I‘m using reaper for 4 years now absolutely loving its possibilities. I spent months on configurations and found solutions to almost every major concern I had so far.
The major issue I‘m unfortunately still experiencing is having heavy Audio Dropouts during Mixing sessions. As I already spent whole days every now and then trying to make this work I really hope to find someone helping me out via Team Viewer / Zoom finally solving this.
macOS Catalina 10.15.7
MacBook Pro (16-inch, 2019)
2,4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9
64 GB 2667 MHz DDR4
4TB SSD
Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB
Recently I updated my Interface from Babyface 2012 to a new UAD Apollo X4 Heritage experiencing the same issue.
Sometimes the dropouts can be reduced by closing all open Plugin windows and stop the playback and than play again.
(As shown in this video:
https://youtu.be/oRFLQuQvaqA)
But this isn’t always the case and nothing I can confirm being reproducible all the time.
In this video the RT CPU highly rises up so dropouts make sense I guess, but this isn’t always the case either.
The CPU-Performance usually stays around 25-45%. In the video its very high (around 50). Right after filming I kept all plugins closed, hit pause and waited for 1-3 minutes, hit play again and everything is was running pretty smooth again with CPU staying around 25-30% and RT CPU sitting at 2-3%. When I started making adjustments the Mix and plugins the dropouts come back - but not always immediately. I got the feeling opening up plugins with real time visualisation like “Fab Filter pro-Q3” increases the chance to get dropouts faster.
Like in this video when making some actions like hitting pause/play or tweaking some plugin settings the spinning wheel occasionally shows up - sometimes it spins for about minute without any response.
Sometimes when I just started my Computer opening a Mix straight away things are going fine for quite a while. I realised the dropouts are likely being increased by having other Programs like Firefox and Apple Mail running as well. Once the issues occured after a fresh start, they seem to stay regardless of closing and reopening the project or even reaper itself.
I also noticed my transport bar usually isn’t flushing during these dropouts.
Experimenting with this issue a lot reading through several forum threads regarding similar experiences I optimized a few settings already as accurate as I‘m capable of doing this:
- First I had the majority of the setup routing based on folder tracks. As discussed in this article reaper seems to handle heavy PDC plugins better when routed manually instead. So I routed manually after the first layer where single tracks going into their Auxes (otherwise I had to manually rout all single tracks as well instead of currently drag and dropping under the Auxes when setting up a new Mixing Session).
- I disabled PDC-compensation for plugins in my master chain
- I thought it could have been an issue using a mixture of VST and AU plug-in versions, so I‘m recently just using VST and VST3.
I still got the dropouts but I’m thinking the spinning wheel shows up less and Reaper might ain’t be freezing for that long anymore (Not tested enough).
- I made some adjustments to the buffering settings ending up with something I found working best so far (Attachment).
Adjusting the buffer size itself sometimes helps. Sometimes lowering the buffer size reduces the dropouts more than increasing.
These adjustments helped a lot already having dropouts only when having many plugins running.
I couldn’t figure out just one certain thing causing this issue.
Unfortunately I’m not that technically involved in the IT behind this to provide a more detailed report or further optimise Reapers performence. I’m looking forward to get in contact with you guys to hopefully figure this out soon, as I’m loving working with Reaper.
As I experienced the dropouts occure only when applying complex routing including summing and heavy plugin processing on the buses. For example applying even more and heavier plugins on every single track without summing results in no issues at all.
unfortunately for me Mixing has the purpose of summing and processing signals together is essential for me. My Setup is based on Buses and contains side-chain routings.
I figured out a few ways to reduce Audio-Dropouts or make them disappear by minimizing certain parts of the setup, Switch routing or disable plugins. Maybe this helps finding a solution:
- I’m using a vocal chain of around 20 plug-in instances. If I bypass the majority the dropouts disappear.
- Reducing the number of vocal tracks going into the vocal chain makes the dropouts dissapear.
- I‘m using a mastering chain of around 10 plugins. If I bypass the majority the dropouts disappear.
Besides the dropouts I also want to mention that I’m experiencing random crashes on loading projects every thew days. If it’s crashing it’s likely to crash several times until it randomly doesn’t crash anymore opening the exact same project. A restart of the Mac most of the time seems to help here as well (Example: Attachment).
Thanks for reading and sharing your thoughts with me!