RPP file all of a sudden huge

[panicaftermath]

All of a sudden, the RPP file for the project I'm working on has gotten huge. Over 1.3Gb. Two days ago it was just under 10 Mb.

It is a moderate size project. Mostly audio. Some MIDI. Only Reaper plugins except of one instance of Addictive Drums, two instances of Arturia Analog Lab (new to my set up) and an instance of Poise.

Several times the project seemed to hang up while saving, but always recovered. Then the last time that happened, it never recovered. Next time I tried to load the project, Reaper hung up. That's when I noticed the huge size.

Any ideas?

[panicaftermath]

I can see from project files created when I've rendered mixes that the project has grown in several leaps over the last 2 days.

When i tried to open it in notepad++, it said it was too large When opened one that was only about 600Mb, I saw it was cluttered with setting for the two Analog Lab instances.

I found a version I could open that was only about 300Mb. When I applied the rendered the two instances to audio removed the vsti's from the project and saved it, the project size was back to 5 Mb.

[akademie]

Originally Posted by panicaftermath

I can see from project files created when I've rendered mixes that the project has grown in several leaps over the last 2 days.

When i tried to open it in notepad++, it said it was too large When opened one that was only about 600Mb, I saw it was cluttered with setting for the two Analog Lag instances.

I found a version I could open that was only about 300Mb. When I applied the rendered the two instances to audio removed the vsti's from the project and saved it, the project size was back to 5 Mb.

Those VSTi's are sampleplayers and do save its content (the actual samples loaded in them) to a Reaper project file.

You can look at settings of these VSTi's if there are settings for something like "save samples with project" or similar.

[LePixaliz]

If you open the rpp file into a text or code editor, you can see which plugin is taking most of the size of the file.

But the "easy" way is to delete the plugins one by one until you find which of them is the bad one.

[panicaftermath]

It was definitely the Arturia Analog Lab 4 VSTi. When I open the "smaller" 287Mb rpp in Notepad++ and search for Arturia, there are 4 huge blocks of data. In at least some of those cases, most of the data appears redundant. Here's a licecap of a scroll through just one of those blocks. The section starts at line 39355 and continues until for well over 150,000 more lines. Is that in somewhow working correctly?

When I delete the Arturia instances, the rpp returns to a more normal size in the <10Mb range.

[Greg Savage]

Something doesn't sound right there. I just saved a project using 20 instances Analog Lab for the sake 'let's test it' and the project file barely hit 4 megs.

[Tale]

That's certainly not OK. I think I have seen something similar before with Arturia's Farfisa V (VST2 in REAPER 6 on Win10), but at the time I was unable to reproduce the issue, so I never figured out if this was a REAPER or an Arturia issue.

[panicaftermath]

Things were ok for several days, after I removed problem instances and put new ones in. I used the VST3 version instead of the regular VST.

Then today I noticed it started happening again. Saves became slower. When I checked, the project which had remained under 5 Mb was up to 12 Mb. Then 17 Mb. Then 22, then 39Mb. In between those saves, I hadn't changed any settings on the AL instances and was only slightly editing the MIDI that was feeding one of them.

I saved the full fx chain, and also just that instance as a chain. Then deleted the instance, and the file size was back at about 5 Mb.

When I added a fresh instance and loaded the same native preset, all was as expected. But when I tried loading the preset as saved in Reaper, or loading the instance via the saved fx chain, the bloat returned (as I expected it would - the fx chain files are larger than typical.)

Something is happening after the instance is in place. Can't see that I'm doing anything too unusual. And wasn't even doing much tweaking of the plugin, just sending light midi to it.

When I looked at the rpp in NP++, it was filled with a solid block of mostly a short sequence from line 24139 to line 1073208, when the pattern changed to something more normal (or at least more random) looking for several more thousand lines. By this point the rpp was about 216Mb.

Good thing this time I discovered it before the rpp was too big for npp++ to open.

[Time Waster]

Originally Posted by panicaftermath

When I added a fresh instance and loaded the same native preset, all was as expected. But when I tried loading the preset as saved in Reaper, or loading the instance via the saved fx chain, the bloat returned (as I expected it would.)

I think what is happening is that when you save a preset in REAPER, you are basically saving a snapshot of the memory block used by the loaded instance, and this would include all of the sample data. I found this out when creating a sampler using JSFX. I had to find a way of allocating the memory space used for the samples so as to minimise the size of the memory space used, because even blank spaces in memory were saved to the preset. I presume REAPER does this because it doesn't know anything about how the VSTi works, so it just takes a snapshot of the current state of the RAM used and saves it with the project.

[Tale]

Analog Lab is not a sample player, but actually includes all modeled synths from the V Collection. Some of these do use samples (e.g. Mellotron V), but I don't think the samples are stored inside the state.

But even if this were the case, then I think the state would not grow, unless you select larger samples. Also, exporting/importing the FX chain would not solve the issue.

[panicaftermath]

Analog Lab was behaving itself for a few days. Then the rpp started to grow after I tweaked a setting or two, then close tit again. It seems I woke it up and to started to grow with the AL block of the rpp rowing to 10's of thousands of lines of the same short repeating sequence.

I thought the growth could be that I've also got two Kontakt instances, but as soon as I deleted AL, the rpp went from 39Mb to 3.5 Mb.

When I opened the 39Mb version, made a few simple edits unrelated to AL, and saved, it was up to 74Mb.

I think I will freeze the audio I want and be done with it.

[Goldreap]

I don't know what's going on here but it rings a bell...try right clicking the plugin in the Add FX window > Un-tick 'Save state as VST bank'.

[heda]

chunk nightmares
maybe it is an arturia lab bug. all that repeated data seems like a memory leak to me.
kontakt chunk datas are also big (depending on the library used) but not as big as that. I would contact arturia maybe they have a fix

freezing won't solve the issue. it doesn't delete the data of the chunk because it needs to know it in case you want to unfreeze it. the only thing you can do is render to new track and delete the plugin from the original track.

[panicaftermath]

Thanks for those replies.

I've un-checked "Save state as VST bank." Makes sense that might be a factor.

After un-checking that, I deleted both instances of AL and saved the project, which brought the rpp size back to a normal. Then I immediately used Undo to bring back both instances, which returned with their settings intact, as expected. But when I then saved, the rpp remained a normal size.

Will update.

Thanks again!

[panicaftermath]

A new development.

Pretty much as expected the rpp started growing again for no obvious reason, though more slowly than previously. I could see one of the Analog Lab instances was again occupying 1000's of seemingly useless junk as in the pics above.

My plan was to remove the instance, then add it again, set is as I want, then save that as a fx chain before it gets a chance to get weird. So I can load it up again easily next time it happens.

But before doing that, I saved the preset using AL's own internal preset save system. After doing that, when I saved the Reaper project, the rpp file dropped from around 30mb to the more normal 4mb.

It's as though saving the preset forced it to clean itself up.

Now to see if that pattern repeats.

[panicaftermath]

Originally Posted by panicaftermath

Now to see if that pattern repeats.

And it did.

The rpp started growing again for no apparent reason from 4mb to about 49mb across maybe a dozen or so saves over a couple of hours.

The rpp showed 1000's of lines or a short repeating pattern for one of the Analog Lab instances.

As last time, I simply saved the preset using AL's internal system, then saved the Reaper project, which was back to the 4Mb range.

That seems to trigger a clean up.

But it's interesting that I had not actually touched the settings on the AL instance since the last time that happened, so there wouldn't have been any new changes to undo.

Not sure what's what, but this pattern seems to be established.

[heda]

try to enable minimal undo or buggy compatibility on that plugin and see if it happens again

[alekvila]

I was having this same problem. My Reaper files were growing exponentially with every save. Then I updated my Arturia plugins. That fixed it. My Reaper file was previously over 2 GB, and now it's 13 MB.