Serious Problems

I have an audio storybook project that keeps blowing up on me. Various things occur. The first is that audio clips visible in the timeline won't play. The source files, recorded in Reaper, are perfectly intact and open up fine in Cool Edit. After opening the file in Cool Edit, if I return to the still open project the clip will now play normally. This happens intermittently to clips throughout the timeline. As far as I can tell it only happens to clips recorded within Reaper, so far the ones I've identified may have an intra-track Cuckos effect such as ReaVerb, although it may happen with VST or DXi plug-ins, not sure. Another problem I have is when I finally try to render the project, it's starts to render then Reaper crashes. If I listen to the area rendered OK in the file, I can still hear audio gaps where there should be sound, in this case dialog. Needless to say, this is a problem. If it didn't have the dropout audio I would literally re-record the damn project to a second DAW just to finalize it, as I have to have it done by Thursday. Unfortunately I don't have that as an option. Any ideas will be welcome. Thanks.

Which plugins did you use? I'm sure one of those are the culprit.

Open the project with the "Open with FX offline (recovery mode)"-box ticked. If the audio plays correctly this way it is probably a plugin issue. Try enabling them until you find the bad one, and substitute it with some other plugin. If the audio doesn't play back correctly in recovery mode (all fx offline), there is something else going on. Then you could possibly try to save all fx-chains, copy all audio & paste it to a new project. If the audio plays back correctly there, you could simply load your saved fx-chains to all the empty channels in the new project. I hope it all works out for you!

Thanks for the info. Unfortunately there are hundreds of instance of various effects spread throughout the timeline. It's would've taken weeks to find the faulty plug-ins. What I wound up doing was eliminating all but one track at a time and rendering out each track independently and creating a new project with the rendered files. While this created some mixdown anomalies, I was able to adjust them in the new project. I'm still at a loss as to why this project crapped out like this. It was only 40 tracks. I may have gone too far with intra-track effects perhaps. I have created similar projects in the past, on the same workstation (Athlon 64 X2 4000+, 2 gigs DDR2 ram, both on-board Realtek Audio and Behringer BCA2000, system and data drives, etc), with up to 107 tracks, all with intra-track effects applied. While it would weigh the project down at times, I was able to still render the finished project out without crashing. It's time to move on to 64-bit, I suppose. I think I would miss many 32-bit effects however. I do have a new dual-boot 32/64 machine, so I can still process some stuff if necessary, but you really always need them at your disposal. Win XP unfortunately won't see the 16 gigs of ram I have in it, although I suppose Reaper will see the six cores, no?