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Reaper - Worth switching to?


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I've heard a lot of good things about Reaper lately, with some endorsements being pretty significant: zircon has been checking it out (given zircon's FL Studio skills, this seems significant), and sixto said in his guitar thread that if he hadn't already paid for Cubase SX, he'd get Reaper.

I currently have the academic version of Cubase 4, and while I'm generally happy with it, I'm considering selling it and switching to Reaper just because I'll end up with some extra money that way that I could put towards something like an audio interface with more inputs.

I've played around a bit with Reaper, and will of course do more of that, but I'd like to hear people's opinions. What features, other than cost, make Reaper a good or better choice than other DAWs today?

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In my opinion, I would go with FL Studio, or another DAW. I tryed Reaper, and couldn't get adjusted. even after getting a theme for it, It just seemed confusing, unlike FL where it was more well rounded and I felt it was a better interface to me.

Don't get me wrong. It is deffinately a powerfull DAW. Try it out. I have heard lots of good things about it as well. zircon actually suggested it to me as well, I just prefered FL's interface alot more.

If you like it, and can work well it in, use it. Alot of people use it and love it. plus its cheap :P

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I've heard a lot of good things about Reaper lately, with some endorsements being pretty significant: zircon has been checking it out (given zircon's FL Studio skills, this seems significant), and sixto said in his guitar thread that if he hadn't already paid for Cubase SX, he'd get Reaper.

I currently have the academic version of Cubase 4, and while I'm generally happy with it, I'm considering selling it and switching to Reaper just because I'll end up with some extra money that way that I could put towards something like an audio interface with more inputs.

I've played around a bit with Reaper, and will of course do more of that, but I'd like to hear people's opinions. What features, other than cost, make Reaper a good or better choice than other DAWs today?

REAPER continues to surprise me. It's really, really customizable and has extremely efficient operation (low memory, low CPU, great multithreading, fairly stable). Those are the primary benefits. Plus, it is very regularly updated and a 64bit version is in beta testing now. However, I would base a recommendation on whether you want to switch on what you want to get out of your sequencer.

The main issue I have with REAPER is the piano roll. I just don't like it. I don't particularly like any other piano roll besides FL's either, but REAPER's just seems weak compared to most. The devs acknowledge this and I'm hoping by REAPER 3 they will really boost the MIDI capabilities. However, it's still workable. "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" on Jill's album was done entirely in REAPER... it's still easy enough to record, quantize, and so on.

I'd say if you're mainly working with recordings, switch to REAPER immediately. It's amazing for audio editing. If you're mainly a MIDI guy, spend some time with it first and see if it fits your workflow.

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I'm mainly a MIDI guy. My workflow is to play in all the parts live instead of pointing and clicking and to do necessary MIDI editing, so I'm not as tied to the piano roll as some might be. Although depending on the instrumentation, I will have some audio as well when I record sound from my keyboards before mixing.

Performance is a big plus: my laptop isn't bad but isn't top-of-the-line and upgrading it will be a non-option for many years. The two things I've disliked about Cubase are that it's felt a bit bloated and could perform better and that I had issues reloading projects if a project contained a plugin that had to load a lot of samples - loading a Kontakt multi, for example, could cause Cubase to crash when loading with no apparent workaround. I've lost a couple projects that way, and the workaround for new projects (save the multi with the project and explicitly load it every time), seems silly.

Other than that, I'm not really pushing limits with what I do in a DAW, at least, not yet. Definitely need to play more with it though.

Any other thoughts?

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I don't particularly like any other piano roll besides FL's either,

+1

FL's piano roll is pretty much the best reason to choose FL over another DAW. It's just so..damn...awesome...

Although, I wish Image-line would jump on the bandwagon and add a score editor/sync'd video playback. Then it'd be a real competitor in the market of "pro's," IMO.

