What’s so great about REAPER?

Back in August 2010 shortly after REAPER 4 came out I wrote this for the Home Recording Show Podcast, it got a bunch of people to give REAPER a chance. Its not really a review but just me raving about cool R4 features and how it compares to Pro Tools.
~Jon~

What’s so great about REAPER?

About REAPER
For those that don’t know what REAPER is, it’s a digital audio workstation created by Justin Frankel who made a truckload of money when he sold his company Nullsoft to AOL in 1999. Winamp was Justin’s first successful software project with over 15 Million users in the first year. In December 2003 AOL shut down Nullsoft and laid off 450 employees. In 2005 Justin launched his new company Cockos and released the first version of REAPER as freeware.

How I fell in love with a DAW
For my part of the story let’s start by going back almost to the beginning, to 2007. When I first tried REAPER I hated it, I was a hardcore Pro Tools user at the time and just couldn’t figure it out no matter how hard I tried. Of course, I hated Pro Tools too the first time I used it, and still did to varying degrees over the next 4 years.

Jump to May 2010 when I bought my REAPER license, I think it was version 3.4 at the time, the $60 license gets me through to version 4.99. Up until that point I’d used it for a few minutes at a time for a couple years. I’d always like how fast it launched and it was the one I’d go to whenever I wanted to try out a new plugin. I never really took it seriously though. At this time there were a lot of Pro Tools users that were unhappy. The excitement of Pro Tools 8 had worn off and many serious bugs like the one that blasts full volume, speaker blowing noise were still not fixed. AVID had just begun assimilating all it’s brands to the AVID name and weren’t giving the users any indication of what was coming or how long we’d have to wait. Many long time Pro Tools users were having a good look at the other options, some went with Logic, some went to Cubase, and some helped push the development of REAPER. I saw the customization that could be done by a few former Pro Tools users and I decided to give it a shot. Over a year later, I believe REAPER is the best workstation out there, regardless of price. I use Pro Tools extremely rarely now, usually just for teaching. [Note-since this was originally published I have sold my PT junk]

Cool stuff
One of the things that immediately impressed me was the frequency of bug fixes and feature additions. At this time it was weekly or every couple weeks. It’s slowed down a little more recently, but is still more frequent than any other DAW I’ve seen.

REAPER is still relatively new and the code has been optimized through every step of development. It’s one of the most efficient pieces of software you’ll ever use. The entire program is only about 10MB to download, compared to the typical bug fix update for Pro Tools taking up more than a gigabyte. The code is fresh and there’s no legacy code to maintain and workaround like most older DAWs.

Pro Tools is known for being a fast workstation for editing, I’ve found REAPER to be just as good and faster in some aspects. Beat Detective, strip silence, elastic audio, comping, tab to transient, audio to MIDI are all there but with different names.

One of the things I always found to slow down my editing in Pro Tools was the way it handled crossfades as separate wav files. When editing multi-track drums you might have 10,000 fade files and that is a huge strain on the hard drive. REAPER and many other DAWs are not like this, a crossfade simply turns down the first file down to silence as another overlapping file is turned up from silence. This is a way more efficient method. Reaper also gives you the option to automatically fade in and out each file to avoid pops and can auto crossfade any time you split an item. This is a huge time saver.

So I started using REAPER as my main DAW just before my big move across the country. When I arrived I had a drum editing job come up and I wanted to see if REAPER could handle it. It worked flawlessly with the Slip Editing method. I can edit drums on my MacBook off the slow internal drive and not have to worry about it slowing down because of fade files.

Something unique to REAPER is that it’s so customizable, with hundreds of preferences and actions. This is great because if you’re transitioning from another DAW, you can usually get things working the same way with the same key commands. If you don’t like a key command you can change it easily or even chain multiple actions together.

One feature I really love is the realtime, non-destructive FX inserts available for any item. This is similar to Audiosuite in Pro Tools but in realtime and you can have multiple effects in the chain. I use this for noise reduction of specific spots or for removing pops from mics. If I want to commit the effects it only takes a few seconds to render.

If you travel a lot and want to use REAPER in other studios, you can install it onto a flash drive or SD card. Just plug it in and run your already customized and personalized REAPER just like you would in your own studio.

More cool stuff
I could go on and on, there are so many great features I couldn’t begin to list them, so I’ll just list a few of my most used features.

Faster than realtime rendering for tracks and mixdowns. Because I work on some long projects, being able to render the final mix super fast is a huge help. Depending on the complexity of the project and how much automation there is I can usually render at 4 to 12x realtime. You can do this for individual tracks to as needed. I do this with AutoTune.

Very intuitive routing – Creating a send can be done in a number of ways, I like to click and drag from the sends section of the mix to the track I want to receive on. Creating a submix is a matter of making a new track above an instrument group, guitars for example and dragging all the guitar tracks onto the new track. The new track becomes a folder with all the routing done automatically.

The FX browser – Instead of a long list of VST plugins, the FX browser has a filter function so you could just type the first few letters of the plugin and it will hide everything else. You can also make your own shortcut lists for favourites. You can double click the effect to add to the selected track or click and drag from the browser to wherever you need the effect.

The Dock – In REAPER 3 there was only 1 dock at the bottom of the main window. You can add any floating window to the dock if you want. In REAPER 4 there is now multiple docks, 1 on each side of the window. When combined with screensets you can very easily switch between different types of workflows without having to manually move windows around. I have 1 screenset with everything except the arrange view hidden, another with the track manager open on the left, another split screen with the mixer on the right, another with the mixer almost fullscreen, just below the time ruler. I switch screensets with the number keys.

Volume trim for every item – This is something I use a ton. If you grab the top edge of an item you can have a volume trim, if you hold shift you can boost the recorded audio. I use this a lot for evening out dynamics in a performance or in dialog.

As I said, there are so many great features, I can’t list them all. If you’d like to try Reaper for yourself you can download the full program at www.reaper.fm Keep in mind, it takes time to learn a new piece of software like a DAW. With REAPER it doesn’t cost you anything to find out if you don’t like it.

What do you love about REAPER?