Mixing Down in Reaper

[Somelsewhere]

Okay, so I guess my first question is:

are there any drawbacks to having alot of tracks on one song, like does it it harm the computer's processing power at all, so far I have 20 tracks on one. Really, I just need some vet to be like "I have like 600 tracks on one song, don't sweat it."

and,

once I have the volumes and panning pretty much set for a group of tracks, how do I cram them all into one track in the Reaper software?

thanks in advance.

[buckkillr8]

sure it does. The more tracks the more work on the CPU. Add some plugins to those tracks and it'll really be sweating.

[oretez]

Originally Posted by Somelsewhere

Okay, so I guess my first question is:


once I have the volumes and panning pretty much set for a group of tracks, how do I cram them all into one track in the Reaper software?

thanks in advance.

render in file menu

[VomitHatSteve]

Originally Posted by buckkillr8

sure it does. The more tracks the more work on the CPU. Add some plugins to those tracks and it'll really be sweating.

That's true. Though individual tracks with no effects don't take a lot of CPU. I've had dozens of raw tracks playing at once with no observable performance hit, but once I add effects to about 6 of them, my system really slows down.

[AndrewClaycomb]

Just finished an album for a hard rock band that had 48-78 tracks per song. I did that on my aging laptop. I did run out of processing power if I tried to record with effects turned on during playback. It was easy enough to just turn off all effects while tracking.

Now I have a dedicated DAW and don't run out of steam anymore. I also record to external FW drives, so the main hard drive doesn't have to compete for resources.

Keep up with defragmenting your drives and you shouldn't have an issue with playback unless you go crazy with samples and/or effects. If that's the case you should just render everything.

[DarkFriend]

Yeah, Reaper seems to be really good with tracks. I usually have 30-40 per song, most with effects running. The thing that seems to bog down Reaper (or any workstation) are the effects. Some are well-coded and efficient (Waves and the Reaper native effects come to mind) and some are bloated and bog down a system (some guitar amp simulators come to mind).

You can "freeze" tracks which is creating WAV files with the effects "printed" and that will save resources. Also, I've found that higher sample rates than 44100 can cause performance issues.