Custom Action freezes Reaper

Hey Community, 1. I built a custom action to compare two tracks - I need it for uni - and it kinda works, but despite the actions using Solo buttons and playback I can't see any solo buttons pressed or the play cursor going. 2. Also as this action takes about 20 seconds I would like to be able to stop it. But Reaper is frozen and gets displayed as not responsive for the duration of the action. Thanks in advance! :) Best regards old_edge P.S.: I have a laptop with Windows 10 i7.

Thank you very much for the effort. 1. I still get this error: "Forum.lua:34: 'end' expected (to close 'function' at line 11) near <eof>" I tried to put "end" to various spots, but it didn't work. 2. Would you mind to give me a quick explanation what you did here? Im very new to ReaScript. Im not completely new to programming though. What scripting language is it you used, as I just read there are a few different ones you can use in there? 3. How come that my custom action freezes Reaper though? So when would I use a custom action and when a script? Thanks in advance. You don't have to answer everthing at once, if you don't like. ;) old_edge

Have you copied the whole script? It should be 39 lines long. This is a Lua script. It starts by soloing the first track + seeking to the start + playing (solo(0)). Then it checks every ~33ms (reaper.defer) whether 20 seconds have elapsed since the script's start (wait(20, ...)). If yes, it soloes the second track + seek + play (solo(1)). The action Wait 10 seconds before next action is blocking: nothing else can happen in the GUI thread while it's waiting. Using reaper.defer in a script allows REAPER to resume its work and come back to the script a bit later.

Hey thanks for the explanation! Yeah I doublechecked, as you can see in the picture it didn't work. By the way. How did you manage to put the picture directly into the post? Thanks in advance old_edge

Which version of REAPER are you using? The latest version should not display error messages in a separate window like that when ran from the IDE - it should display them at the bottom, like this: Perhaps the version of REAPER you are currently using has an older version of Lua. The picture is too small to see much but the code seems indeed complete. (This forum has pretty tight limitations on image upload sizes. It's best to upload them on an external image host (eg. imgur). Then write [​img]https://url/to/image.gif[/img] in the post to embed it.)

That's weird. I tried with a few different REAPER versions and it works fine here. Also v5.65 doesn't usually display syntax errors in a separate window like that. Try Save Page As or Save Link As instead of copy/paste: