I am tired of this!

Every time I use PLAY in Reaper it crashes eventually. I just always make sure I save. However, I think it is best to use PLAY in something like Vienna Ensemble Pro 5. PLAY seems to be the most stable in that program and VE Pro would probably not crash Reaper.

Reaper crashes a lot for me too. Every session without fail. I have to constantly hit Ctrl-S to make sure I lose no work but invariably I edit some plugin settings and the fateful crash dialog box pops up. I am not sure where the fault lies...mostly the plugins, I would say...but sometimes it reports the ATI card dll as the reason. I don't have any other DAW to test the stability but I am glad I am not the only one experiencing this.

All of you experiencing regular crashes with reaper, DONT accept them. There is no reason that a medium powered system with a halfway decent interface cannot del[with some pretty heavy duty projects. I use a lot of VSTis and dont have any issues like this on a very modest AMD system. Nor have I ever had problems like this unless I had a rogue plugin or an external factor (usually something else wanting to hog cpu or interrupts) messing reaper up. It is worth spending some time to eliminate the root causes, really!

EWQL and Kontakt or no, it can be a true detective story trying to determine the culprit(s) to all of this crashing business. I decided long ago when I first made the move to recording my own projects on a home system that I wasn't going to put up with any of this crashing business. Along with this, I wouldn't dream of using anything like EWQL or any plugin that is known unstable and/or that brings along banks of a gig or more. I simply have no use for them, as good as some of them sound. There are much lighter and easier alternatives, and I'm not about creating full symphony orchestras anyway. I've encountered a couple of buggy VSTi plugins along the way -- and got good and rid of them -- and now haven't had Reaper crash on a project in more than a year. I should also mention that, for my own projects anyway, I'm not interested at all in 50 or 100-track counts. I've arbitrarily set a limit of 48 at most. Just because I have a system that can handle more doesn't mean that I should. Somehow, fiddling with so much begins to feel too much like work again to me; it takes all the fun out of it. These days I like to keep work as work and distinct from my own creativity -- personal projects that should feel as little like real work as I can manage. I can certainly understand why others might want to produce these totally massive studio projects on their personal systems, but to me it usually looks and sounds like excess and overkill. It smacks of the sorts of over-production that crept into '80s music, stuck around in parts, and sucked the life and grit out of many of the tunes then. This way of doing business now shows up in home recording in these large and often unstable projects we are discussing here. More power to you if you can pull off such ordeals smoothly and without a glitch. At what price though? Today, it takes someone with a degree in mechanical engineering and costs me nearly $1000 each time to have my automobile tuned up once or twice a year. This was something I or practically any backyard mechanic could do for ourselves not so many years ago. I hope no one is making projects more complicated simply because they can, because I listen in vain to hear the improvement and virtues of doing this and I simply can't hear the merits. Did the music of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan or even Jimi Hendrix sound too thin or simple for you? Would any of those have benefited from 124 or more tracks on all songs? Even when Phil Specter was allowed to fool with and 'build up' the Beatles' Let It Be album he had limited tracks (very limited still by today's standard!). I don't resort to bouncing tracks around like George Martin or Eddie Kramer were sometimes forced to do, but I do render groups down when I have the basic sounds I'm after, close enough to be handled by the final mix. I like to get all the stinking complexity out of the way! We have enough to click on already, don't we? Someone is asking in another thread How to Get the Sound of The Police. Aside from a couple of songs on their Synchronicity album, the answer is, AVOID just about all of the troublesome business we are mired in in this thread. Good Luck getting Reaper to handle massive plugins, track counts and projects. It is possible. So is a manned trip to Mars. I just sometimes have to wonder the need.

Ring your local Salvation Army. They have an orchestra or band that will play for events, don't they? A thought about 'real orchestras' in recordings. More and more, as I'm listening to sound tracks to movies and shows, I'm hearing less and less faux orchestras, of the sort we're talking about in these plugins. Not only are they using nearly no real orchestras, but more and more no contrived ones either. Instead, I seem to be hearing a lot of the 'lone composer with a really fine synth' doing much of the music. My guess is that fewer and fewer are wanting to bother with these beast instrument plugins, opting for a good Zebra 2 synth or similar ... with just a few oddball ethnic and 'for-atmosphere' VSTi, such as those Middle Eastern ones that keep turning up.

BTW, your Beethoven comparison? He would have been limited to at most perhaps six tracks, perhaps even less. Instruments weren't all thought of as individual instruments. And Cf. how they have recorded orchestras through the decades ... started out with only a couple of mics, etc., went from there. Point is, he would never have needed today's vast track counts. Not even close.

Ok, fair enough. Composing in head and on paper seems to be a rapidly vanishing skill on our times, so I commend you on that also.

Going off topic I think, but in the end you're only limited by your hardware, your budget and most importantly your imagination. Les Paul was doing 24 track recordings with Mary Ford in the early '50s and it was amazing. All the artists mentioned above like the Beatles, Hendrix and Beethoven all pushed the boundaries of what was available at the time. Just 'cause they were limited by the track count of their day we are not and we don't have to be -- and although there is nothing wrong with using just a few tracks if that's what the song calls for, it can equally be argued that there isn't anything wrong with using a lot either if that's what you have to do to get the song to where it is in your head. I don't set out to do big projects but sometimes it just grows and as you record you hear more and more possibilities. It doesn't mean you have to have 100 tracks all going at once though. A lot of modern Pop tunes mixed in the box can have up to 200 hundred tracks; although they're not all necessarily active at the same time. The point is there are no rules except the ones we impose on ourselves and the limits of our technology of the day.