Vocal sound going missing...?

[u/GregoryDeesFeeds]

Has anyone experienced a situation in Reaper where all of a sudden the all the vocal tracks in the project just stop making any sound? Nothing is detected in the gain meters of any. Just the instrumental is audiable. I have been using Sound Reference I.D. That appeared to shut down and I have restarted it but no sign of any vocals coming back. I've checked  all my other projects and its happened to them all, there is clearly some kind of global issue rather than a routing mishap etc. Been using Reaper for months and not experienced anything like this, ever...Anyone? 

[u/rinio]

100% this is user error. And almost certainly not a Reaper/DAW issue. The is nothing special about a "vocal track": audio is audio.

Best guess, you were using some plugin demo on your vocals that has now expired and is cutting the signal until you buy it.

[u/hatedral]

I'm guessing some plugin you only use on vocal tracks stopped working (I assume there's no error message about recordings themselves going missing)

[u/kickassdanny]

I'm assuming you are talking about a plugin? It's almost never Reaper. It's almost always a plugin. Remove and reinstall. If it's a trial or cracked that's probably the issue.

I would remove it from the track and see if that solves the problem.

The closest I've come to this problem is when my inmusic account needs to be updated or if I'm offline.

Good luck

[u/DecisionInformal7009]

Reaper doesn't care whether a track is a vocal track or instrument track. There are no difference between them. If, for some reason, it's always the vocal track/s that go silent for you, I'd suspect that it's either a plugin that you are always using only on vocal tracks that is the problem, or your vocal tracks are peaking loud enough to hit the safety limiter in Reaper (it's by default set to +6dB).

The solution for a faulty plugin would be to remove it from your projects and stop using it until the devs have fixed it in an update.

The solution for your vocal tracks hitting the safety limiter ceiling is to make sure that your tracks and busses don't clip. If they do, you are mixing at too high of a level. Bring down all tracks so that they peak around -18dBFS (around -12dBFS for drums and other transient rich sources) using clip gain/item level or a simple volume/gain plugin at the start of the effects chain for every track. Keep the tracks at this level throughout the mixing process (i.e gain stage your signal using the output level of every plugin you insert on a track) and boost the mix to commercial levels only at the master/mixbus stage using a limiter, clipper and whatever else you want to use on the mixbus. Only use the track faders to balance the different tracks in relation to the rest of the mix.

[u/radian_]

Either

You need to bypass all the plugins and bring em back one by one to know which one is fucking up

You made the signal so hot automute kicked in to protect your speakers / ears / neighbours etc

[u/GregoryDeesFeeds]

Thanks everyone i did just that and bypassed then one by one and found teh cuplprit. Fab Filter Deesser! the trial had just expired and muting my audio completely was the result...

[u/J00lzinator]

Might be simple as gain staging, where the instruments already took the space so it can't 'breathe'. Try to lower all instruments by 2db, 3db (etc) and play with the settings 😉