pipelineaudio said:
OK, I am a MAJOR REAPER enthusiast, but I will say, though reaper midi gets better roughly every nine hours or so, there are still a LOT of MIDI things in cubase where cubase SMOKES reaper...no contest
I give this lead another month or two at most with the speed of development being what it is, but as of this moment, I believe MIDI sequencists will be happier in cubase than reaper...
If your needs are mostly audio though its a no brainer. We can get you editing audio faster in reaper in less than an hour than what you can do in cubase. The users will be glad to help you out, either in forums, or in realtime chat. This is an open invitation BTW
If your needs are 50/50 audio and midi, its a tougher call
Still, if you are on cable, from the time you hit download, till the time you are fully up and running in reaper will be less than 30 seconds ( NO Im NOT kidding) the app is small enough to fit on a floppy
On my last project, I did all of 0% using MIDI - all audio. Basically, laid out the drum parts using loops from Drums On Demand, then I played the acoustic and electric guitar parts and vocals over that, then I had a friend come in and lay bass down.
(Shameless Plug Time)
Here are some songs from my last album - done in Cubase - no need to listen really, but gives you an indication of the style/type of music I do:
Something Better
Isn't She Wonderful
I'd like to use MIDI a bit in the future, just because I know there are some really cool things you can do with it, but my focus is definately primarily audio.
Some of the things I really like about Cubase (just a few):
Tempo and metronome settings. I know these are standard in most DAW apps, but Cubase laid them out really easily.
The way it handles "looped" recording - setting up a loop for say a vocal line and being able to record it over and over again in one session. OIt's pretty easy and intuitive in Cubase, but reading the manual on the Reaper site, I found out how to do it within a minute of opening the page.
Being able to save a channel and a mixer setup. I'm going to start recording live church services for my church, and I plan on saving a mixer setup in cubase so I can just plug in and start recording. I read in the manual how to save effects channels and channel settings, but not entire mixer setups - can I do this?
Pre-send effects via effects channels in Cubase (I'm assuming this is possible in Reaper). Maybe I'm not calling this the right thing - basically the ability to hear the effect, but not the actual audio that the effect is "effecting" - like hearing the reverb from a drum track but lowering the volume of the drums w/out the volume of the reverb being affected.
I really like all the capabilities of Cubase, but on the other hand, there is tons of stuff there that I don't use. Its nice to know that I have those capabilities, but I think an app can be crippling to the creative process if there is more there than will ever be needed - I think people spend way too much time fiddling around with crap they don't really need instead of making cool music. It seems like Reaper might have just the right feature set (and then some) for what I do and would like to do.
Anyway, once my macbook pro shows up I'll boot windows and try Reaper out - sounds like it might be just right for me. Thanks for your input - very helpful.
