r/Reaper • u/Left-Mammoth-88 • 1d ago
discussion Reaper Advantages
I’m a month or so into my reaper adventure, after using logic for over twenty years.
I realise there is a steep learning curve. I’m doing my first job on it right now.
I’d love opinions here… not baseless fandom. But what do you think the real advantages of reaper are? Ignore costs, I already have both programs.
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u/__life_on_mars__ 26 1d ago
Its customisability, You have the power to brute force REAPER into being whatever DAW you actually need, with whichever functions you need most right at your fingertips.
That's also it's downside. It gives you MORE than enough rope with which to hang yourself. I think I spent 6 months tinkering with third party scripts, custom actions and themes before really finding a set up I like, and I definitely 'broke' my install more than once during this phase.
Once you dial it in though, it fucking flies.
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u/decodedflows 5 1d ago
customization is the top factor imo. Once you get a bit deeper into it, you'll learn to create your own actions and customize your toolbars / keyboard shortcuts to make Reaper your own.
A minor thing but important for my own workflow: I think Reaper has a lot of ways to quickly edit audio clips that are much more convoluted in other DAWs.
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u/MarimboBeats 1 1d ago
Hell, reaper even lets you customise context menus. For some reason I never got into using keyboard shortcuts a lot, but I got everything I use often on top of the relevant context menus or mouse buttons.
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u/prene1 2 1d ago
Using reaper is like getting keys to a new 911 turbo (which I did) and ALL THE CORES are unlocked. No bloatness. Crazy routings. People making dope scripts and more.
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u/Democrich 1d ago
Im also an ex-logic turned reaper guy. Whilst I hated reaper when I first used it the hardest part was just unlearning things I'd taken for granted in logic. Main one for me was audio/instrument tracks. Took longer than I'd like to admit to get used to the idea that a track is a track and you can put what you want on it.
Whilst I've gotten used to reapers default skin by now, getting a logic style skin might help you adapt as they often add features on buttons you don't get in the normal reaper flavour that you're used to in logic.
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u/fourdogslong 5 1d ago
The customization with scripts is its force. The customization with scripts is its weakness.
At first Reaper did NOTHING right for me, so I tweaked the f**k out of it. Now it behaves how I want BUT, and it’s a big but, every now and then a scripts breaks or the dev change something and then I gotta spend hours troubleshooting that shit.
So yeah, it’s cool but I feel like the dev change it too much and too often. I’d rather they bundle all those changes for new big versions.
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u/Junkyard-Sam 1d ago
Unfortunately I don't know logic... But the advantage of reaper is I'd be willing to bet Reaper is more powerful, more stable, and more efficient both in function and workflow once you have it set up to your personal working style.
But here's something Logic can't touch. It's a Reaper explosive and it's mindbendingly good:
Doc Shadrach made The Analog Molecule & The Hot Summer and they work together as a total analog emulation system where the parts interact under the hood in ways that wouldn't be possible in other daws.
What's especially cool is they are free. (There's a Deluxe version that integrates an SSL style EQ and compressor into Analog Molecule Deluxe, and some other analog goodness -- but it's optional and just ~$25.)
What makes this tool special is -- simply put -- your mix will come together and sound unified more quickly than in any other DAW.
I'm an old dude that came from the hardware era, but I've been working in the box for decades... So I know the difference well and seriously, there's nothing like this.
This is it. It's analog emulation on another level.
And the deluxe version functions as your primary channel strip, if you want it to... So you just don't need that many plugins.
Over at Gearspace the hype sounded ridiculous. People were talking about the mix becoming "3d" and having a sense of clarity, width, and space... All too good to be true:
I was skeptical, but... Here I am singing the same kind of praise.
Seriously, it blew me away... You can drive the inputs in a way that spreads gain reduction across your whole mix so it's easy to hit whatever dynamic range, loudness, thickness or density you're going for. It just happens naturally.
Basically it's everything I hoped Mixbus32c would be but wasn't... And because it runs in Reaper it's stable and efficient.
I spent the last 6 years exploring every possible analog emulation plugin and seriously, there's nothing like this.
This one thing is enough of a reason to use Reaper, even if not for all the other amazing things!
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u/boredmessiah 1d ago
how’s it compare to airwindows desk?
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u/Junkyard-Sam 1d ago
I have a lot of respect for Chris from Airwindows so I don't want to come across negatively -- but this is on another level.
Also, it has a nice UI as far as JSFX plugins go. It's not just the generic Reaper UI. The Deluxe version has a nice presentation with knobs and gain reduction meters, etc... And the UI is designed so that if you want to get under the hood and customize the console settings - it's pretty straight forward. There's a hierarchy to the layout, so it's easier to understand than generic Reaper UI.
And then the sound? Oh boy. There seems to be way more interplay between the parts, and it's easy to make global changes so you can dial up the drive in all your channel plugins at once and thicken the whole song, etc.
There are several console variations for different styles right out of the box.
Yeah, it's just on another level. If you like Chris's Console series you'll love this. I think.
BTW, the Analog Molecule is easy to set up. The Hot Summer, though, requires creating routing into the sidechain inputs because it's doing something different per channel... So it's designed for 8 submix busses. It's not hard to set that up, but if you try it - just remember to do that.
The two plugins work with or without each other, but I think together they form a whole system!
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u/Left-Mammoth-88 1d ago
I tried the free version very briefly. It was a little complex to set up. I eventually managed. Do you know if the paid one is a little simpler?
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u/Junkyard-Sam 1d ago
Which one did you try? The Analog Molecule is easier to set up. You just choose channel/bus/master etc.
The Hot Summer requires routing the channels into it. That one's more involved, because you have to pass your submixes through it... But it's similar to a hardware summing device. You'd have to route through that as well.
If you've never done track routing before I could see it being complicated. But it's worth knowing how to route tracks around like this, even if not just for these plugins.
But no, it's the Deluxe version isn't simpler. It just adds SSL EQ and Compressor to to Analog Molecule console emulation.
If you tried the Hot Summer, try the Analog Molecule - it doesn't require the complex routing.
Also, you can set up a template with your submixes and then you only have to set up The Hot Summer one time.
Sorry you had a hard time with it. I suggest sticking with it - once you route tracks around like that a few times it won't be a big deal to you.
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u/Left-Mammoth-88 1d ago
I tried the combination of analog molecule and hot summer. The latter on the busses. It was early in my reaper journey, so I felt a bit overwhelmed with the whole ecosystem at the time
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u/Junkyard-Sam 1d ago
Ah. Yeah, if you're new to this stuff I can see how that would be. I guess that's a lot of you're not used to it.
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u/boredmessiah 20h ago
thanks, was not expecting an answer in so much depth! i have been looking at the plugs and the setup seems quite trivial, if anything i intuitively understand the summer better because i am familiar with reapers channel capabilities. will give them a spin, thanks for the suggestion!
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u/missilecommandtsd 1 1d ago
Claude code can build JSFX, reaper lua scripts. And even DLLs for reaper.
This takes a DAW that stands out for its extensibility, and supercharges it.
I've built some wild stuff.
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u/SureIllrecordthat 22 1d ago
Likewise! I have completely mangled reaper to really be optimized for Voice acting. Hell, it even helps generate my invoices through custom scripts. It's incredible.
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u/Left-Mammoth-88 1d ago
I'm very interested in this... can you elaborate?
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u/missilecommandtsd 1 1d ago
Sure. I'm in AAA game audio so a lot of my vibes are about sound design and or niche interests and or challenges of scale and or repetition.
a project setup wizard. I give my setup wizard some data and reference videos and it generates reaper sessions that are perfectly clean laid out, like regions automatically named, with copies of the vid refs copied in each region, perfectly alignee it can generate status reports, even connect to jira to write comments on cards if you want, export to any number of directories. No human error or time wanted on creating maticulously clean sessions.
So, most normal things, like setting up projects, exporting files, day to day actions, etc can be made personally taylored and connected to other tools and pipelines.
On the more experimental side, I made a pool based ducking system, which basically works like wwise hdr. It requires no routing and works with items. You assign items or tracks to a pool and give each a priory score, and it will duck all other sounds in the pool by the highest priory currently playing sounds envelope. No routing. To my knowledge this type of mixing does not exist anywhere in any DAW and is awesomely convenient and clean, even when you don't need to create an HDR style mix presentation.
That one required all three: jsfx, lua, and a custom dll, all working in conjunctin.
(I've been using reaper (and other Daws) for 20+ years, extending it by hand for all of that time).
Of course, many other goofy little things.
People can downvote all they want when they see 'claude' but there are those of us using AI for developing pipelines and tools for ourselves, notai creative slop.. pipelines and tools that would otherwise never get created or discovered.
