Reaper

The days when music studios used huge tape machines are long gone and today the PC is the most used tool when it comes to multimedia. The PC plays a major role in home entertainment as well, and especially when it comes to music, the computer leads by far so it's high time even the amateur musician learned which does what when recording.

Be it simple acoustical music or loop-based techno, country-rock or death metal, the core-technology remains the same: you need a PC and proper software ?and yeah, instruments and knowledge on how to play or to produce recordable stuff, generally speaking. If in what concerns computers, almost anyone could tell you what to buy and eventually it's just a matter of reaching a PC dealer which will further assist you in your ?acquisition?, well, in the software-related issue, things are a whole lot different.

There is so much music software already produced in the world and there is so much more to come. Professional applications are very effective in doing the work but they aren't all the time wallet-friendly. Besides all this, there is one more thing which is - in fact - the most important: knowing what software one has to buy for meeting the specific needs. Well, Reaper is a great software for those who are rather new in the field of music recording and production: first of all, it has looks and features that very much resemble the highly-professional applications one meets in the world?s biggest studios. It also comes at a bargain price and, last but not least, it's already bundled with lots of effects, making it recording-ready right from the moment you start it.

The Looks

As I have just said, Reaper ?looks and feels? much like the major audio production software (Audition, Cubase, Sonar and so on). There are three main areas that are defined and have specific functions in the main window: in the leftmost zone, you have the channel-array, the zone which allows you to delete or add channels, rename and arm them, set the real time, and establish pre- and post- effects.

The largest area in the main window is dedicated to visual tracks, as I hope you have already guessed. Here you have either a sine-type or a loop-type visual on the recorded chunks; moreover, it is here where you can directly edit envelopes of specific regions.

At the bottom, for the whole width of your screen, you have a very handy fader-operated mixer. Not only do you have direct access to each channel?s volume and panning, mute and solo switches, but there are lots of other features adjacent to the channel's basic commands. A very readable LED-type VU-meter for each channel as well as for the master fader, recording arm-button and monitor-triggering, FX console direct access and I/O routing options - they all are quickly accessible from the mixer-fader area. I just have to add that each channel on the mixer has its own editable label and this really makes the mixer section of the Reaper look and act as a real mixer would. I just looked at these label-fields as if I were looking at the paper-stripe on the real-life stage mixer. What a cool thing!

When you dock various windows, their corresponding tabs go at the bottom of the screen so you can see them at any time while still being able to quickly access any of them with just a single click.

As I expected from a software that looked very well so far and almost professionally-oriented, Reaper has options regarding color schemes: not mere options, but numerous pre-defined color schemes, ranging from eye-comforting stylish calm and ?usable? colors to harsh and intriguingly brutal pure colors. Besides all these, you can choose a theme which suits your needs best and you can even further tweak its setting; technically it?s absolutely free to make the Reaper look the way you want.

The main visual-track pane can display the progress in time units or in measures, allowing the user to quickly get the whole picture of a given project, while at the same time it is very easily-zoomable for fast search and edit. Zooming works very well and it is controlled by the scroll-wheel of the mouse as in the highly-pro software. The transport control buttons are located under the channel-list, on the left side of the screen, and the vertical/horizontal zoom buttons are in the lower-right corner of the track-view pane, in the usual position.

Overall, the Reaper looks pretty tidy and organized, much like the expensive high-end programs met in studios; the areas are well separated and are also resizable, according to the needs of the moment. The mixer zone with single-channel VU-meters resembles very much a professional VU-bridge often met in large studio-mixers and which is really very helpful. Even more, below each channel, numerical data is displayed: level in dB and panning percentage, thus one single look can at times be enough to analyze the mixer/channels set-up.

The Works

Basically the Reaper works like a multitrack recorder. You can use it to record single- or multi-channel sessions from a vast choice of sources, such as a ?what you hear? source or instruments, or microphones and so on.

Each track can be set up the way you want and even according to what kind of instrument you are going to record on it. Reaper comes in very handy at this chapter by offering a wide range of presets for arming the track with the most suitable settings. What I liked more about the Reaper's works is the fact that - despite its low price - it also has a lot of effects embedded in its own source code so, if you are a newbie or an inexperienced user, you won't need to spend the big bucks on additional plugin software to help you make your work sound OK.

Besides all that, Reaper has built-in support for DirectX and VST software, meaning you can infinitely expand the range of things it will finally be capable of doing. Having already the basic tools at your discretion, such as compression, gating, EQs and even basic synthesis effects, it's a lot easier to get to the sound production and start creating good things from the beginning. At the same time, Reaper and its tools are easy to learn and use, so everyone can get quickly acquainted to their specs and use them more and more efficiently.