So if you're primarily a midi guy, like you said, I'd say FL all the way. Just keep in mind you'll use it as a sequencer for all the vst toys you'll get since most of the synths it comes with are NOT at, say, Reason's level...to put it least offensively.

(I also have kontakt and experienced none of the crashing problems with multis you mentioned with cubase. Just FYI)

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IN MY OPINION, Reaper would be a fine choice as it shares a common interface with a few other things. FL Studio is just... a mess. It's capable enough but there's a lot of things it'll do for you that you don't want it to do, and vice versa. Try it out of course, I mean I used it for 5 or 6 years and it's not THAT bad, it's just that I switched to Renoise which is so much better :P

i am a tracker elitist fyi, you won't see a lot of that here since everyone uses FL or Reason.

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Myself, I've been using Cubase since I first started with music production at school some years ago. I've tried both Reaper and Sonar afterwards, because they've been more economical options, but I haven't really managed to get into the workflow of either. Also, isn't Reaper restricted to only 32-bit or only 64-bit plugins?

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To everyone saying "go with what you like": that's a given. I've liked the little bit of Reaper that I've done so far; I like Cubase. (Incidentally, I don't like FL Studio's workflow). Choosing between Reaper and Cubase wouldn't be "I'm choosing the one that's so much better in every way", and obviously, if I didn't like the workflow in one, I wouldn't choose it. I'm looking more for things that Reaper does that other software doesn't do as well or doesn't do at all.

I wouldn't SWITCH to Reaper just yet.(unless you're using FLstudio:D ) Wait a year until Reaper gets reliable and usable enough to be somewhat of a replacement for a major DAW.

The only motivation to do so now would be that Cubase 5 has already been announced (and may be in stores already, I don't know), so the longer I wait, the less I could realistically get for selling Cubase 4.

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I like using a combo of REAPER and Reason, via ReWire. Well ..... not that I've done much, yet. And I don't really have experience with other DAWs, so I can't say anything, except that Reaper is great w/ audio, decent w/ MIDI (good enough for me), and the community is very helpful and active.

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To everyone saying "go with what you like": that's a given. I've liked the little bit of Reaper that I've done so far; I like Cubase. (Incidentally, I don't like FL Studio's workflow). Choosing between Reaper and Cubase wouldn't be "I'm choosing the one that's so much better in every way", and obviously, if I didn't like the workflow in one, I wouldn't choose it. I'm looking more for things that Reaper does that other software doesn't do as well or doesn't do at all.

The only motivation to do so now would be that Cubase 5 has already been announced (and may be in stores already, I don't know), so the longer I wait, the less I could realistically get for selling Cubase 4.

I've been using Cubase 4 for about a year now, and I'm completely happy with it, I'm upgrading to Cubase 5 this month, if it does half of what it claims it can do, then I don't foresee myself needing another DAW for at least 5 years.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Choosing the correct DAW is kind of a personnal quest... no,no, I mean it!

I've been using Cakewalk (& more recently Sonar) for at least 8 years now.

The last time a friend of mine let me try his Cubase, I choked and almost litteraly puked on his MPC 5000! :dstrbd:

That doesn't mean Cubase is a bad program, far from it, that just means it's not for me. (at least for now)

Choosing the right piece of software is a part of the whole process of becoming a proficient sound designer.

It's more like you're building your "workstation" (should I say), and your style builds itself (or grows) along with it.

Your creativity shouldn't be limited by a piece of hardware/software, but instead expanded by it.

The subject here was :"Is Reaper worth switching to?". I can't really respond to that, having used it for a measly 15 minutes.

But what I can affirm, is that whatever sequencer you choose, you are gonna have to make some concession.

Whether it's midi sequencing or wave edit, or even handling VST.

In fine, what's important for you is to define your priorities in terms of how do you approach the whole process of making music.

What do you do first? What do you do most often? What is dispensable as of now? What couldn't you live without? When do we take lunch-break in this place?

And so on...;-)

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