Reaper File Sizes

[symphonious7]

I'm trying to work on a song with another person with me sending him the files and stuff, my DAW is Reaper, and I have put all my device and render settings to what they're supposed to be, but my stem/wav files are coming out HUGE!  Like over 100 mb for one guitar part etc, took me over a full day to get him all the parts.  Does anyone have any experience with Reaper?  Know what the problem might be?

[symphonious7]

1 minute ago, HoboSage said:

My bad, Chris.  I secretly embed coded messages in other people's music files so that when they're ultimatley uploaded to the internet my mother ship can hear my reports, but they won't be able to trace the message back to me.  I like it here, and I don't want to go back.  You understand.

Well that does explain why my computer starts floating and glowing when I try to render a file.....

[symphonious7]

On a serious note, we got it figured out through a FB group, I was gonna delete this thread but then Hobo let everyone in on his alien origins and I just feel the forum deserves to know.  

[symphonious7]

It kind of turned out it WASN'T an issue, but more just that on @dnafe 's computer his file sizes were usually about half the size of mine, not sure why, but alot of people in the FB group said those sizes weren't abnormal.  Then a guy told me how to compress the files into a zip (which I don't fully understand yet but he gave me a link to a download and I assume I'll figure it out) but yeah he was basically saying you can take the separate tracks, consolidate them into one file, compress that file and it becomes smaller, then your friend you're sending the files to just uses the same program to uncompress it.  

The other thing I learned, is that you can make your files mono in reaper.  This will take some of the quality away, but some tracks don't need it if they are supporting parts or don't need to sound wide or large.  I had been trying to do this by clicking the mono button in the workstation itself, but what I didn't know was that you need to go "file/render/" and then in that box, there's a switch from mono to stereo, if you render the file in mono it's like half the size.  

 

So basically it was just me not really knowing what I'm doing, and I've learned from now on to render the files that don't need much definition in mono to save space, and to use a zip file compressing program to consolidate all my files and make them quicker to send and download  

[Mark Hahn]

On ‎8‎/‎3‎/‎2017 at 1:27 PM, symphonious7 said:

It kind of turned out it WASN'T an issue, but more just that on @dnafe 's computer his file sizes were usually about half the size of mine, not sure why, but alot of people in the FB group said those sizes weren't abnormal.  Then a guy told me how to compress the files into a zip (which I don't fully understand yet but he gave me a link to a download and I assume I'll figure it out) but yeah he was basically saying you can take the separate tracks, consolidate them into one file, compress that file and it becomes smaller, then your friend you're sending the files to just uses the same program to uncompress it.  

The other thing I learned, is that you can make your files mono in reaper.  This will take some of the quality away, but some tracks don't need it if they are supporting parts or don't need to sound wide or large.  I had been trying to do this by clicking the mono button in the workstation itself, but what I didn't know was that you need to go "file/render/" and then in that box, there's a switch from mono to stereo, if you render the file in mono it's like half the size.  

 

So basically it was just me not really knowing what I'm doing, and I've learned from now on to render the files that don't need much definition in mono to save space, and to use a zip file compressing program to consolidate all my files and make them quicker to send and download  

 

Something doesn't seem right here. Maybe you've upped your bit rate or something? I don't know exactly what you're doing, but for collaboration, if the tracks are all just mixed later, you could share mp3's to listen to while recording everything in lossless wav files?

 

Maybe this helps a little (scavenged from a Reaper forum somewhere):

 

If you know the bitrate, you can estimate file size with the following formula:
File Size in MB = (Bitrate in kbps x Playing Time in minutes) / 140

The bitrate for CD audio (44.1kHz, 16-bit, stereo) is 1411 kbps, which you can easily calculate (44.1 x 16 x 2).

The bitrate for lossy compression (MP3, AAC, etc.) depends on the compression setting, but you can reduce the bitrate (and file size) to about 1/5th of the original with excellent quality. With a high-quality MP3 or AAC file, most music will sound identical to the original in blind listening tests. (If you compress too much, the quality loss becomes more noticeable.)

With lossless compression (FLAC or ALAC), you can compress the file to about 60% of it's original size with no quality loss. (When uncompressed, the bytes are identical to the original... like a ZIP file for audio.)