and 2) she plans on composing and recording a piece of music as her senior project in high school (still a year away). Mom added up 1 and 2 and got the answer that we need to get this fixed or improve the setup, including buying/building a new computer if needed. Dad (that's me) agrees, and will be responsible for implementing the improvements, but doesn't know where to start. Do we need a bigger, badder computer? Different software more suited to the task? Or is the computer sufficient, but maybe needs some configuration adjustments?

This evening, I determined that she usually has other programs (browser, mail, misc. other teenager-stuff) running in the background, including having her WIFI on, while running Reaper. I told her that she should shut everything down and turn off her WIFI, and that might help. How much, we don't know.

Where to turn next?
 
1) I have had a number of problems with DSK plugs, not the least of which being that I've had trouble with them being unstable in Reaper.

B) She could probably eek by with increased buffer settings to give the CPU more time to what it needs to do. Freezing/rendering tracks once she's got them where she wants them could help, too.

III) That processor IS a little old and sad by now. Keep in mind that you can always get more horsepower for less money by going desktop rather than laptop. The laptop she has will probably work for most of whatever she needs for homework and stuff and "portable" type stuff.
 
I have, on a couple of occasions had my grandson's laptop here because it has all but stopped working. You would not BELIEVE the amount of ***t he had gathered on that machine!
I started the clean up process by first setting a Restore point, next I dumped his documents, 6th form work etc onto my 1TB USB3 drive (took a while, HIS laptop is only USB 2.0!) . Then came the laborious process of running Ccleaner, Revo Uninstaller and Dskcheck to reduce the amount of crap.

I am typing on an i3 2 (4) core HP 2.4G and have in the past run over 20 tracks of Cubase Ess 6 with no dropouts with 4G ram (now have 8G) so I think the Sony should cope, especially since Reaper is nowhere near the CPU hit of Cubase!

Buy her a 32G (say) USB stick and tell her to spend an evening dumping all the files, photos and such, onto it. Then, grab the lappy and FORMAT the drive and re install Windows (7?) Then all the other proggs she needs. Lucky dad!

Or, there might be a Recovery partition, often 'D' and a means to set the PC to 'factory gate' status. Not AS sparkling as a format di-da but could help a lot.

FINALLY! I am NO PC guru!! I have done all the above and gotten away with it but you WILL lose something you did not want to, life mate. Be advised by the experts here. Mr Steenamaroo has ALL the smarts.

Oh! And you COULD show her how to use Ccleaner and to defrag the drive? Tell her NOT to download 'every pretty thing' she sees?..In truth mate it will be easier to save wind and keep a track yourself!

Dave.
 
First turn off the Wifi, and shut down everything not being used while running Reaper.

You didn't specify how many VSTi tracks she is running, but stem-rendering (that's what is called in Reaper) is the first thing to try - once she has a track how she wants it, render it (it becomes an audio track) and mute/disable the VSTi track. This will free up RAM and CPU. IF she decides she wants to change that track, its easy enough to enable the VSTi track and edit it.
 
Where are the buffer sizes normally kept?
If there's no need for real-time feedback on audio inputs, and it sounds like there isn't, set it to something large like 2048.

Also, hit up msconfig and see what's launching at startup.
It'd do no harm to strip out anything non-essential. Spotify, skype, updaters, helpers. etc.
 
Probably freeze the tracks rather than render. As Steen says, increase buffer size, and unless the CPU is maxing out (i3, not the best, but I've worked with less) HD is what is going to be the sticking point. Probably has a 5400 RPM HD, tons of stuff running on it that isn't required.

My suggestion would be, do as Dave said, clean up some stuff and get crab off, do as Steen says and set the buffers higher on the interface card and, for ~$80 get an SSD, 240 GB works pretty well. Keep all of the non essential stuff on an external USB drive. Use a drive copy utility to get the old HD over to the new HD.

I am always amazed of how much life is given to a computer with a simple SSD drive install. I just added another SSD to an old quad core AMD computer that took 5+ minutes to boot. Now, it has a new lease on life with that little SSD. It is like the wonder invention for computers in the last 5 years (I am sure they started sooner, but where prices were within reach). Really, they improve computers that much. Best bang for the buck.
 