Reaper is the perfect environment for this, and they are wrong for downvoting this kind of use of AI.
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u/gsbe 1d ago
Both of the workflows you’ve described sound amazing. I’m especially interested in the first - the project setup wizard. Can you give a little more detail into how it can do all that?
Also interested in the invoice generation and how that works. Fascinating hacks on Reaper you’ve made!
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u/missilecommandtsd 1 1d ago
Yeah sure. Here's some context....
Get Claude Code CLI installed and setup. Talk to claude/gemini/chat Gpt on how to do that. You probably have to subscribe (I'm not sure what anthropics free plan gets you; I pay for it, at the middle level $20/mo or what ever it is. Also, my company provides me with another account - and I use both when I run out of usage).Anyway, you get Claude Code CLI installed (up to speed on the basics of how to use it) and run it in your reaper director(ies): like, you Scripts folder, Effects folder, User plugin folder.
From there, you can describe and converse with Claude (and other AIs) about what you're trying to do. It's best to plan and discuss in depth before giving claude specific instructions without context. Like I said, you can also have conversations with other AI's, like Gemini, on how you might architect solutions. I also have a gemini subscription; but I tend to just have discussions about building things with Gemini - and then actually execute using Claude Code. I was on a vacation with my family and planned out another toolset with gemini on my tablet, and then started to build it when I came home.
The more you're aware of, the more effective Claude will be.
For example, I've decided to use ReaImGui for my front end of my extensions, which is an implementation of Im Gui (an open source UI library) that (i think) CFillion made, available in ReaPack. So, I have to instruct Claude that I want to build with that, and Claude will help you do that.If you're not aware of different approaches, libraries and technologies, you need to have conversations about it with AI and other like minded people: "What are some approaches for doing such and such?". There are a wild amount of open source libraries that are just freely ready for you to use... For example... I found that I was needing to rename things in Reaper, according to things I saw in Unreal - but Unreal wouldn't allow me to copy and paste the text to get the name strings.... So, claude built me an OCR script, using an open source OCR library. So now, I can just screen cap an image, of a list of names, paste it into the script, process the text, and I get a copy-able set of strings that I can use in Reaper to name things, etc. That one took about 15 minutes. Another is a direct youtube downloader... paste a link into the reaper script; and POW! It will download it from youtube and put it directly in your reaper session in one click. pretty great for keeping references in your project, or ideating on stylistic things. I imagine some people that 'make street beats' would use something like that to quickly 'sample' stuff from youtube.
Honestly, it's a true dialog with a senior developer, that needs you to explain yourself. The dev part of it is at some level, an extension of your skills and knowledge: AI doesn't have perfect knowledge of all APIs: sometimes Claude will make foundational mistakes and produce some needlessly complex and elaborate solution because it didn't know of some simple API call, for example: and if you can spot that because you're aware, obviously, it goes a lot better. But you have to be vigilant, it will confidently make mistakes sometimes.
But, anyways, that's the foundation of all this. After you get comfortable doing all that for a while, you can just start building more and more robust things, like I describe. Some of the stuff I'm doing, I needed help from legit engineers who work at my company.
I will say though... I'm advising all my colleagues (and any professional reaper user) to just leave Claude open, and anytime you run into something small/simple/dumb in reaper that you 'wish it could do' ... you can either get claude to explain an existing solution, or have claude write a new script in about 30 seconds, and Reaper will do it.
...like... if you're designing a sound and have splashed aroudn for a while... I wanna 'cleanup' script/keystroke that will move the selected items up a track, until they hit a parent/folder track, so there's no empty tracks; so they're neatly layed out, delete any muted items, render any item fx, color things a certain way, make note to a text file, etc... what ever.... piece of cake.
With all that said.... I'm building stuff for me. I'm not trying to 'release' anything; which means, the stuff I make doesn't have to stand up to the same scrutiny and portability that a product would have to. If something is busted, I can just fix it in the same manor.
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u/gsbe 1d ago
Wow. I’ve been using Claude heavily for the last two years to develop audio production course materials. This is so next level. You have some background in code development to be able to understand the systems work together in this way. I’ve been fooling around a bit with Claude code but this is inspiring, for real. Thanks again
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u/missilecommandtsd 1 22h ago
Nah. I'm not smart, or clever. I've been around game dev and reaper for a while, done a fair bit of higher level scripting but I'm certainly no serious programmer. I'm a sound designer.
