The Reaper Thread

I really really love reaper. I feel like it's the daw, I've been missing for the past 9 or 10 years. I started off in Acid, and got really comfortable with it. Could make it do all sorts of cool stuff, but since then I have never really grown into any other DAW. I spent probably a good 7 years trying to get into Logic, but I never could. Read books, watched tuts, and always felt like it was constantly in my way.

 

Recently Switched to Reaper, and holy fuck. It's so good. Can do ANYTHING, and it's usually easy to find the way to do so. Just makes sense to me. Love it!

 

Who else here uses Reaper as their primary multi-tracking / composing platform?

 

I'd love to learn more if there are any ninja types around who might know some good tricks or shortcuts.

love my Reaper - for so many reason, seems to be ran by a great lad/lads, offering such cheap prices for licenses and constant updates etc.

I never really use it to compose - mainly for post-sound Film editing or sound designing

would be sweet if we could keep this thread running as a info/help thread for all Reaper related things.

I'm pretty comfortable with in. I like having all my F keys mapped to my favorite functions which keeps things simple and easy to remember. next version (4.33) is gonna introduce stretch marker editing on the audio files which is one of the few things most people coming from other DAWs will miss when trying Reaper.

the gui sucks and a lot of shit is weird for no reason, like ctrl+c doesnt do a standard copy, you need to do a special copy that ignores the time selection, or else when you paste it will paste everything within the time selection. a lot of shit is awkward, it reminds me of vi.

I'm interested in what you guys have to say about Reaper. I use Live version 6, and to update Live costs a lot more than Reaper's $60 license.

  On 4/15/2013 at 2:47 AM, CharlesWatkins said:

the gui sucks and a lot of shit is weird for no reason, like ctrl+c doesnt do a standard copy, you need to do a special copy that ignores the time selection, or else when you paste it will paste everything within the time selection. a lot of shit is awkward, it reminds me of vi.

i dunnoooo man, i find it to be one of the most user friendly and intuitive GUI's i've ever come across - especially if you use a usb mouse with a wheel

 

but i guess everyones different with these things

  On 4/15/2013 at 11:18 AM, TRiP said:

i find it to be one of the most user friendly and intuitive GUI's i've ever come across - especially if you use a usb mouse with a wheel

Absolutely, not read a scrap of documentation since I first downloaded (then swiftly purchased it) from back in the 2.x days, but found everything to be completely logical. It probably helped that prior to using it I'd used Sony Vegas for many years and the UI and shortcut keys seem to be damn near identical.

 

The primary use of Reaper for me is for making mixsts, putting together our albums and for general track mastering. And it works a treat for all three for me.

I use Numerology to compose, Live to host the synths & Fx Num controls, and Reaper for mixing : I love it. It's easy and fast to use, as deep as you can need, light on CPU. I wish Reaper has the same MIDI mapping features as Live, I'd happily use Reaper instead then.

ya I compose in Numerology too, but then basically multi-track all the midi and mod data into reaper where I re build the instruments and fine tune things. It's a nice workflow. I appreciate it because it really makes you commit to the composition before mixing. When composing in a daw it's hard to make the switch from composing to mixing a lot of times.

 

It's a bit of work as you have to change all the paramod data into cc data, and then remap it to the synths, but that's not too big a deal really.

 

The JS plugin format is amazing. You can edit the code of the plugin right in reaper!!!

The only thing that prevent me from doing everything in Numerology is that it's not as CPU efficient as others hosts... yet. I'll stick with Reaper for mixing anyway, I find it perfect the way it is for that purpose.

Well I think it is actually, unless you have a lot of LFOs running which eat a lot of cpu. Thing is that you are limited by what your machine can do in real time. There's no freeze, or offline bounce function.

You can't run as much Diva or Aalto instances in Numerology as in Live. No multi-thread rendering yet for AU in Numerology, But Jim's working on it. And Reaper is still much more CPU efficient than Live (or any other DAW I've tested).

I LOVES IT.

I use Reaper as my main DAW too. It fits my needs in music making perfectly : I started making music with Renoise, but then found it quite unpractical for mixing after a while, as I was studying sound engineering and thus making a lot of progress in mixing ; then I heard about Reaper, gave it a try, found out that it was very easy to run all the tracks from Renoise into Reaper (using Rewire), that the two softwares were syncing perfectly together with this method ; and that's how I've been able to keep using Renoise, which I love, but still benefiting from an interface more adapted to mixing.

 

Progressively, I started using Reaper for MIDI, and especially for my synths (software and hardware), and kept Renoise for the beats. I'm very comfortable with this configuration, even though I sometimes think it's a shame to get stuck with it. I guess I'll try to make a drastic change one of these days and see what come out of that.

 

Still I've a critic to make to Reaper. I'm taking part in a recording studio with some friends, and since we started our activity we try to use it as our main daw, with which we would like to record / edit / mix / master, and I've to say the recording part is quite a problem, because of the layer-recording features of the soft. The takes feature is a nice one but in the context of a recording of several tracks in the same time (critical example : drums with, say, 10 microphones), it gets messy quite quickly, and even if you try keeping a good discipline during the recording session, making an error can be a pain in the ass because it can get extremely messy.

 

I think it's not exaggerated to say Reaper is quite a messy software because it proposes a ton of features and it's sometimes easy to get lost in them. But in the same time, I've always found it intuitive and simple when I'm using it for my compositions. I dunno, I wish the dev team were realizing that and trying to stop wanting to add a ton of new little features and think a little bit more about organizing the existing ones better.

 

PS : I'm interested to know about any of your experiences with multi-track recording

  On 4/15/2013 at 8:11 PM, Antape said:

I use Reaper as my main DAW too. It fits my needs in music making perfectly : I started making music with Renoise, but then found it quite unpractical for mixing after a while, as I was studying sound engineering and thus making a lot of progress in mixing ; then I heard about Reaper, gave it a try, found out that it was very easy to run all the tracks from Renoise into Reaper (using Rewire), that the two softwares were syncing perfectly together with this method ; and that's how I've been able to keep using Renoise, which I love, but still benefiting from an interface more adapted to mixing.

 

Progressively, I started using Reaper for MIDI, and especially for my synths (software and hardware), and kept Renoise for the beats. I'm very comfortable with this configuration, even though I sometimes think it's a shame to get stuck with it. I guess I'll try to make a drastic change one of these days and see what come out of that.

 

Still I've a critic to make to Reaper. I'm taking part in a recording studio with some friends, and since we started our activity we try to use it as our main daw, with which we would like to record / edit / mix / master, and I've to say the recording part is quite a problem, because of the layer-recording features of the soft. The takes feature is a nice one but in the context of a recording of several tracks in the same time (critical example : drums with, say, 10 microphones), it gets messy quite quickly, and even if you try keeping a good discipline during the recording session, making an error can be a pain in the ass because it can get extremely messy.

 

I think it's not exaggerated to say Reaper is quite a messy software because it proposes a ton of features and it's sometimes easy to get lost in them. But in the same time, I've always found it intuitive and simple when I'm using it for my compositions. I dunno, I wish the dev team were realizing that and trying to stop wanting to add a ton of new little features and think a little bit more about organizing the existing ones better.

 

PS : I'm interested to know about any of your experiences with multi-track recording

 

hmm im looking to get something similar going since im kind of planning getting that korg 303 copy and i cant imagine Renoise being very helpful with that

 

i toyed around with the demo a few days ago and it seemed very easy to handle indeed. always fun to lay down bass & synth lines with the good old pianoroll. i like how Reaper can also group tracks like Renoise.

comrades

i have a little long standing problem with Reaper (or rather its caused by the vst). Whenever I use Valhalla reverb vst on a clip and play it back in the timeline it makes a pre-reverb type noise at the very start of the clips (even though the clip might be a long fade in)

tis' very annoying/distracting when trying to listen over work

any ideas?

I have loads of shortcuts and hotkeys setup, but reaper aint working for me right now, will post them when I can.

i use reaper for final mixes and nothing else, because the automation is really dreadful. but it's a great program. and light too. maybe they solved it in the new one, but i haven't checked.

it is a bit goofy, but quite simple when you get it figured out.