I am always amazed of how much life is given to a computer with a simple SSD drive install. I just added another SSD to an old quad core AMD computer that took 5+ minutes to boot. Now, it has a new lease on life with that little SSD. It is like the wonder invention for computers in the last 5 years (I am sure they started sooner, but where prices were within reach). Really, they improve computers that much. Best bang for the buck.

It really is ridiculous!
 
First turn off the Wifi, and shut down everything not being used while running Reaper.

You didn't specify how many VSTi tracks she is running, but stem-rendering (that's what is called in Reaper) is the first thing to try - once she has a track how she wants it, render it (it becomes an audio track) and mute/disable the VSTi track. This will free up RAM and CPU. IF she decides she wants to change that track, its easy enough to enable the VSTi track and edit it.

That'd be my first recommendation. The network spikes are apparently corresponding with the CPU and disk spikes, so that's hardly doing you any favors to have it running, and rendering high-CPU plugins like VSTis down will do wonders for performance.
 
Thanks, everybody, for your help thus far. I was away for a couple days and not checking this thread. My daughter tells me she tried closing all non-reaper programs and turning off her WIFI, but the project still locks up on occasion. I haven't dug any further into her machine to looks at what might be running the background, buffers, or any of that stuff.

A related question: We also have a desktop machine sitting around under-utilized.

Desktop_Specs.JPG

I could up the RAM to 8 GB easily enough, but it also needs more hard disk space. I could install another, faster internal drive, or add a USB 3 interface and a big external drive. There's also the SSD option. So let's say we end up with a smallish SSD and a large 7200 RPM hard drive. As I understand it, there are several pieces of software involved with a DAW project:

  • Operating system
  • Reaper application
  • Reaper project files
  • Reaper audio media files
  • VST plugins (effects and instruments)

My question (remember, I said this was a question) is this: optimally, where should those "pieces" go on such a computer? Which bits are helped most by the all-out speed of an SSD, and which can "get by" speed-wise with an HD, and/or require the disk space?

BTW, her interface is a Scarlett 2i4, used almost exclusively for playback. Her MIDI input comes from a Yamaha digital piano and its built-in USB MIDI port.
 
Hey again,
That desktop machine may be a useful asset although I reckon you could probably get the laptop doing what you want. Let's entertain both, for now.

Desktop wise, I don't know that upgrading to 8gb ram is worthwhile.
I mean, it may be in the long run but I wouldn't do it first. It sounds like her needs are pretty minimal.

If you were to pop an SSD in it I'd certainly use it as the main system drive. IE. install windows on it.
By default that means reaper, your VSTS, and your audio sessions go on there. I wouldn't bother changing that.

To be honest, I'd just buy a drive big enough to have everything on it. For average home-computer-joe that's probably 256gb.
If that computer is host to tonnes of music or movies or whatever, then maybe I'd consider a second spinning disk for bulk storage.
Depending how big it is, the drive that hosts the OS right now would probably fill that role.

If you were talking about 200gb or more of sample libraries or something and piles of huge sessions that'd be different,
but for basic midi input and composition, there's really no need for anything above a well maintained common laptop or computer.


I 'fix' a lot of computers for people.
90% of the time I remove their 5 expired antivirus demos, untick everything non-system in Msconfig, defrag, and send it back.
My advice would be to try some basic maintenance on that laptop, set the buffer size to large, and see how you go from there.
 
Well, howa 'bout dat. I just opened up the desktop to see what it might need. Turns out it has a spare memory slot, so sticking another 4 GB of RAM in there would be a piece of cake. More importantly, it already has a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I didn't remember putting that in there, but now that I see it, I realize the old HD started getting flakey about a year ago, and I replaced with this one. Get another monitor hooked up, and it's good to go.
 
Well, howa 'bout dat. I just opened up the desktop to see what it might need. Turns out it has a spare memory slot, so sticking another 4 GB of RAM in there would be a piece of cake. More importantly, it already has a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I didn't remember putting that in there, but now that I see it, I realize the old HD started getting flakey about a year ago, and I replaced with this one. Get another monitor hooked up, and it's good to go.

