Reaper cant take 40 tracks of playback ... Help!

It plays 35 tracks smoothly, but as I add more tracks... reaper slows down, and then with more tracks it stops playing after 3 or 4 seconds. I don't think it's the processor either, cause I had a P4 1.6 Ghz 1 GB (RDRam), and it easily used to play up to 60 tracks (16 bit /44.1 Khz)

If it is the processor then give it an ease by making your ASIO audio buffers much higher (higher latency). That should help a lot...

I increased the buffer size from 128 to 1024, but it didn't help at all.... the CPU still shows 20% usage (which I think shouldn't stop the audio). I've worked with more tracks in the past, so I'm sure it's something else. I've tried other projects, and all fall apart when I go above 40 tracks....

sarmadg try this. those drives you have. find the one with the biggest drive cache that isnt used by the OS. find out what the cache size is in that 320 gigger your useing. is it very small ?? if so this might be an issue. difficult to tell. if its small, run a test useing a 32 mb cache drive if you have one and see if things improve. small cache in drives can sometimes cause probs. but in your case i dont know if this is the issue.. youll have to run tests.

Based on my (possibly rusty) calcuations, a 44.1khz 32bit mono wave file has a bitrate of ~ 176kB/sec. 40 files would run the hard disk around 7MB/sec, which should be no problem on your system. I would suspect something is wrong with your hard drive. On my old XP 3800+, I've played back over 100 tracks concurrently without problems.

maybe a useless contribution, but once I had a similar experience with my (very) old P4 2,6, 1 giga ram, where the circa 30 tracks project sucked off the most of the cpu resources even with no plugs in.... ...until I've found out I've set the project rate to 1.02 instead of 1.0...

Motu Traveler is firewire. The cache on the 320 GB drive is 8 MB I have another drive which is a 320 GB with 16 MB cache.... I tried that one, and it certainly improved the performace by 8 more tracks... I can now play 47 tracks.... (Good tip Manning1) these are 32 bit 44.1 Khz stereo files.... The performance meter says 16 MB/s (so your calculations are correct Stepone). On HD tune I get an average of 60 MB/s for the drive I'm using. Considering HD tune result, I should be able to play at least three times the count I have right now (or am I wrong in saying that?) The project is set to 1.00 (I actually have these wave files, and I drag them from the media explorer to a new project every time I change some setting).

Another thing you can check, since your interface is firewire... go into 'Device Manager' in Windows and check and see what it says you have for a firewire chip (hopefully it's Texas Instruments).

sarmadg cheers. let me explain why audio apps like large cache in drives. (but i dont know if this is your only prob as i'm not there to have a look.) cos i often have found people trying to do large trak counts on even 2mb cache drives. and run into probs. particularly at hi bit depths and sampling rates. think of cache like a "holding cell". everything passes thru cache. heres the issue...people get lulled into a false sense of security with a small cache drive. at low trak counts its not a problem. then it smacks em in the rear when they try another song with lots more traks. lets take the case of a small cache drive. think what happens if there is more data being read than the cache can hold. oops, more writes into the cache have to occur. this is where things get hairy. the cache cant handle the amount of data needed to be written into it. i'm from uk..so heres a laymans example...lol. try fitting two big caddie suv's side by side on an english country lane..oops. ones gotta wait. (small cache drive). now consider a big wide USA freeway. (big cache drive). no probs...it can handle the caddy suv's. in summary puters are all about traffic handling. like a hiway. what you might try sarmadg is run a test now with a 32 mb cache 7200 rpm drive. youll prolly find further improvement in trak count. but run tests in case there are other reasons. god bless.

Your system shouldn't have any problem streaming 40 tracks with no DSP. I suspect you have a TSR or something similar running in the background of your computer that's causing this issue. Go into task manager and see what's running. Start shutting services down there and see if it helps. Or your hard drive is *severely* fragmented or dying. Just as a test, copy those same files to your system drive and try to play them.