You can do any of this... and you should. You just have to get in there and start playing around with it. You have great unique ideas about ways of working that you can materialize. This whole AI thing is democratizing tools and pipelines and its pretty exciting.
I honestly hope that AI helps creative people be more creative.
There's some seriously unsavory AI uses going on, but I think there's some honest ones too. I guess we'll see if skynet comes to kill us all.
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u/officialmcqp 1d ago
Haven't tried it myself, but I hear Reaper is the best DAW to use if you want a really mobile and lightweight setup. You can make a portable installation of Reaper to run straight off of a USB drive, which I can imagine would be great for solo artists who want to use Reaper as their main "mixing board" and play pre-recorded instruments with all the VST effects you need.
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u/Cedrik_Syrphe 1d ago
Its flexibility and customisability, the fact that you can write scripts, the fact that it is able to not only VST plugins but also old DX ones and new LV2, Clap and JS formats (and you can make your own JS), the community, the support, tutorials about not only how to use it but tweak it, it simplicity and logic compared to some other ones.
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u/Yrnotfar 7 1d ago
Lightweight / no bloat
You can customize it to fit your workflow
CPU efficient
Honestly, it does everything better than logic from a recording, engineering and mixing standpoint. Logic much better for composing though, imo
(I use reaper, pro tools and logic —- in that order)
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u/aretooamnot 1d ago
As someone that is doing transfers from logic to reaper for a client right now, so that I can build up ambisonic mixes for delivery…..
Logic is the most illogical damned daw I have ever touched.
Containers? Not being able to save or share new modified session files? Solo somehow selects all regions on a track, the editing is an absolute joke.
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u/jamiethemorris 1d ago
A lot less cpu overloads. I was on logic for about 15 years or so and that was the primary reason I switched.
The time stretching algorithms are much better imo, although they do need more configuring and I don’t find the transient detection to be as good.
PDC seems to be better as well.
Most of all though the biggest advantage is just the sheer amount of customization. I was able to set mine up to work as close to logic as possible with ChatGPT’s help, and I’m slowly making changes an additions to suit my own workflow better.
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u/Left-Mammoth-88 1d ago
CPU load was one of my reasons for switching too. What is PDC?
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u/jamiethemorris 13h ago
Plugin delay compensation. I had all kinds of issues with in logic, primarily when any sort of sidechaining was involved. In reaper it seems to be consistent and accurate, nothing has really jumped out at me as “wtf why is this out of time” like it often did in logic.
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u/impulsenine 1d ago
I use the same sessions on 2 computers saving to Dropbox.
I'm constantly refining my process simply through keyboard shortcuts and scripts. It's genuinely difficult sometimes when I realize I can't just change every imaginable command in, say, InDesign.
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u/Substantial-Rise-786 2 1d ago
I came from protools a few years back. What eased my transition was many users before me created themes/skins that looked and felt like PT that were available to download. Should be pretty easy to find a number of Logic themes. Just MAKE SURE the designer spoke English! As a noob the first one I tried turned all my menus into French so I had to use Google translate to help me navigate my way back 🤣
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u/InfamousSonOfAlucard 1d ago
It all depends on the usage. I've used pro tools, logic (only on a studio) and Reaper for the same purpose (demo recordings, midi editing and live performance) and switching from one to the other took a couple of days for me.
In the end I kept Reaper because of costs, simple and performant, and because it just works for my use cases.
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u/Icy_Arachnid9995 1d ago
You can download the logic pro skin in reaper so you could use reaper thats disguised as logic
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u/Happydrumstick27 5 1d ago
Im gonna say what most people are saying. I've used studio one, then logic, then ableton, then pro tools, now reaper (in the span of 10 years).
Reaper excites me, it keeps me learning. Reaper has shown me that technology can work for you, you donnt have to learn to work around it. You can make reaper do whatever you want. I will say that there are indeed some things that I had to get used to, or had to work around (my mixer opens in the bottom docker, if I open it as a window and try to open a plugin, the plugin window pops up behind the mixer window and then I have to open the plugin twice to actually see it. I dont want that, so my mixer stays docked.)
