REAPER

I spent sometime yesterday testing ReaLearn, and that’s exactly what I was looking for re:macros & mapping.

 

I had a blast using one of Numerology VST’s sequencer into Bazille, and sending 14bit CCs modulations with Dialog Audio MP3244 ans Seq4 (do yourself a favor and check them both, no matter if you’re a hardware, software or modular guy) to controls loads of Bazille parameters. Using ReaLearn I can finally use MIDI CCs generated by VSTs as I want, with out any latency, and I can map them to whatever I need to. I’ve been trying to achieve that for years with other DAWs... The timing was super tight and the modulations butter smooth. Damn I’m impressed (and even more enthusiastic).

 

I have a day-off tomorrow so I’ll try to write a proper loop with Reaper, I might even end ditching Live. I’m happy I’ve been mixing with Reaper since v3 though, pretty sure that using it for MIDI won’t be that much of an hassle now that I have that macro/modulation/mapping thingie sorted.

 

Thank you so much gents, I wouldn’t have tried without that thread. Thanks a million!

 

RSP, how is Playtime? I’ve grabbed the demo but haven’t tested it properly yet. Might be something I need to sketch ideas the way I’d do with Live.

I don't understand a lot of what you guys are talking about because of my unfamiliarity with more advanced Reaper stuff, but damn I am getting the baddest urges to try all this stuff out myself. I just have this feeling that it will be a hell of a learning curve and lots of trial and error, and I already have spent the past year on Live doing this stuff.

 

In general, how much of this plugin stuff is available for free?

can u edit so that items go behind each other rather than xrossfading?

cheers

got it...turn off autocrossfades duh

 

however can u get the later item to cut off the one behind it?

Edited April 5, 2018 by bendish

  On 4/4/2018 at 7:23 PM, Nil said:

I spent sometime yesterday testing ReaLearn, and that’s exactly what I was looking for re:macros & mapping.

 

I had a blast using one of Numerology VST’s sequencer into Bazille, and sending 14bit CCs modulations with Dialog Audio MP3244 ans Seq4 (do yourself a favor and check them both, no matter if you’re a hardware, software or modular guy) to controls loads of Bazille parameters. Using ReaLearn I can finally use MIDI CCs generated by VSTs as I want, with out any latency, and I can map them to whatever I need to. I’ve been trying to achieve that for years with other DAWs... The timing was super tight and the modulations butter smooth. Damn I’m impressed (and even more enthusiastic).

 

I have a day-off tomorrow so I’ll try to write a proper loop with Reaper, I might even end ditching Live. I’m happy I’ve been mixing with Reaper since v3 though, pretty sure that using it for MIDI won’t be that much of an hassle now that I have that macro/modulation/mapping thingie sorted.

 

Thank you so much gents, I wouldn’t have tried without that thread. Thanks a million!

 

RSP, how is Playtime? I’ve grabbed the demo but haven’t tested it properly yet. Might be something I need to sketch ideas the way I’d do with Live.

 

 

It seems promising, although it's definitely a bit weird to get used to how it manages clips and tracks on the timeline, and I don't have a good controller to use with it.  For the price I'd say it's definitely worth seriously considering, if only because it's a good way to quickly lay out the basic structure of something in real time. If it gets some counterpart to Live's follow actions it'll be really good.  As it is now it's kind of like how I remember Live 1.5 being when I first tried it, and for loop recording and triggering clips that's great.

 

It definitely needs some kind of controller or a touchscreen though.

 

Definitely more fun than half a dozen three foot TRS cables, which is what the money was meant for originally.

 

EDIT: also, I haven't tried it but since it's a plugin you could use one instance of it loaded with MIDI clips to control another instance, and I guess that could be useful for something. I don't know how easy it would be to accomplish something similar in Live since I haven't used it in a long time and never really took to it.

 

My only complaint so far is that I can't find a way to change what track a clip is assigned to (which determines where the original is stored AND where it gets written when you are performing).  You choose that when you first record or import it and then as far as I can tell there's no way to reassign it without deleting it from its cell in Playime and then re-adding it again.  Not the end of the wold but it can make things get cluttered if you don't have some kind of plan when you first add or record your clips.

Edited April 5, 2018 by RSP

  On 4/5/2018 at 3:17 AM, thawkins said:

 

 

In general, how much of this plugin stuff is available for free?

 

 

A lot of it.  JS scripts are pretty much always free as far as I know, SWS extensions are free and should probably be part of the Reaper distribution at this point, different interface themes are generally free, the only Reaper-specific thing I've encountered so far that isn't free is Playtime and it's $20 euros.