Should one work with more complex tools such as MIDI sequencers he won't be set aback: Reaper has an excellent MIDI, VSTi and DXi integration support and all the products of these technologies will be easily mixable with general standard audio when needed.

It is obvious that I will just mention the most important things I have noticed in Reaper's working; a detailed explanation risks to become some sort of tutorial or user's manual and it is neither the case nor the time / space for such an endeavor. One more thing has to be added: the Reaper is very easy to set up, at least for the basic requirements. More complicated options, like pre/post FX settings, have been made very easy to do, so even the beginner audio producer can tweak and arrange the chain of effects following few easy steps.

Automation has also been grouped and it became very simple just because each automation mode has a brief explanation so the user knows exactly what's to be done and what is going to happen with the channel faders. This way, several settings of automation become really helpful: you can choose to record the fader's movements or just let them move freely, based just on pre-edited envelopes.

Being a software aimed to the semi- to completely pro usage, Reaper sports traditional controlling buttons and shortcuts: the spacebar triggers playback or pause, Ctrl+R starts recording etc. With just a mouse click you can gain access to the entire shortcut list working in Reaper so it's really up to you to learn and then use them all.

The chunks of recording are very easy to spot, recognize, move or simply edit. Volume envelopes are easily controllable with the mouse: just click on the horizontal-envelope line and then move it upwards or downwards: besides the numerical dB-level you can also see the waveform's sine-shape growing (when setting higher levels) or getting smaller and smaller until it eventually disappears (when lowering levels too much). The same info is displayed in percentages when directly tweaking a track's panning envelope. You will see the points where the pan envelope changes and - as you hover your mouse cursor over those regions - the numeric data will be shown.

As you have probably imagined, Reaper also features markers (much like the cue points in Audition, for example) which are very easy to set up: just press M (obviously from ?Marker?) and then click on the track-view pane. The resulting points will receive numbers and you can easily set playback to start from a certain marker.

The Reaper's operation is definitely very close to the operation of pro audio software (how many times I've said that?) if what you're thinking of is chunk resizing, selecting and selection resizing, grouping or working with groups.

The track-view pane can be easily seen in grid-mode the snap-to-grid options coming in very handy and if you're working with loops, things become even easier in the gridview-mode. Loops are automatically added to an initial portion as you resize it into a bigger one. Snapping and ?per beat? work very well, so if you're into electronic music, which is based on definite-size parts, then Reaper is just the thing for you.

One thing the Reaper does not have (or it does have, but maybe I could not get to it this afternoon) is its own editor. You have to configure an external wave editor (provided you have one installed) and always rely on it to properly edit the recorded or imported chunks. But let's not forget about the price for which Reaper is sold. Should you also get a close-to-professional editor as well - that would not be a bargain but rather theft. Nevertheless, the lack of a built-in waveform editor hinders a bit the audio producer; it annoyed me and I guess I won't be the only one who might have noticed this after 30 minutes of Reaper work.

Letting you find out the multitude of nice features the Reaper has, let's get to some conclusions.

The Good

An unbelievable price for an almost professional piece of software, loaded with features I really did not expect to find in it. The Reaper is also ready for the basic needs of both a beginner and an advanced user and this is one hell of a feature if we just think of how many things we'd usually need to start producing audio. Besides this, Reaper acts like a host, supporting VST/VSTi, DirectX/DXi and all MIDI. It is easy to operate on and - as an even better thing - as you learn to work with it, this will help you a lot when moving to major professional programs: a lot of commonly-used control-ways once learned will ensure your getting familiarized with the ?big stuff? a lot easier.

And some other great features: unbelievably small and thus perfectly fit for mobile PCs, it starts, works and closes fast.

The Bad

I don't know if the following features should really be called ?bad? (for a 40-dollar software!) but here we go: -no internal editor and this tends to slow down the workflow a bit. -even if there are a lot of color schemes, from what I have seen so far, they are not properly-coded, meaning each track would better have another color for quick and easier recognition when working with many separate tracks.

The Truth

One of the best middle-user audio production softwares available, also at a bargain price and which comes ready for instant use. Easy to learn and fast enough for almost any kind of user. Perfect for those who either want to learn audio production tech or for those who want to become better. I am positive I'll test Reaper further because it's rather complex and it made me really curios.

See the snapshots below and get a better idea on what Reaper is like: