Dumb Reaper questions Part 1

[Armistice]

Howdy...

Just moving into the DAW world after many years on a standalone.

Q1. What would you typically do with areas of tracks that contain no useful sound but are still "live"?

For instance in the track I'm working on I basically sit down and play a few different guitar bits in various places, lots of space in between, and keep the thing recording all the time. There's doubtless some low level signal noise there... that's not the issue, I can control that via envelope. In the standalone world I would ruthlessly edit every bit of "blank" recorded space out as I was always fighting for disk space. No such problem here. What do you do?

Q2. If I do chop things up and have tracks starting at different spots in a song, how would I import all these tracks /wav files so they start at the same spot, so someone else could mix them without needing instructions on lining them up?

Q3. In standalone world, I could put (say) a reverb on an auxillary bus and apply different amounts of the same reverb to different tracks. I never really had to get into how this was routed as it was an "automatic" feature of the machine I had. How would I do something similar in Reaper? I'm sure I don't need to pull up the same plug in multiple times and tinker with the settings? Or do I?

Q4. Do you ever keep an eye on CPU usage? I was quite surprised when I checked with 14 audio tracks and MIDI drums split over 16 tracks, with 2 or 3 plug ins on each of the audio tracks, that the CPU usage was either 1, 2 or 3% at most. Obviously this isn't a problem as it's a beast of a computer, it's more curiousity - how many tracks / plugs do you manage to record, all playing at the same time (ie. with the plug ins active).

Q5. I've heard reference to "freezing" tracks with the effect recorded, as a way to minimise CPU drain. I get the concept, and I can see how to do it via recording a track + effect on another track in real time - but is that what people are talking about, or is there some other method I should know about?

That should do for now... I expect more will arise!

Must say that I'm loving the DAW world... everything is soooo much easier.. So far, anyway!

Cheers

 

[gecko zzed]

Q1: ruthlessly killing blank parts of the track doesn't save disk space, because Reaper saves the whole file that is recorded, irrrespective of what you actually use in the arrangement. If I see blank parts I will sometimes chop them out to keep any noise on them out of the way. Sometimes I don't worry about it. But I wouldn't use an envelope. Just chop it out; quicker and easier.

Q2: Plan A: give the whole project (and its files) to someone who also uses Reaper. Plan B: once you've got the track in shape, render it. There's an option to load it straight into Reaper.

Q3: Create a track and call it, say, "reverb". Add a reverb plug in to this track. Set the reverb to 100% wet. Go to the recorded tracks, go to "I/O", and select the "reverb" track as a new send. Move the slider to control how much reverb you want.

Q4: Not often. I did when my PC was recently running slow and I couldn't figure out why (I found out later it was overheating because of accumulated dust). I just blithely keep adding plug-ins and tracks.

Q5: I've not found a need to do this, so I can't help on this one.

 

[Armistice]

Thanks geck... keep your eyes peeled.... I expect I'll have Parts 2 to 9 coming up real soon...

 

[VomitHatSteve]

I can answer q5.

Select the track (by clicking on the left hand info-bar or whatever you call it). Right click. Select "Render as stems and mute originals". It will render the track with FX and all to a new track and mute your original. If you're still getting CPU usage issues, you may need to disable the FX on the original too.

 

[mjbphotos]

I can answer q5.

Select the track (by clicking on the left hand info-bar or whatever you call it). Right click. Select "Render as stems and mute originals". It will render the track with FX and all to a new track and mute your original. If you're still getting CPU usage issues, you may need to disable the FX on the original too.

I haven't done this with my new computer yet, but with the old one with just 2G RAM, running more than one VSTi (plus EZ Drummer)would basically stop playback, so I would stem render the VSTi track(s) only.

 

[ashcat_lt]

I can answer q5.

Select the track (by clicking on the left hand info-bar or whatever you call it). Right click. Select "Render as stems and mute originals". It will render the track with FX and all to a new track and mute your original. If you're still getting CPU usage issues, you may need to disable the FX on the original too.

There's an option in the Preferences to make it stop processing plugins on muted tracks. Also, I think you can freeze to the original track with all of the effects bypassed.

Really, its not much more than another way to render the track, and you can accomplish the same thing in a number of different ways.

 

[RAMI]

I can answer q5.

Select the track (by clicking on the left hand info-bar or whatever you call it). Right click. Select "Render as stems and mute originals". It will render the track with FX and all to a new track and mute your original. If you're still getting CPU usage issues, you may need to disable the FX on the original too.

There's an option in the Preferences to make it stop processing plugins on muted tracks. Also, I think you can freeze to the original track with all of the effects bypassed.

Really, its not much more than another way to render the track, and you can accomplish the same thing in a number of different ways.

Thanx for those ideas. All I've been doing is soling the track and rendering it. I'll mute the effects if I want it dry, obviously.

 

[Armistice]

I can answer q5.

Select the track (by clicking on the left hand info-bar or whatever you call it). Right click. Select "Render as stems and mute originals". It will render the track with FX and all to a new track and mute your original. If you're still getting CPU usage issues, you may need to disable the FX on the original too.

Yeah, I found that one last night... always wondered what a "stem" was... good tip!

 

[VomitHatSteve]

There's an option in the Preferences to make it stop processing plugins on muted tracks. Also, I think you can freeze to the original track with all of the effects bypassed.

Really, its not much more than another way to render the track, and you can accomplish the same thing in a number of different ways.

I have that option checked, but it still seems to use less CPU with the FX toggled off.
I suspect that there's an extra if loop being executed somewhere each sample when a track is muted.

 

[ashcat_lt]

Yeah, I found that one last night... always wondered what a "stem" was... good tip!

Usually a "stem track" is a rendered version of some submix - a subset of the instruments that make up the full mix. It's very common in big money mixing (the three or four people actually still making money from record labels) to get the mix where you think it should be and then render stems - maybe drums on one, bass on another, most of the instruments on a stereo track, backing vocals and then leads - with all of the effects and relative balance intact within the group. This way when (not if) the label asks for revisions (more vocals, more bass, etc.) it's easy to knock those out. In fact, nowadays these folks will send the stems to the mastering engineer and let him put the thing together!