The one thing I haven't been able to figure out in Reaper (and the one thing that I really liked about Pro Tools vs. every other DAW I've used in the past, all of which I liked better than Pro Tools except for this one thing) is a way to select a range of audio, copy it to the clipboard, and then select a new range and paste the audio in the clipboard in to that range.  In Pro Tools that's a REALLY useful tool for dialogue editing, because you can select some room tone and copy it, and then for the rest of the job you just select a part you need to cut out and paste the room tone in to the selection.  In reaper, if I needed to replace, say, a cough between words with room tone, I'd have to cut out the cough, copy a clip of room tone that I'd prepared earlier in to the space where the cough was, adjust the start and end points of it manually, and get the crossfades right.  In Pro Tools that's all done with a single keyboard shortcut.

 

Back when I was editing audio books for a living I had to buy Pro Tools because it was impossible to work fast enough in Reaper, and that was the only reason.  Everything else about Reaper was jut vastly superior but I ended up working in Pro Tools because of that one shortcoming.  These days the most I have to edit is a podcast intro or something similar that's too short for it to be a big deal but even then it can take 5-10 minutes to edit and assemble 1 minute of speech in Reaper that would have taken 1-2 minutes in Pro Tools.

 

I'm pretty sure there's no easy way to implement something comparable as a script because of the way Reaper handles range and item selection compared to Pro Tools.

 

If anyone has any ideas about this I'd really love to hear them, because it would save me some time but also a guy I play music with is still doing audiobooks and he has switched to Reaper for everything else but he's still stuck with Pro Tools for the audio books, for the same reason I was.

Try using a reverb as an insert effect on a drum mix, but using the dynamics of the dry signal to modulate the wet/dry mix of the reverb, so that louder = dryer.  Thatway the actual drum hits stay more or less dry but the reverb tails kind of swell in to the spaces between.  It's a pretty cool sound, similar to ducking a reverb using a compressor but not the same.

Edited April 5, 2018 by RSP

  On 4/5/2018 at 4:50 PM, RSP said:

Try using a reverb as an insert effect on a drum mix, but using the dynamics of the dry signal to modulate the wet/dry mix of the reverb, so that louder = dryer.  Thatway the actual drum hits stay more or less dry but the reverb tails kind of swell in to the spaces between.  It's a pretty cool sound, similar to ducking a reverb using a compressor but not the same.

gotta try that one, seems like it's going to sound pretty dope...

  On 4/5/2018 at 6:29 PM, THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON said:

 

  On 4/5/2018 at 4:50 PM, RSP said:

Try using a reverb as an insert effect on a drum mix, but using the dynamics of the dry signal to modulate the wet/dry mix of the reverb, so that louder = dryer.  Thatway the actual drum hits stay more or less dry but the reverb tails kind of swell in to the spaces between.  It's a pretty cool sound, similar to ducking a reverb using a compressor but not the same.

gotta try that one, seems like it's going to sound pretty dope...

 

 

Yeah, once you start messing with the routing matrices and parameter modulation Reaper starts to actually get into modular territory.

 

A couple years ago I saw a full blown vocoder made in Reaper without any scripting, just EQ and parameter modulation.

Edited April 5, 2018 by RSP

I have a couple of questions you guys may know the answers.

Is there anything similar to Live’s non-destructive groove quantification ? I’ve used the SWS FNG Groove feature to extract / apply custom groove templates (done with Numerology’s own GrooveClock), but to test different grooves you basically have to apply/undo/apply another one rather than switching on the fly from a template to another before committing to it or not. Live’s way is quite more flexible, hence my question.

Secondly, is there a native way to have a section looping and to switch between (MID) patterns, or is the Playtime VST RSP mentioned a few posts ago the only way to go? Ideally I wish I could switch drum patterns on the fly within the project multitrack MIDI editor.

Thanks!

Not something I've messed with unfortunately.

 

EDIT: maybe this would help?  It's hard to tell without trying it because the description is pretty vague.

Edited April 11, 2018 by RSP

question:

 

is it possible to only show tracks with data within time loop selection and hide all others?

