Reaper vs. DSK

Rich_S

Member
Hi, all. I'm starting a new thread here after realizing my daughter's drop-outs are not from a lack of computer horsepower, they seem to be caused by problems between Reaper and her DSK VST instrument plugins. (Here's the old thread, but it's largely redundant with this one at this point.)

She's a teenager, writing some orchestral music in the vein of video game or anime themes. She's a good pianist but totally new to recording. I have some rudimentary Reaper experience, but all of that was mixing audio tracks, I'm new to the whole in-the-box instruments thing.

My daughter complained that her small reaper project would frequently stop playing. It would just go silent. The run time would still advance, but no sound and nothing on the level meters. When playing, the Performance Meter was showing 6 DSK instruments (FX) using 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 running but silent.

Looking at the FX settings on the individual tracks, I found that 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 gray sliders in a column, with no graphics, labels, or legends. When the project is working correctly, DSK FX come up with their normal fancy faceplates. I could get the DSK FX back to normal by restarting Reaper, or by removing the instrument from the track's FX assignment and re-inserting it. However, it would break again after playing the project once or twice.

I updated 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, but I'd like a bit more info.

Does anybody have experience with Reaper and the DSK plugins? Can you confirm problems that were solved somewhere between versions 5.1 and 5.4? Or was playing the project four times in a row just dumb luck?

Any other advice for somebody using this particular combination of DAW and plugins?
 
I have a few DSK plug ins. They work fine, except for two: DSK Overture and DSK Virtuoso. These sometimes cause problems, i.e. they occasionally crash Reaper. They do it often enough for me to avoid them as much as possible.
 
Grrr... I thought it was fixed, but #4 daughter just informed me that Reaper is still crashing. I think she's using Overture, so I'll ask her to try a different plugin, even though it might not fit her "vision".

In the meantime, can anybody recommend a decent, inexpensive, reliable orchestral plugin pack? I might be convinced to spend a bit of money to make this problem go away.
 
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