How to get Reaper up and running (sounding!) in VirtualBox on MacOSX

Hey all, Just in case anyone else has this problem. I use VirtualBox to run WinXP within OSX for those times I have to check some of my old Windows projects (that use plugins not avaliable on MacOS) and don't want to reboot into XP However, I have had trouble getting any sound out of Reaper in VirtualBox. Other apps (Wavosaur etc) works fine but when I hit play in Reaper it just says "playing" but nothing happens. But tonight I finally figured out what's wrong. VirtualBox (on MacOS) does not (yet) support audio input, so when I changed the number of inputs (using WaveAudio in Reaper) to zero everything works great. Now I can fire up my Reaper XP projects in no time on my mac! Lovely! Maybe noone else need this info, but just in case... Well, here it is :) Regards, - Jonas

What's the performance like Jonas? I've fooled around with Reaper in Parallels desktop but the performance wasn't great. Not terrible, but I would never be able to load up a heavy project I was using natively in OS X. Bill.

I tried loading a project that nearly brought my old computer (a Dell 8600, 1.6 GHz Pentium) to its knees and that plays back just fine on my MBP (unibody, 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo), averageing around 50-60% CPU (but then I have Safari, Mail.app and a few other programs running under OSX as well). Now, I don't if that's good or bad in an absolute sense, but for my needs it's excellent! Let me know if you want me to do some performance tests. Regards, - Jonas

Just for fun, I tried opening the BradSucks demo on XP in VirtualBox and natively in MacOSX. XP+VirtualBox shows around 60% CPU load. 40% for system stuff and around 20% for user (both divided nicely over both cores). MacOSX shows around 45% CPU load. 15% for system stuff and around 30% for user (also divided nicely over both cores). So based on this (very scientific) test it seems that Reaper in XP+Virtualbox uses roughly 30% more resources than it's native MacOSX counterpart. Of course this says very little about real world use, but VirtualBox is free so go ahead and download it and try how it fits you needs! Regards, - Jonas

Thanks Jonas! Will do:)