 

thanks

Edited April 18, 2018 by bendish

toggle zoom selected items hide other tracks

anybody else actually /make/ JS scripts for Reaper? I wanted to make a modular synth in JS at some point but I knew practically it was gonna be stupid slow but probably the sound quality would be really good. There is a JS modular synth already but it literally, is a bunch of JS scripts treated as modules. Mine I was imagining it's all there on one script in a GUI. And then there is a JS compiler somebody's working on that would probably speed things up but it doesn't allow any graphics/gui code? aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

Edit: Also the whole 'figure out if stuff is routed correctly' logic on a modular synth is probably most easily done as recursive code and JS doesn't allow recursion. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Edited April 18, 2018 by Ragnar

  On 4/18/2018 at 6:36 PM, Ragnar said:

anybody else actually /make/ JS scripts for Reaper? I wanted to make a modular synth in JS at some point but I knew practically it was gonna be stupid slow but probably the sound quality would be really good. There is a JS modular synth already but it literally, is a bunch of JS scripts treated as modules. Mine I was imagining it's all there on one script in a GUI. And then there is a JS compiler somebody's working on that would probably speed things up but it doesn't allow any graphics/gui code? aaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

Edit: Also the whole 'figure out if stuff is routed correctly' logic on a modular synth is probably most easily done as recursive code and JS doesn't allow recursion. aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

 

I have no idea about JS scripting, but you can replace recursion with an iterative stack-based approach - this should generally work in all languages. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/159590/way-to-go-from-recursion-to-iteration

does anybody know how to make the edit cursor move to the place where you stop playback? every time i stop playback the edit cursor moves back to where i started playback...

other thing that got me riddled today... i remembered about the problem of playback speed when playing stuff at different samplerates from which they've been originally recorded, but on reaper i change the samplerate to say, 8kHz, and 44.1kHz recorded samples still play back at normal rate, what am i missing? is this something that's been corrected on recent DAW's or am i confusing something here?

 

plus, another thing, i remember, don't know which daw though, that when zooming horizontally, i could then draw the sample points of a said wave, but on reaper i click the dots and i cannot manually draw anything...

Edited April 20, 2018 by THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON

By default Reaper automatically resamples everything to the project sample rate (which defaults to your interface's current sample rate, but you can force it to a specific rate in the project settings) on the fly. I have no idea if you can turn that off, never tried.

 

Drawing samples directly was a Sound Forge thing way back, and I think Steinberg eventually added it to all their stuff, too.  Not sure about Reaper, since technically Reaper doesn't have any audio editor at all, you need an external one. A lot of other DAWs have a built in audio editor. I don't need to do that much anymore (I used to do entire crappy noise pieces just with the pencil tool in Sound Forge but these days the only time I really need that sort of editing is for getting rid of  noises in spoken word stuff I'm editing for work, and the kind of work I'm doing doesn't pay enough or give long enough deadlines for that kind of editing to be an option, so I haven't done it in quite a few years)

  On 4/20/2018 at 1:33 PM, RSP said:

By default Reaper automatically resamples everything to the project sample rate (which defaults to your interface's current sample rate, but you can force it to a specific rate in the project settings) on the fly. I have no idea if you can turn that off, never tried.

ah, so everything is re-sampled automatically, yeah, i couldn't find anything to turn it off... 

 

  On 4/20/2018 at 1:33 PM, RSP said:

getting rid of noises in spoken word stuff I'm editing for work

yeah i wanted to try to remove some crackles/scratches from vinyl records...

 

thanks man :thumbsup:

 

about the edit cursor, do u have any idea how to make it stop from going back to playback start position?

Edited April 20, 2018 by THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON

Press shift+return to pause

  On 4/20/2018 at 2:34 PM, oscillik said:

Press shift+return to pause

dunno if you're on mac but on win i use space to pause, but the cursor goes back to where i started playing...

  On 4/20/2018 at 1:33 PM, RSP said:

By default Reaper automatically resamples everything to the project sample rate (which defaults to your interface's current sample rate, but you can force it to a specific rate in the project settings) on the fly. I have no idea if you can turn that off, never tried.

i even tried exporting a 8 kHz wav file and playing it on wmp but it plays at normal speed... ¯\_(⊙︿⊙)_/¯ Edited April 20, 2018 by THIS IS MICHAEL JACKSON

ok i found it, ctrl+space, space alone plays/stop while ctrl+space plays/pause...

 

thanks dudes :thumbsup:

Sorry, I must've remembered it wrong. This vid is useful

 

  On 4/20/2018 at 3:11 PM, oscillik said:

Sorry, I must've remembered it wrong. This vid is useful

yeah thanks i got around it, went to actions list and swapped play/stop (space) shortcut with play/pause (enter)...