Reaper Optimization Guide?!

[JonSlaughter]

Is there an optimization guide for reaper? Specifically how to minimize pops and clicks during mixing/playback while maximizing response time.


1. Higher buffers in the audio device settings generally reduces pops and clicks but increases latency.

a. There is a limit to which this does good. I've tried setting extremely large buffers(10+ seconds worth) and no sound. With one second, I still get pops and clicks similar to around a 200ms buffer setting. There is no perfect setting here as far as I can tell.

b. # of buffers vs sample size of buffers? 10 x 1024 or 1 x 10240? Does it matter?

2. Disk buffer helps reduce load on hard drives. With SSD, possibly not an issue, but higher settings don't seem to help either.

3. I have 8gig of memory. 100% of my projects are audio, yet reaper only uses 1.1gig and still accesses the HD. Why can't reaper store most if not all the audio in memory to avoid disk access?

I know it is accessing the disk because the performance meter shows it start at around 300kB/s then jumps to around 10MB/s.

4. Media buffer size. I have it set to 1600ms. Helped a little but larger values cause more problems than it solves and reaper does not seem to use more memory with higher settings.

5. Anticipative FX processing - Higher values than 200ms don't seem to help much. I've even tried to turn it off in my project and it was way worse.

6. Stem rendering - Great to reduce load but messy in that you have to keep track of the stems and the track they come from. Would be nice to be able to "freeze" a track but still have the ability to edit it as normal. Reaper's freeze hides the tracks. Reapers "stems" makes two tracks. I'd rather be able to toggle between the last frozen state and the non-frozen state with a dirty flag telling me if the last freeze is not up to date.

e.g., When I freeze a track and need to modify it, I have to unfreeze it. It it takes 10 mins to freeze a track, then it is a total of 20 mins to sometimes fix a simple problem. Very time consuming. If I use stems, I can keep the old stem around, but still make unessential changes. I might not be able to hear them but it's not a big deal. If it is, I can just render the updated part of the song(usually going to be very short, seconds) and add that to the old stem.

I can do this already with stems but because reaper tracks them as a separate track, it can become a little messy keeping track of them. Also, reaper keeps all these frozen media items and stem files around... even if they will never be used again. (e.g., freeze then unfreeze a track and you have a 50MB file taking up space that will never be used again).


One day I will be able to upgrade to a better computer but until then any one know anything to increase reapers performance?

(The #1 thing I would like to have is for reaper to actually take advantage of as much free memory(80% say) as it can. It should be a pretty easy thing to do, right?)

[Nystagmus]

For freezing, you need to re-look at the freeze menu within Reaper. There's several different options and the one that I use allows for editing. All you have to do is click the "unlock" icon on the media files that got locked during freeze. If you select them all, you can unlock them all at the same time. You may need to enable the lock/unlock media item within the media preferences.

As for the optimizations, it would be nice to have an optimization guide but i think it would be very difficult to assemble since computer installations vary wildly and exponentially from computer to computer, OS to OS, preferences settings to preferences settings, Reaper versions to Reaper versions.

I find that for now, it's up to the user to do the research thoroughly to find out what optimizations work by reading a whole lot of forums and blogs and websites for pro audio and the like. Whenever I do this and learn something good that works, I share the results on forums like this and other forums so that it's easier for the next person(s).

Luckily, this forum is a lot more user-friendly than other forums and support sites. And the Reaper developers really do care about making Reaper work well. They really work hard and have for many years now, and it's paid off because Reaper really did get better.

A lot of other software really doesn't have all these advantages nor the good userbase.

But if I were you, I'd send an email to Cockos about your request and see what feedback they give you. Also, be sure to keep doing internet web searches for Reaper optimizations and tweaks and for keywords such as latency, and buffer and playback, etc. Sometimes internet search engines give better results than forum search engines.

The optimizations I learned were for my Linux system, but I think a lot of them if not most of them would be applicable to other systems. Search for posts by me and you should find a fairly recent post I made with my better settings. Sorry that I can't remember the exact location of the post. But I remember that I posted up the same info on http://gearsz.com and on a particular Ubuntu Linux support site.

I wasn't sure which settings were absolute best, but I uploaded screenshots of my settings that finally worked best for me so far. I wrote in text explanations on the pictures and on the forums where I posted.

Good luck.

[foxAsteria]

are you using an actual asio soundcard or the one on your motherboard? you can try asio4all if the latter, but you will not get low latency without using asio drivers. best to leave other settings at default unless you know what you're doing. TONS of threads on here about this.

you should never need a 200ms buffer, let alone a 10+ second buffer. mine sits at around 8-10ms and even 10 years ago when my rig sucked i never needed to go over 25ms in any DAW.

highly recommend a decent asio soundcard if you want to do audio work on your computer. can get one for $50 or less used.

stem rendering is not a solution for general clicks and pops. only if you use a ton of effects and even then it is more advisable to start using fx sends instead of putting effects on individual tracks.

i'm not sure about the memory issue, but i'm pretty sure it's the audio device that designates ram usage based on buffers etc, not so much reaper. never had such crap performance as you describe except when i was trying to use directsound as my audio device (when i was a total noob).

for general audio work optimization try starting here: http://www.presonus.com/community/Le...sic-Production

[Ollie]

Sorry, in my experience the place where optimization should happen first is outside of REAPER. The default settings usually work fine on a healthy system. There are many options in REAPER to address specific problems or optimize for specific hardware, but none of them will fix or (vastly) improve things that are wrong with the system underneath. If you experience problems long before CPU and/or disk are reaching their limits, it's almost always something amiss* with the system, or with your selection of plug-ins, both may add up to each other.

* Realtime audio processing is pretty different from other software in its demands, so a computer could be running quite perfectly with all other software, while it still can have problems when running low-latency audio software.

[godly]

Sorry to pick up this old topic.
I have a similar question for live play.
My vst Synth avenger is very demanding to my soundcard.
Works perfect with wasapi but on asio from my soundcard i get cracks and glitches.
Is there a way to separate the 2 for performance.
Or maybe reserve an CPU especially for that vst?