Reaper Reaper REAPER!!!

The Cancers

The Cancers

New member
So, after years of playing around with recording, and about a year of actually taking it seriously, I'm finally getting other people into the home studio to do some demo recording.
And destroying any future business I might make for myself by selling them all on Reaper.
Them: "Hey, so can you do this..."
Me: "Yeah, man, simple as pie. Just go here, do this, click that, massage and your done."
Them: "Awesome, that is simple as pie."
Me: "Yeah, it's a great program, and free to try, and really powerful."
Them: "I dunno, I tried Cubase (Sonar, Logic, etc...) for free and it didn't seem that great. Plus, I couldn't do this that or the other without my computer fudging up."
Me: "Man, you were trying crippled versions. Seriously, download Reaper, read the manual, read up on some websites, nothing I'm doing is very complicated, and I can do it all on a two year old Vista laptop that's I also use to play video games and surf the interwebs. Now let's go get some pie."

And then a week later they call to say I was right and that they're gonna try mixing themselves. Brings a smile to my face. Why isn't everyone using this program?:D
 
The Cancers said:
Why isn't everyone using this program?:D
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I'm not using Reaper because it lacks Groove Quantize, but that's just me. I seriously considered choosing that as my DAW when I started getting back into music, and it just isn't completely there yet. It's a very good, Cubase-like DAW, though, and it's definitely worth a look for anyone just getting into music. Fully-functioning demo? 1/8 the price of full-featured Live or Cubase? You simply can't go wrong with that.

They also have a very good community from what I can make out.
 
curious?

i have tried protools le. m-audio protools,and cubase. i gave up on all 3. i guess i'm just not computer savy enough. i've settled on Alesis HD24 and an analog mixer. much more user friendly! so what is so different and special about reaper? do they have a dummies version or senior citizen version?
 
UltimateOutside said:
I'm not using Reaper because it lacks Groove Quantize, but that's just me.
Click to expand...

Um, check me if I'm wrong, but Groove Quantitize is the plugin that takes a groove, figures out where the downbeats are, and stretches/squashes it to make an out of time performance in time, right?

Because, if that's the case, I use Reaper because I practice before I record. :confused:
 
Not only that, but I'm pretty sure I've seen a feature very like that in one or another of the extensions.
As far as what's so great about Reaper, I gotta say a solid 80% of it is the pricepoint. I'm pretty sure that all the big boy DAWs can be made to perform all the tricks at this point, it's just a matter of knowing the program and what you want it to do.
I've just never been a big fan of paying for a product plus convenience.
Which is what it feels like to me if I'm gonna shell out 2 grand for a mac and 300 bucks for logic.
Once it's all hooked up and installed, I can get recording and go for significantly longer without having to refer to the manual. Convenient.
I dunno, everybody's got their own approach, their own workflow, but I'm gonna end up reading the manual regardless of which product I go with, and clicking my mouse in a $600 DAW is not any easier than clicking my mouse in a $60 one.
Once you know the program, you know the program, and workflow works itself out.
Plus, the Reaper forum community is amazing. With all the extensions, it's almost got a Linux, open source vibe going on, without any of the hassle of having to actually understand source code (anybody tried Ardour? Ugh).
No amount of money is gonna buy a DAW that writes, records and mixes your songs for you, so why not go with the cheapest one that does everything you need?
All that being said, if Reaper doesn't have a groove quantize feature (I don't need it, so I really don't know for sure and don't want to go looking for it), and you need it to make music, well then, there you go. Good answer.
 
You know, sometimes simple is the best. I use Sonar producer 8 and have a lot of hardware, plugins, blah, blah, blah. It's a case of GAS and at this stage in life I can afford the toys I longed for when I could actually have used them.

I like Sonar alot, and I spend hours tweaking and adding and mixing and tweaking some more, blah, blah, blah. Of course to run all this crap, I made myself a smokin computer that I'm always overclocking, and loading drivers and tweaking, and blah, blah, blah!

To make a long story short, I found a CD of some recordings I did when I first decided to try using a computer for recording (that was about 10 years ago.) I bought a copy of Sony Acid Studio for $29.95 at Staples. Took it home, plugged my guitar into the onboard soundcard in the back of my old Pentium 75, plugged an old Shure 57 into the mic jack and spent 2 hours recording.

I listened to that CD today and you know, it ain't that much different than what I record today, except now I use about $10K worth of stuff to do it!

Any one tells my wife, and I will have to kill you :)
 
Washburn100 said:
To make a long story short, I found a CD of some recordings I did when I first decided to try using a computer for recording (that was about 10 years ago.) I bought a copy of Sony Acid Studio for $29.95 at Staples. Took it home, plugged my guitar into the onboard soundcard in the back of my old Pentium 75, plugged an old Shure 57 into the mic jack and spent 2 hours recording.

I listened to that CD today and you know, it ain't that much different than what I record today, except now I use about $10K worth of stuff to do it!

Any one tells my wife, and I will have to kill you :)
Click to expand...

:p I started with Acid 2.0 too, plugged into the mic input on my laptop's soundcard. Your soundcard must've been quite a bit better than mine, because mine absolutely RAPED the signal coming into it. I grabbed a M-Audio 4x10 and then eventually a Firepod over the last couple years, and the increase in sound quality was massive.

Still, I learned a ton about how to make a recording not COMPLETELY suck, on that setup. :p
 
I started with a $40 consumer version of cakewalk I got at CompUSA 10 years ago. Computer mic plugged straight into the soundcard, inside the soundhole on my crappy, crappy acoustic guitar. Still haven't been able to get acoustic sounds anywhere near that awesome since.:D
 
DrewPeterson7 said:
Um, check me if I'm wrong, but Groove Quantitize is the plugin that takes a groove, figures out where the downbeats are, and stretches/squashes it to make an out of time performance in time, right?

Because, if that's the case, I use Reaper because I practice before I record. :confused:
Click to expand...
I'm happy for you, Liberace, but groove quantize is more to experiment with different moods/rhythms of a pre-existing track, not to fix mistakes in your performance (just regular old quantize will do that just fine). There are plenty of other features that Reaper lacks which the full versions of Cubase or Live both have- but its feature set will grow with time, and it's perfectly adequate for most uses. I like Reaper a lot, and definitely recommend people check it out.
 
And then they try to mix it themselves and realize that it actually takes practice and decent ears to get good results, thus disenchanting them further with the recording process and sending them right back to you. It's win/win.
 
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