enormous file size

I've got a project that has somehow become 26MB in size (just the .rpp file). Looking at other similar projects, it seems that 2 to 5MB is more normal. The 26MB project, if it loads at all, takes 10 minutes or more. Actually, the last couple of times I've attempted to open it, Reaper crashes. Any ideas as to what might be behind the problem? One thing that I did a little different on this project was to load two instances of Independence Free, although I have since removed one of the instances. Otherwise, it's very similar to many other projects I've done. I have tried to load project w/ fx bypassed, but that seemed to have no effect. I've tried to load it directly from Windows, open another project then open the "big" one, all with no success. I'd like to recover the project if at all possible. Any suggestions?

The .RPP file is a text file. You could make a copy (for safety), open that copy with a text editor like Edit Pad and browse for any clues, maybe comparing it to a similar file ....

I know it's hard with a big file, but is there any chance you could post it somewhere like stashbox.org or pastebin.com (or even just part of it)?

A 26mb text file should compress quite a bit using say zip or rar

Schwa: The file appears too big to load to stashbox. I have a dropbox account. Could I put it in a shared folder for you? Maybe a couple of clues: the crash at startup says "modname: reaper_sws.dll" (or something like that) This seemed to happen when I started playing around a little with the SWS snapshots. Browsing through the text file, as Nicholas suggested, showed several lines called "Independence Free" (followed by a boatload of text), and a few references to SWS Snapshots.

Ok, I can't believe this worked: I edited the .RPP text file in notepad, and removed everything that looked like it belonged to a snapshot. I saved the file, and it became 3.6MB. I then opened it in Reaper (which it opened in it's usual few seconds, not minutes), and it played back perfectly. I'm guessing I got extremely lucky about deleting just the right text, or else Reaper is very forgiving. Honestly, I'm more concerned about not repeating this problem on future projects, so I'm still interested in hearing thoughts about possible causes.

Thanks for posting the RPP. This doesn't look like a bug, more unexpected behavior. As you can see in the RPP. the Independence Free sampler stores a massively huge state, I don't know if it's storing all of its samples as part of the restore state or what. (Plugin state information is opaque to Reaper by design, what happens is that when you save the project Reaper says to each plugin "give me some chunk of data that describes your current state", and on reopening Reaper hands the data chunk back to the plugin, which interprets it and sets its knobs and whatnot back to exactly how they were when the project was closed.) You have two instances of Independence Free, so that's 2 massive state chunks, and (also by design) the SWS snapshot stores the state of each plugin, and there are 5 snapshots, for a total of 12 massive state chunks. Nothing broken, just a very state-hoggy plugin, combined with a bunch of project snapshots. (To respond to your other comment, .RPP files try to be fairly forgiving.)

it seems to me that this may have been related to the recent and victorious bug hunt, search and destroy undertaken by diligent Mr. SWS and several other forumites. greetings .t

KevinW, thanks for posting this "worst case" RPP, it's helped me make my extension load/save this sort of stuff faster and without crashing. You should be able to load the old version of the project now (if you need the snapshots from it). Tim

I'd be interested with this RPP (for REAPER extension tests), sadly the URL is now KO. Do someone made a copy of it ? it'd be much appreciated...