That 1TB drive probably does not have a lot on it if only a year old so you could get an SSD* and install OS and Reaper on it then create a second partition on the bulk of the 1TB drive and use that for music files. I don't know about Reaper but you can 'tell' Adobe Audition to use the biggest drive it detects for storage.

Why a partition? Well, if everything goes T's U with the SSD section you have a ready fix. USB 3.0 ? Yes! If it does not have it, get it.

N.B. Old valve jockey talking here. If Mr Steen' say I tlk the bllx? HE da man!

*I fitted an SSD in a W7 machine a couple of years ago. Yes, boots faster than this HP i3 laptop and another desktop but otherwise I would not know. YMMV.

Dave.
 
Well, howa 'bout dat. I just opened up the desktop to see what it might need. Turns out it has a spare memory slot, so sticking another 4 GB of RAM in there would be a piece of cake. More importantly, it already has a 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drive. I didn't remember putting that in there, but now that I see it, I realize the old HD started getting flakey about a year ago, and I replaced with this one. Get another monitor hooked up, and it's good to go.

Make sure to match all the specs of the old RAM sticks with the new one. If your bus has to swap between different RAM speeds, you'll probably experience significant performance degradation.

I also endorse the SSD for OS and HDD for data configuration. SSDs are much faster but they also die faster, especially if you're writing to them frequently. I managed to kill one in a year by using it for my browser cache and clearing everything every day. HDDs tend to last pretty long, so when your OS drive fails, you can swap it out and still have your data in tact.
 
I plan to follow the 2-pronged approach and load up Reaper and the DSK plugins on the desktop machine this weekend.

In the meantime, more than on of you have mentioned checking and/or increasing the buffer size. Where do I find this setting in Windows? I Googled it, but I got a lot of hits, some obviously unrelated to this problem.
 
It's in Reaper preferences/settings.
Look under 'Audio -> Device' and you should see something like sample size, block size, buffer size.

It'll be a binary number 32/62/128/256/512/1024/2048.

If it's in the lower half of that list, set it to something bigger.
 
We talkin' 'bout the thing that the big orange arrow is pointing at? And what does the checkbox do?

Reaper_preferences.JPG

Note that this is my computer, not hers. I'll check hers next time she gets off of it.

P.S. - I actually cracked the Reaper manual to look this up, and that led me to the Performance Meter. Wow, that's going to be a big help. I should read the manual more often.
 
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I should read the manual more often.

Do that. :p

Your computer will tell you what it needs. This is what I was saying before. You could put another 4gb ram in your machine and see zero result, ever.
Or it could be the root and fix all your life's worries.

but why guess? ;)


At a guess (lol...i know) the checkbox looks like manual/automatic. Leave it ticked.
PIcked 44100 / 1024 or even 2048 if it'll let you.
Let us know how that goes, please. :)
 
I tried 1024 and it still locked up. When playing, the Performance Meter was showing 6 DSK instruments (FX) using about from 2 -8% each, for a total CPU load around 25%. However, I noticed that the load on each FX dropped to zero when the project was locked up. This prompted me to look closer at the FX assigned to each track. What I found was, when the project was locked up, the FX faceplates would open as blank pop-ups when I opened them. They'd just show a bunch of identical sliders in a column, with no graphics, labels, or legends. When the project is working, the DSK faceplates show up in a control-panel layout with a fancy faux-wood background.

Clearly, something was broken in the connection between Reaper and the DSK VSTi's. I found I could get the link re-established by restarting reaper, or by removing the instrument from the tracks' FX assignment and re-inserting it. However, it would break again after playing the project once or twice.

So, step one was to update reaper. She was running 5.1, so I moved her up to 5.4. I played the project four times in a row and no lockup. Maybe it's fixed. We'll see.

We have, however, answered my question of "Not Enough Computer?" It seems she does have enough for now. As she loads it up with more tracks, I'll explain stem rendering to her, and eventually get that desktop machine set up.

In the meantime, I'm going to move this topic to the Don't Fear The Reaper forum room, in hopes somebody can confirm/explain my findings.

Thanks, everybody!
 
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Hi again,
Ok, that's encouraging!

It proves you have the resources but something is intermittently bugged or broken.
Updating Reaper was a good move. I'd also check the DSK plugins for updates if the problem comes back but, for now, cross those fingers! :)
 
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