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?
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?