Reaper noisy playback...

[byllsong]

Hi guys,
I've been learning and working with Reaper since Christmas.
I've been trying out different free vst's, keeping those I like
discarding the others.
I've noticed recently that when I load Reaper and play back previously recorded songs,
there is a noisy or buzzy sound.
If I close Reaper and reopen it, the noise is gone.
I'm thinking the problem might be vst related, but I might be wrong.
Any thoughts or solutions?
Thanks.

[marcblack30]

Do you have any demo vsts on those projects? Sometimes demos will add noise like every 30 seconds or so.

[byllsong]

They all appear to pretty old.
No demos .

[ecurb]

Hi Billy,

I've used Reaper for years now, but I've got to say that what you're describing is new to me... the closest thing I can think of is that I remember getting some strange artifacts, pops and scratches and other unwanted noise, a few years back when I was working on a much weaker PC than I have now and I think also trying to convert sample rates on the fly, e.g. had audio tracks playing back wav files recorded at 44.1 kHz while my system's audio, and Reaper, were set to 48kHz. Or something like that. So Reaper was basically trying to do a bunch of those conversions on the fly while also running a bunch of VSTs and so forth, and things were getting a bit ugly at the output stage.

Not sure if that's related in any way. But might be worth checking there's nothing weird going on there anyway.

Bruce.

[byllsong]

Hi Bruce,
I've been fiddling around and noticed that the vst's in question
are those that have a lot of components...(full orchestra, multi-instruments, groups of sounds)
When I take the bulky ones out, it all works.
I need to accept "Less is more"
Thanks

[ecurb]

Hi Billy,

OK, again not sure exactly how this will work out for you but may be worth a try - and sorry if this is stuff you already know, as you mentioned you're fairly new to Reaper though, might be worth mentioning.

One thing you can try is isolating out the tracks that are causing problems and rendering them separately down to .wav files. which often take a lot less processing and therefore cause a less problems than "on the fly" VSTs. Basic way of doing this in Reaper is

- Select one or more individual tracks that you want to isolate - i.e. the one(s) that are causing problems - by ctrl + clicking on them in the upper left track panel.
- Bring up the "Render" window by hitting ctrl + alt + R. (You can find this under the FILE menu dropdown also, but trust me, if you're working much in Reaper, this is one shortcut worth learning)
- in the top left dropdown set the source to "Stems (selected tracks)". So when you hit go, Reaper will *only* focus on recording a copy of those problem tracks.
- down near the bottom of the popup, tick the checkbox for "Add rendered items to new tracks in project". This will do what it says and conveniently add a rendered, low CPU and RAM hit version of the tracks you've earmarked right into your project for you
- Optionally you may want to change the right-most dropdown about 1/3rd of the way down and at the right side, where there are 3 boxes in a row on the one line, from "Full-speed Offline" to "1x Offline". Honestly... jury is out for me on this. Basically it's the option to bounce down your track in real time and try to get the best sound out of the parts vs. running it as fast as the CPU can manage. And sometimes fast as can manage works better anyway from what I've seen. But worth playing with it you are still getting glitches.
- Take a quick look at the three text boxes just above this line (top 1/3rd of the page), titled "Output Directory, File Name, and Render to" - adjust, using the browse button if needed, as you see fit. Basically you're about to save whatever noise the tracks you selected make as one or more .wav files and you get to specify here just where you want those file(s) saved and what you want them called.
- Hit the button down near the bottom right titled "Render (x) files", where x is the number of tracks you selected, once you're happy with how it looks.
- Once this has processed you should end up with plain old WAV file rendered versions of your selected tracks inserted into your project. You can then just mute the original VST tracks that generated these renders, and play back and add other stuff on new tracks hopefully with less glitches and performance oddities, as it takes a lot less CPU and RAM to play back these rendered versions than to keep reproducing the original VST source.

If you decide you need to change something in the source tracks, you can of course just delete the output renders, unmute the source tracks, re-record, re-render as needed.

Hope that's of some help, sorry it became a bit long winded!
Bruce.

P.S. One of the big incentives for building a high spec PC, i.e. fast chip and lots of RAM, is - less need to do this sort of thing as the platform's more capable of just producing the whole thing in real time anyway without needing to bounce parts of it down to rendered stems as you go.

[byllsong]

Wow, that's a mouthful.
Thanks,
I 'll try to digest and look at this on the weekend.

[ochaim]

if taking out cpu/ram intensive instruments resolve the problem, have you tried increasinf the audio buffer?