Someone over at the Audition forums wants to mix 20000 tracks, with only one tiny clip on each track (one above the other). Don't ask me why. Out of general interest I used Reaper (2.53) to split a longish existing recording into 1000 pieces - didn't take long with a custom action - and created a new take from each little piece, thus creating 1000 files remarkably quickly. Then I tried opening the files with one file per track, and again, in a short space of time I was looking at 1000 tracks. But when I go to render the 1000 tracks, Reaper just seems to freeze. Doing the same thing in Audition takes radically longer for the files to be opened and the tracks created, but having finally got there, it has no problem in rendering the 1000 tracks quite quickly. Any reason why Reaper won't do the render, I wonder?

have you tried putting everything in a folder and doing a bounce? [edit: or a 'record output of track'?] or a 1x speed render? out of interest - why do the files need to be on separate tracks? you can probably stack lots of them on the same track.

I think it's kind of cool that you're dinkin' around with this.....but, to those people that want to mix 20,000 tracks for whatever reason.....I think they should get a job....or find a hobby or something.

How long are the clips, and are they aligned in time? I would think if you could force them to get rendered entirely into RAM things would work, but if there's any reading from disk, the game is already lost.

In the test version I'm trying, the clips are three seconds long, all starting and ending at the same time. And there's 'only' 1000 of them. Like I said above, Reaper didn't really turn a hair when importing them, but it doesn't want to mix them or replay them or anything. If neither Audition nor Reaper would do the job I wouldn't have been surprised, but given that Audition did (proving that it's possible on this hardware) I just thought it curious that Reaper did not. I don't fully understand the original objective but it's clearly not to do with music as such - some kind of scientific or research thing.

hrm. you could try installing a RAM disk device and copying the audio data to that. schwa is right, it's gonna try and read from 1000 files at the same time, the access time will kill you. the actual processing time is probably really minor. (my guess is audition is probably pre-caching the raw WAV data BEFORE playback, whereas reaper doesn't start caching until you hit play)

Have you tried modifying the Audio buffering settings or the Advanced Disk I/O options?

RAM use could be an issue -- try opening the task manager and enabling both the ram size and VM size columns...

I'm just curious: Did you tried to render 20.000 tracks in another DAW's also ??? If yes, did you achieve success in any one ??? :]