4 ways to reduce CPU load in REAPER

in this video we'll talk about four ways you can save computer power in your reaper projects [Music] thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video stay tuned to the end for their special offer all right let's jump into it with the first example here i've got a project here that has six different guitar parts a bass part and then a whole bunch of drum tracks with midi drums and they have processing on them guitar amps there's the helix native plug-in having just a few of those plug-ins in here makes the the project really choppy if i'm at a point in the project where i don't need to record anymore i can go ahead and increase my audio buffer size there's always a shortcut at the top of the reaper window to get to your audio devices and so just hit audio device settings and in here i have 64 as my requested block size which is a very small block size for low latency recording works great for recording guitars but now that i'm mixing and processing tracks i actually don't need that in there anymore so my cpu was about 40 42 42-ish percent uh playing back this project i'm going to increase my buffer size up to 1024 which is moderately high buffer size and that gives reaper and the audio device more time to process the audio and so now when i play this back or even just idle it's dropped down at least 10 percent [Music] so now it's averaging 28 to 30 cpu next we're going to look at rendering effects to items so i have some effect guitars here these guitars are taking about two and a half percent of my cpu each so this is something that i would like to consolidate but i also want some flexibility in um post-production even after this point so i want to just apply the guitar's guitar amp effect to this item so here's what this section sounds like some left and right pick scrapes i think it sounds pretty cool what we're going to do here is i'm going to actually select all these items here right click i'm going to apply track effects to items as a new take with a mono output so if i zoom in on this item here take one is my original direct guitar and take two is the output of the amp applied to that item so i can bypass the effects on the track and it sounds the same i'll just do that on the left and right here so i've got that pick scrape effect and i'm actually going to add two new tracks so that i can work with those independently and so i'll take these guitars and move them down and these guitars move them up these tracks here two and three which for good habit i'll rename i'll make sure that those are panned now at this point have i actually saved cpu no not really i've just moved an effect from the track to an item and printed that the actual cpu load is the same as it was before but we could do that to the entire track not just the section of it and you can see here the pick scrapes taking zero cpu just a little tiny bit of disc access to run those but these other tracks let's take these left and right guitars which are these heavy guitars solo these i'll take those two and in this case i'll right click and i'm going to use the track freeze so render freeze tracks i'm going to freeze these tracks to mono it's going to apply those settings to the items replacing the items and taking those effects off the track so i'm just going to take a second to run this and i'm doing this on two tracks simultaneously and there we go it replaced those items in the project with locked items post effects and any automation on the track is still there so this volume automation is still there and panning and all that is all there as it was before and that's taking up zero cpu for those uh four tracks now looking at the performance metering here things have dropped a little bit we're down down to 24 cpu so now to save even more cpu in this project i'm going to take the the lo-fi guitars and the bass and render those down or actually freeze them down into mono tracks depending on your project you'll want to use either mono or stereo or multi-channel there's no examples in he in this project where i wouldn't use stereo or multi-channel but you would use stereo if it was like a synth or something like that in this case i'm using a mono guitar going into a mono amp and if there is a little bit of reverb in the actual tones uh it doesn't really matter because i'm panning the output of the track anyways so i'm going to render these to mono so freezing those tracks actually dropped my cpu now to only 12 and so let's hear this project now still playing perfectly and the really cool thing about freezing is that you can undo it so you're like oh you know i want to change that tone a little bit just right click go to render freeze tracks and click on unfreeze it's going to bring back the original item the original effects everything's going to back going back to the way it was and now i've got the effect on the track and i can see those settings here so i can change the eq change the amp anything i want to do i'll just freeze this again before we move on now it's time to talk about our sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community for creators with thousands of classes on art design productivity and more they're one of my favorite places to go to learn i never feel bad about spending a couple hours learning on skillshare works great on my ipad i love just sitting in the bed or sitting in a comfy chair and going through some of the classes on skillshare as i said before there are thousands of classes there's always something new to learn there and i think you guys are really gonna like it intro to digital audio recording learn the basics of reaper daw from brian knapp this is a great little class i think you guys will like it if you're into using reaper and you can try this out for free the first 1000 people to use the link in the description will get a free trial of skillshare premium membership if you want to stay on for a full year it's only about 10 a month i think it's super worth it i really enjoy it and i think you will too thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video so we talked about buffer size rendering effects to items track freeze and now let's look at the last option subprojects subprojects is a really cool way of converting a bunch of tracks or items into new reaper projects that work inside of a reaper project so i want to do this with my drums because of the effects that i have on this drum track and the parallel compression with the drums crush bus and the three reverbs that i'm using i can't directly freeze this i actually have to put in another track above the drums we'll call this drum stem so inserting a track calling it drum stem let me show you what happens if you create a sub project move to sub project warning tracks contain non-trivial routing that will be affected by move to subproject seven sends to tracks in parrot project do you wish to continue reading will be removed if you're okay with that you hit okay but this is a very important warning that your mix is going to change so we're going to hit cancel here i'll use that drum stems track and make that a folder so now this is all of my drums my parallel compression and the three reverbs all inside of one folder and this is safe to render to a sub-project now so right click move tracks to new sub project and it starts rendering the drums we've got the silence at the beginning and now it's rendering the drum part and then it's going to stop when it gets to this marker here called equals end and that's pretty quick 20 seconds to render that drum track and it's gone back into my original project and replaced all of those tracks i think it was like 20 tracks with a stereo mix so i've got uh the stereo file here which sounds exactly as it was originally [Music] and the cool thing is you can double click on this and it's going to open up that sub project as a new reaper project we can see the original midi items and we have all the tracks here just as they were before and all of my effects are here so 26 tracks in this sub project that bounces down into a single stem non-destructive plus you can even move this around you can you can edit this further you can apply effects to the the overall output of this and yeah it just opens up in new tabs so let's make a change to this so i've got contacts here i'm using the bob or shell signature series drums here from room sound and i'll just change this i'll just change the snare and if i play this back [Music] sure sounds good when i close this sub project or if i hit save it's going to start rendering that again because i make it i made a change to this project by the way this is a 32-bit floating point render that it's doing here so if there's ever any clipping or anything like that uh it's all kind of it's all non-destructive and you could just normalize the file or turn it down or whatever and you'll remove any distortion there that new snare is updated in my master project and the actual cpu in this project is only five percent now that's pretty amazing difference from almost 45 down to five percent let's hear this [Music] [Music] and something you need to watch out for sometimes the freeze will actually cut off the the tail end of an item so um sometimes extending the length of the item a little bit uh can help it's a good thing we checked and there you go guys there's four different ways you can save some cpu in your reaper projects and i think some of these tips can apply to pretty much anyone anyone that's got the latest and greatest super computer just for organizational things as you're taking a break maybe free some tracks your projects will run more smoothly it's great to kind of commit to some sounds using some of these tips hopefully this has been helpful and thank you so much for watching please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blogs your patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more tutorials you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 17,303

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, reaper cpu load, reaper track freeze, subproject, subprojects in reaper, sub projects in reaper, apply fx to item, audio buffer size in reaper, reaper cpu use, reaper (software)

Id: 4MIToJRCf5o

Length: 13min 25sec (805 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021