reaper random sound pauses and stutters

[azfz]

hi. love reaper, but having a problem with pauses/stutters and red indicator during playback. this is random. sometimes can play the song all they way through, and sometimes i get a pause. this is on 8 tracks only with a gate and eq on each. i have a fresh built intel i5 system, windows7 64, 4 gig ram, mackie 8 input interface, and only reaper & acrobat, installed. not even a screen saver running. i tried different eq's. i dont think thats it. this pc rocks. reaper runs pretty smooth besides this problem. i tried buffer settings and other things ive seen recommended. i looked at several pages of posts and only saw one related, but that poster had a much older pc likely causing trouble. any suggestions are appreciated.

 

[gecko zzed]

when you get the red light indicator thing happening, it usually means something's working pretty darn hard.

if you play the song then hit CTRL ALT P you bring up the performance meter. This will tell you how much CPU & RAM reaper is using, and which tracks, effects etc within Reaper are using it.

It may not be a Reaper issue . . . there may be something in your computer that's commanding its resources (e.g. a virus)

 

[azfz]

thanks for reply

thanks for the reply. i am not sure what to think at this point. i had reaper on a pntium 4 1.8 gig pc with 380 meg of ram before this setup. i could do the same thing with 8 tracks for my drums and the sound would just get pretty funky, but never freeze and pause. this pc is much better with no internet connectioin and no unnessesary services enabled. i just built it from scratch. it is a 64 bit pc. i tried a add in firewire card instead of the buit in one. some people say that works better on laptops. no change. the resource meter always shows very little cpu usage even when its gacking. i can render those tracks and insert the rendered drum track into the project. it will still do it with only the one track. the good thing is i can work with it until its figured out as its not every second of operation. its just a drag having the problem hang around.

 

[VomitHatSteve]

It might be a hardware issue: e.g. some of your hardware is incompatible with the rest, or one of your drivers doesn't work correctly.

My recording PC has 2x1 GB RAM in it with two open slots. I had a spare 256 MB stick lying around, so I tossed it in thinking "Hey! More RAM=better performance!" My performance degraded significantly. the CPU and RAM were't maxed out or anything; it was just spending too much time trying to talk to this mismatched RAM, so everything stuttered and hung.