Reaper crashing occasionally

[monomox]

I posted this in the Reaper forum, but the topic was pushed down and I didn't receive any answers.

I used Reaper without a problem for just over one year on a Win7 computer.

Since MS is about to stop supporting Win 7, I assembled a new computer and installed Win 10. The specs of my new computer are Win 10, AMD Ryzen 5 2600, 24 GB RAM, 500 GB SSD, etc. I'm using Reaper's latest version as of May 10.

I don't know if it's Windows or my hardware, but Reaper occasionally crashes, about once every three weeks, not too bad, fortunately.

I've optimized the settings of my computer for audio:
- disabled Fast Boot,
- set processor scheduling to "Background services".
- no energy saving/CPU throttling, and other small stuff.
Changes I made within Reaper:
- render anticipative FX to 150 ms from 200 ms
- thread priority behavior from 4 to 6

The other weird thing Reaper does occasionally is to crackle when I have the piano roll opened. I close the piano roll and the problem goes away. If I reopen the MIDI piano roll, the stutter may come back or not. As I said, only occasionally. In my most recent project that happens only on a track where I'm using Shreddage 3.

I generally bump Reaper's priority to "high."

Setting the power settings to "highest performance" or something like that helped a lot, but yesterday both problems reappeared.

I suspected Dragonfly and I no longer use it. Now I suspect BFD3 and Jamstix, but I really don't know. The last time Reaper crashed I had selected all the notes for the kick drum in track that had Jamstix (disabled) and BFD3.

LatencyMon tells me that most of the time latency is negligible in my system, but now and then (once an hour?), Wdf01000.sys and (less frequently) ntoskrnl.exe introduce huge latency issues. It's just a spike and I don't know if that's related to my problem.

Let me know if you have questions. Any help is appreciated.

[neverbeeninariot]

Try enabling Anticipative FX processing for tracks with open midi editors. (Prefs/Audio/Buffering). It will increase midi preview latency (live input), but /should/ fix the glitching. I'd stick with the default 200ms render-ahead.

Crashes in REAPER are rare (for me about once every couple of months), the cause is usually a plugin or a driver. After your upgrade (heh) to Win10, did you manually download and install the correct Win10 drivers for all of your hardware (motherboard, pci cards, etc.)? I ask because while windows hardware handling has improved, it doesn't always automatically install the best driver for your system.

If you're sure that your drivers are ok, then it's a plugin (probably...). The problem is identifying which one. If REAPER hangs, rather than a hard crash, then you can force it to create a dump file by opening Task Manager, find the REAPER entry, right-click, create a dump file. If it hard crashed, a dump file should be automatically created by the system - search C:\ for *.dmp files.

Analysing the dump file is another subject altogether, but you could submit a crash report to support@cockos.com (send them a link to the file on dropbox or something), with as much information relating to the crash as you can, or post it in the Bug Reports section of the REAPER forums, there are a couple of guys there who can analyse the file for you (assuming they see your post, of course). I might be able to analyse it, I have a VM set up with the debugging tools although I'm no expert, but I might be able to identify where it crashed, so if you get stuck you can PM me here.

Cheers
nbiar

[Scrubbing Monkeys]

Same as above usually my crashes are plugin related. You could also do a portable install with no plugins to see if the behavior continues....though a bit hard with no instruments.

[Burillo]

Every time I've had REAPER crash it was either a buggy plugin, or I was testing a prerelease version.

[monomox]

I did not installed or updated any drivers, so I'll start there. Thanks guys

[SoundPorn]

How dare you?

[monomox]

Haha, you're right

[smd12]

My reaper crashes all the time Most of the time it is by plugins. the latest VSM-3 and bx_bassman. I uninstalled the plugins and started the project without w/o them and moved them in the chain and things started to work again. I notice reaper doesn't like vsm-3 at the end of the chain.

BTW I never had the issue with either plugin since the last few updates.

[Burillo]

yeah, Plugin Alliance stuff crashes REAPER from time to time on my end. bx_opto was the worst offender, so much that i'm running it bridged by default now.