I am tired of this!

Hi Alex Ewql and Kontakt are available in 64 Bit versions. And the most important feature of 64 bit processing is that you can overcome the 2 or 4 gig limitation of 32 bit operating systems. If you have a load of 3-4 gig from your sample players in an operating system that can only handle a maximum of 3.2 gig at all and a maximum of 2 gig per running application, the samplers all switch to disk streaming mode, and the PC is at its limits. Now, if the smallest thing goes wrong in the machine, eg, some driver trying to reconnect to its device, a disk rearranging sectors, whatever, you will either have a ruined recording or a serious crash.

Large projects 

I'm currently using a project template that has: 251 tracks 15 instances of Kontakt running orchestral sample libs (including Mural from Spitfire Audio, and the complete Sonic Implants/Sonivox symphonic collection among others...) this is on: intel sandybridge i7 8 core 64GB of ram OS and sample libs running on 3 SSDs. 64bit Kontakt (5.3.1) 64bit reaper (4.62) 64bit wine (1.7.19) 64bit debian "8" (jessie) No crashes, aside from one rotten nki instrument converted from gig that went in the trash afterwards. When the template is running, Reaper uses approx 18% of CPU, and RAM usage is about 30GB. (CPU goes right down to 6-7% when transport is running) Are you sure your hardware is capable of running the project you want? For what it's worth, i took a nice jump forward in stability, when i had my studio box built with 3 SSDs, not only for Reaper, but in general, when handling Audio streaming. Don't know how it is in Win and Mac land, but in Linux, i can set parameters for the drives to maximise disk read efficiency. (using what's called a Fstab configuration file) I would recommend using SSDs for OS/audio streaming, based on my own experience. Alex. p.s. I'd also say run everything 64bit if you're not already. 32bit is yesterday's news... :)

Reaper isn't the problem here, the way you're working is the culprit. Just a word of advice: It's less taxing on your CPU to playback audio/wav's vs. driving all those heavy soft synths during MIDI playback. Force yourself to commit to the sound you want and render your MIDI to wav. You can then re-save your file and disable or delete the vsti. Heh. PLAY. What can anyone say about that piece of software that hasn't been said already? Stick to Kontakt.