My SSD is too fast.

[mellorman]

Yeah, you read that right.

I tried to squeeze out a little more performance from my laptop by installing an SSD; generally the laptop has coped with Reason very well for the last year, but since 9.5 I've been experiencing the same issues that many people have, with error messages, glitches, slowdowns etc. Now, I appreciate the solution (short of Propellerheads fixing their software) would be faster CPU and more RAM, but it's a laptop and as upgraded as it can be in those departments, so I thought an SSD might give a little performance boost somewhere along the line...

But no... I'm getting these mysterious dropouts... individual tracks dropping out at regular intervals throughout the songs. If I swap the original HDD back in, problem goes away, so I can only think the SSD is creating a bottleneck somewhere else. All the diags tell me the SSD is working well, I can't see a way of tuning it, drivers are up to date, BIOS (UEFI) is as up-to-date as it can be. Unless anyone has any bright ideas I think I have to swap the old HDD back in, and use the SSD as a paperweight. Any thoughts?

[Loque]

You should check, if your SSD works on full performance. It should read and write around 500MB/s.

Btw,a SSD won't help you much on Reason performance, only on disc performance.

More btw... My next desktop needs on of those new 3,5GB PCIe SSDs .

[Heater]

What do you mean "individual tracks dropping out at regular intervals throughout the songs"?
And what about that issue makes you think the SSD is too fast?

[mellorman]

What do you mean "individual tracks dropping out at regular intervals throughout the songs"?

Well, if I take a song that comprises guitar, bass, synth and drums, the song will play normally for a few seconds then an instrument will drop out (mute) for a second while the other instruments keep playing, but will then carry on. What I think is particularly interesting is that if an instruments drops out at the (say) 6 second mark, it will then drop out at the 12 second, 18 second, 24 second marks and so on. Sadly this behaviour persists when I export to audio, so Reason is effectively useless to me at the moment.

And yes, I don't know that the disk is too fast, purely that it causes an error that I don't experience with my slower HDD.

[Loque]

What do you mean "individual tracks dropping out at regular intervals throughout the songs"?

Well, if I take a song that comprises guitar, bass, synth and drums, the song will play normally for a few seconds then an instrument will drop out (mute) for a second while the other instruments keep playing, but will then carry on. What I think is particularly interesting is that if an instruments drops out at the (say) 6 second mark, it will then drop out at the 12 second, 18 second, 24 second marks and so on. Sadly this behaviour persists when I export to audio, so Reason is effectively useless to me at the moment.

And yes, I don't know that the disk is too fast, purely that it causes an error that I don't experience with my slower HDD.

AS i already mention, check the SSD itself, if it is working properly. 6 second rhythmic sounds weird, even for a sleep-timeout its quite short. I would guess the driver for the disc has an error or performs bad.

[mellorman]

You should check, if your SSD works on full performance. It should read and write around 500MB/s.

I've run the AS SSD benchmark utility against it... sequential reads/writes are working out about 480MB/s so not dazzling but adequate, I reckon.

Interestingly, for MIDI tracks, if I change the patch that seems to fix them (presumably it forces something in the .reason file to be re-written?). I haven't found a fix yet for audio tracks

[Loque]

You should check, if your SSD works on full performance. It should read and write around 500MB/s.

I've run the AS SSD benchmark utility against it... sequential reads/writes are working out about 480MB/s so not dazzling but adequate, I reckon.

Interestingly, for MIDI tracks, if I change the patch that seems to fix them (presumably it forces something in the .reason file to be re-written?). I haven't found a fix yet for audio tracks

So, maybe something went wrong with the song file. Can you re-import one of the samples into a new Reason song and see, if it works? If it works there, you might have some problems with FX or sample length in the original song. Not sure what you hear, but a click or something could be prevented with short fading at the end and beginning.

[4filegate]

Interestingly, for MIDI tracks, if I change the patch that seems to fix them (presumably it forces something in the .reason file to be re-written?). I haven't found a fix yet for audio tracks

CPU overload with midi controller if you use multiple automations at the same time?
&.more detailed information about your graphics card + Operating System OS

[Marco Raaphorst]

contact Propellerhead support. they should know about this.

[mellorman]

Here's an example of what it sounds like...

[mellorman]

contact Propellerhead support. they should know about this.

Let us hope! I have contacted them, but I don't expect them to get back to me too soon. I was posting here to see if anyone had experienced anything similar, or had and top diagnostic tips.

[Ahornberg]

Here's an example of what it sounds like...

does this also occour when you export to audio file or is this only while playing live?

[mellorman]

So... do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news is that the SSD is not too fast. The bad news is that *something* got trashed in the disk cloning process. Let's see what a reinstall of Reason achieves...

[Gorgon]

So... do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news is that the SSD is not too fast. The bad news is that *something* got trashed in the disk cloning process. Let's see what a reinstall of Reason achieves...

Very hard to believe that some kind of dataloss results in selective audio muting. Unless it's a sample being used. That would make perfect sense.

[Heater]

So... do you want the good news or the bad news?

The good news is that the SSD is not too fast. The bad news is that *something* got trashed in the disk cloning process. Let's see what a reinstall of Reason achieves...

This is good news. Hopefully you'll be running okay once sorted.

[Catblack]

I was running into problems on my system when I set up a spare SSD as a scratch disk. I also had some of my VSTs on a third SSD. I never tried doing any audio recordings, but I found I had to stop using the scratch disk in the end. Mostly I (still) get graphical errors in Reason's browser, especially if I'm running other things while Reason launches. I've reported it already.

[mguh22]

It sounds like a Windows laptop and not a Mac.

I'd do a backup of all your personal files. Then I'd reinstall Windows from scratch and then install Reason from scratch. That will make sure Windows is properly optimised for your SSD.

Good luck!

[EnochLight]

Btw,a SSD won't help you much on Reason performance, only on disc performance.

It helps a bit with reading/writing to Reason's cache, which makes loading songs (and saving) tons faster. It also helps with Reason's disc i/o and any other disc intensive things (like loading large samples into Reason's samplers, or recording large audio projects with lots of tracks).