Adjusting the Buffer or Block Size in REAPER

in this video I'm going to show you adjusting the buffer or block size in Reaper [Music] so a buffer or block size determines how much time a processor has to get audio in and out of our system it's measured in samples and it goes something like this 16 32 and 64 samples are considered ultra low latency 128 and 256 samples are considered low latency 512 1024 and 2048 samples will optimize processing over latency basically the lower the buffer or block size the more responsive our system will be but it makes it harder for a computer to process that audio resulting in pops clicks or glitches and if we have a higher buffer or block size we'll be able to process more tracks and more CPU intents plug-ins but we won't be able to record while hearing ourselves through Reaper correctly do the excessive delay or latency in other words if you try to sing or play guitar well the buffer is set really high and monitor through Reaper you're going to hear your performance much later than you perform it now if you have an audio interface that allows you to monitor directly and not monitor through Reaper notice direct monitoring or similar this latency won't matter as you're monitoring Direct now to see our settings we can go to our preferences Ctrl p on the PC command comma on the Mac and go under device or we could just choose it over here audio device settings it's the same thing so I'm using a Mac if you're using a PC this page might look a bit different but you should have this setting right here request block size if your interface comes with software or a driver you can probably set your buffer or block size in there and by default in Reaper this will be turned off and it's going to use the buffer or block size from your software or driver but if you want to override it we could do that right here just choose request block size and it should overwrite your driver or software and by default Reaper usually sets this to 512 giving us a perfect balance between recording with low latency and mixing with more tracks and plugins but I tend to keep this at about 128 to give me low latency during recording so we won't hear a significant delay in the performance but let's see how this project performs I have a project set up here and what's here what it sounds like [Music] decades notice we're not hearing any glitches let's go up here to the view menu and choose the performance meter where we can see how our CPU is handling the performance of this project what we want to focus on right over here is any overruns which will cause glitches or Pops in the audio let's hear it again we're not seeing anything we could also see how much RAM is being used but now let's compare this if we change the buffer or block size to be really small let's make it 16 samples which will make the latency incredibly low but let's notice what happens [Music] as you can hear it's full of glitches let's make it a bit higher let's try 32 with the graph [Music] I'm still hearing glitches and props but not as bad let's go a bit higher 64. reset a graph now we can see we're not getting any overruns or no glitches or pops [Music] so this is the way we're setting I would probably use to record in this project although we can go a bit higher which Mary had it set at 128. reset the graph and again no overruns glitches or Pops in the audio so 128 samples is a pretty good buffer or block size for according into this project as it's still considered low latency so performers won't hit too much delay while they're performing their parts and it's also high enough so we're not hearing any glitches pops or overruns so it's all about finding that balance based on the project we're working with at the time now if we want to see any possible overruns we can go to our transport and right click and choose this option right here which is going to flash the transport yellow on any possible problems so we turn this on which is off by default with switch up buffer to 32 now you can see down here any possible problems and we can see there's a bunch so you'd see it right down here visually if there's any problems with our buffer or block size setting and in this case we need to raise it so in general during recording I like to keep this at about 128. but for mixing I tend to make it a bit higher starting at about 10 24 which will give us more Headroom to run any plugins or many tracks during mix down and of course no glitches or pops now we also have this buffering preference tab where we could tweak some of the buffering settings none of this is going to affect wait and see but it can affect how responsive our system is when working with Reaper by default weep is going to Auto detect the number of CPU cores we have but if you want to choose it yourself you could turn off this option and type it in here maybe use less cores for Reaper if you prefer most of these I weave at default but if you want to tweak some things you can adjust the media buffer size here this uses Ram and CPU to avoid having to wait for a hard drive to load on media for systems with slower disks we should set this higher to get a more responsive performance but if our hard drives are pretty fast we can set this lower and let Reaper work directly from them and we could also choose how full the media buffers should be before starting playback lower numbers will give us a faster response time but play around with these two to see if you get a better experience that's adjusting the buffer or block size in Reaper I hope you learned something hope you could use it and I'll see you next time thanks [Music] Bingo boys let's go [Music]

Channel: REAPER Mania

Views: 12,728

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Id: 303eDz-8SW0

Length: 8min 36sec (516 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 15 2023