Reason Unresponsive when Loading Song

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NekujaK
Posts: 631
Joined: 09 Oct 2016
Location: USA

04 Oct 2019

Encountered a strange and annoying issue that I've never seen before with Reason. I was working on a song during the past couple of weeks, and everything was fine during tracking and mixing. Now all of a sudden, when I open the song file, Reason launches and loads the song, but is unresponsive for about 20-30 minutes (I can see the song in the sequencer, and all the devices are loaded, but clicking the screen does nothing). During this time, the CPU is repeatedly spiking to 100%, and Reason is clearly cranking away at something.

There's quite a bit of audio in the song, but no more than in any of my other projects. I assume Reason is resampling and performing precalcs (there's a lot of pitch correction, comping, and slice edits in the song), but in the past, I could always work in Reason while the precalcs happened in the background. I tried "Save and Optimize" and that seemed to cut the "unresponsive" period in half, but it's still a long wait before being able to get to work.

This is my first Reason project on 10.4, so I'm wondering if they changed precalc so it's now a foreground process instead of background. Or is there another explanation? In any case, this is really annoying and a total productivity killer.
wreaking havoc with :reason: since 2.5
:arrow: https://soundcloud.com/nekujak-donnay/sets

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WillyOD
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04 Oct 2019

Did you try to copy the file into another directory? Save as? Where's your scratch folder, on an SSD?
I used to make music but now I just cry on these forums. @diippii.com

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NekujaK
Posts: 631
Joined: 09 Oct 2016
Location: USA

04 Oct 2019

Thanks for the suggestions. Save As didn't help, neither did changing the directory. Kontakt instrument data is all on SSDs, but the scratch file is not, but I don't know how much that makes a difference because all thru tracking and mixing, I was able to save and re-open this song file many times without any problems. The unresponsiveness only started after I made my first full export/render of the song, but I don't know why that would suddenly cause such a drastic change in loading behavior.
wreaking havoc with :reason: since 2.5
:arrow: https://soundcloud.com/nekujak-donnay/sets

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NekujaK
Posts: 631
Joined: 09 Oct 2016
Location: USA

04 Oct 2019

Did some experimenting, and so far, it seems the problem is centered around Kontakt, and maybe a specific Kontakt library.

The problem project uses 7 Kontakt instruments (plus other plugins). If I save and load a version of the project with all Kontakt instruments disabled (green button in VST containers switched off), the project loads without any problems.

If I then start enabling each Kontakt instrument one by one, everything is fine until I enable NI's Drum Lab, which immediately causes Reason to become unresponsive and the CPU to start spiking sharply - the behavior I described in my original post. It doesn't matter if I enable Drum Lab first, last, or somewhere in the middle. Whenever it's enabled, the issue starts.

To test further, I created a completely blank Reason project and added Drum Lab to it. Loading this project doesn't cause problems. So that makes me think the combination of Drum Lab and something else in my original project is the culprit.

That "something else" might be memory. The Task Manager reports 8GB of memory usage by Reason when the full project is loaded (my machine has 16GB of RAM). Reason reports there is 565MB of audio data in the project. I've worked on larger projects in Reason and never had problems, so maybe there's a weird memory thing with Drum Lab. Or maybe Drum Lab simply doesn't play nice with one of the other plugins in the project. I have no idea.
wreaking havoc with :reason: since 2.5
:arrow: https://soundcloud.com/nekujak-donnay/sets

superpop
Posts: 126
Joined: 16 Jan 2015

04 Oct 2019

Try this


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NekujaK
Posts: 631
Joined: 09 Oct 2016
Location: USA

05 Oct 2019

superpop wrote:
04 Oct 2019
Try this
Thanks for that! I knew about selective purging when an instrument provides for it, but I had no idea about Kontakt's ability to dynamically purge - awesome feature!

Unfortunately, it didn't remedy the loading problem with my project file. What's even more interesting is that the selective purges saved and loaded for all Kontakt instruments EXCEPT Drum Lab, which reloads its entire sample set when the project is loaded. There's something fishy with Drum Lab, because when I remove it from the project, everything is fine again.

Thanks again for the Kontakt tips.
wreaking havoc with :reason: since 2.5
:arrow: https://soundcloud.com/nekujak-donnay/sets

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