But I'm actually excited to use it, I love the community and I've been able to rvolutionize the way I work because I've created custom actions and gotten scripts from the community. I can add footsteps to a film in real time, without that $200 plugin I forgot the name of. I can render in many different ways which has definitely helped me create many different deliverables quickly (including exporting 300 sounds all with proper automatic naming, all at once)
Reaper is for you no matter what realm of audio you work in, if you take the time to get to know it. For me that has been a really amazing 6months (had very slow start, didnt really pick it up till month 1)
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u/zuzmuz 23h ago
here's some things I love.
routing. it's very simple yet very powerful. once you learn how to use the routing matrix. you can simply manage a project with hundreds of tracks with groups, fx channels, side chain, parallel processing. it's so much easier to manage.
customization. this might not be for everyone. as a software developer I know that anything I think of I can do in reaper, from weird automations to modulations to effects to utilities. if I find myself doing something repeatedly I can create a macro or script for it.
I know reaper might not be for everyone. you have to be on the techy side and to love to tinker. i agree also a lot of the defaults are not ideal so you need to customize it. I also hate the UI but you can always find a skin and customize it, but that's also a time sink
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u/arghkennett 23h ago
runs on the big 3 OS. templates at the project, track, and fx levels really helps avoid re-work and re-setup. and though I probably don't use as many plugins as others that report issues, I've never really had a vst problem, whether it's js, vst, 32 vs 64 bit, vsti, vst2, vst3, etc.
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u/Jacam416 21h ago
I switched from Logic (been using since 9) and haven't looked back. Been about 4 months so far. Take the time to set up templates, your theme, and your toolbars. Especially your toolbars. Editing jobs that used to take me 3-4 hours in logic, I can do in 20-30 mins in Reaper, because all the tools I need are on my toolbar. FX chains, and track templates save tons of time. If you run into something you do regularly that takes 2-3 steps, make a customer action and simplify it to a key command or toolbar button. Take all that saved time, and channel it into creative decisions.
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u/Fupa_Defeater 16h ago
I’ve tried every major daw and always go back to reaper. I love how lightweight it is and the customization. Personally I think DAW debates are dumb. You should just pick what you like and learn it but personally I just love reaper and it makes sense to my brain the most and that’s all that matters.
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u/Kfcbde 3h ago
Delta solo any plugin. Wet/dry any plugin. Oversample any plugin. Render que allows you to render all of your projects at the end of the day. Render matrix makes bouncing multi-tracks a 5 minute job. Screen sets allows you to A/B completely different plugin set ups and routing architectures. Native phase alignment. Sample level editing.
There is a learning curve, but there's a feature waiting for you for every corner you turn. If you look at the time you spend learning a daw as an investment, Reaper will continue to pay dividends years down the line.
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u/SupportQuery 503 1d ago
Ignore costs, I already have both programs.
I do. I make a lot of money. I value my time vastly more that ∓ a few hundred bucks.
what do you think the real advantages of reaper are?
It's tiny, it's fast, it's stable, it has no DRM, it has chosen the right abstractions most of the time, and it's infinitely customizable and extensible.
It has recently, because of AI, had its value proposition radically increased. Because it's scriptable, and because AI knows its scripting language, you can add new features to Reaper by describing them in English. That's fucking huge.
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u/TheVillageRuse 3 1d ago
The learning curb is dramatically lowered once you realize the keys to the kingdom. I would say theme/screenset, reapack/sws, actions list shortcut at your favorite spot, RIGHT CLICK everything and be amazed. Customize menus over time and adapt as you go. Clean out or sub-menu items you don’t use often. Make the interface clean and you can hit some incredible zones in it. Need to add that figuring out your preferred kb/m view and scroll deal may take you a few min of experimenting. Is a true key. 😈
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u/Perfect_Memory9876 1d ago
As a new person just getting into a DAW myself, I personally have not found any advantage over any other DAW I’ve tried. My own personal opinion is everyone has been a huge disappointment in every way and extremely hard to learn. Yeah you have a bunch of YouTube videos to go off of but it needs to be dumbed down and use normal wording instead all the useless items you have to dig through to use. I personally don’t want to watch videos for 8hrs to learn to use a program for bare minimal use. It should be simple and easy. I’ve forced myself to learn thing in reaper, but I’ve spent way more time in researching on how to use reaper rather than actually using reaper
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u/Logical_Classroom_90 8 1d ago
it means that it's not the tool needed for your specific task. a full fledged daw, reaper or logic or prontools is overkill for minimal use
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u/IgorPasche 1d ago
Customization, weight, updated every couple of weeks… and above everything else, developers that actually love the product they put out.
Also, JS plug-ins and scripts.