Anthony Flack wrote:and if you're on a Mac you'll have a whole lot of Apple ones in there too. Don't worry about those too much.The Peak Limiter is great: perfect for squeezing an extra db or 2 out of the master bus to get mixed down material 'in the ball park' of finished records. Also the Reverb is much better than Reaper's (especially small/medium room settings) but I don't know why it defaults to 100% wet.If you scroll further down the plug in list there might be something called an "1175" compressor, which is going for an 1176. Good 'crushing' compressor. But for general/practical uses yeah the Reaper Comp settings are great.

Worse, they don't even have pretend dials, fake wood paneling, imitation analogue VU meters, patchbays with pretend cables to plug in, or pictures of valves that are made to look like they're glowing!So you know they aren't serious professional plugins.

n.c. wrote:so if a track is recorded in stereo, like one track but i select input1+2/stereo. is that a single stereo track? or do i want to open two tracks, and select input 1 mono on the first and input 2 mono on the second and then pan the tracks? 6 of one, half dozen of the other?Yeah, either will work. Use two mono tracks if you want to pan them differently or otherwise treat them differently. A stereo track behaves just like a mono track but of course with two signals stuck together and panned hard left/right. You can split it if you need to, but for a stereo image (output from a keyboard, stereo samples, XY mics etc) it's usually more convenient to keep them together.You can also have more than two inputs on a track, by clicking the I/O you can patch one track into another track, for instance you could send a stereo track to ANOTHER stereo track on inputs 3/4 (or 5/6 etc). This is what you need to do if you want to set a compressor to side-chain.For example if you want to use a gate to get the kick drum out of your underside snare mic, you could click on the I/O of the kick drum, send the kick drum signal to the underside snare channel on aux input 3, and put a gate on the underside snare channel and tell it to process channel 1 but use channel 3 as the trigger.I also often set up reverb on its own track and just patch other channels into the reverb track. I've never used ReaVerberate, always stuck to the impulse-based one. But I'll give the Apple one a go since it's been recommended. I tend to avoid the Apple plugins to spare any problems when opening the project on a Windows machine.

154 wrote:Also the Reverb is much better than Reaper's (especially small/medium room settings) but I don't know why it defaults to 100% wet.100% wet on the reverb return is fairly common practice for working on a console. You can apply the same reverb to one or more tracks using an effects or aux send, and then return the reverbed signal into a mono or stereo return and mix it with the rest of the session without overly affecting the loudness of the tracks sent to reverb. Drenched in reverb or dry as a bone, the sent tracks will be about the same volume.I would prefer 100% wet default to something like a 50/50 default by far.

i'm totally intrigued by some of the possibilities. it's outside my comfort zone, for sure.i appreciate the help navigating.

so if a track is recorded in stereo, like one track but i select input1+2/stereo. is that a single stereo track? or do i want to open two tracks, and select input 1 mono on the first and input 2 mono on the second and then pan the tracks? 6 of one, half dozen of the other?

One quick "How To Approach It" tip when it comes to not being able to figure it out or being outside of comfort zones when starting to use Reaper...Take it in really small steps. While I did suggest saving a effects chain to get an eq/dynamics processor, maybe just going over calling up the "Effects" dialog a few times before moving on to actually selecting effects and eventually saving chains that will come up when a new channel is opened.Tommy, what problems did you have?

n.c. wrote:for the life of me, i can't figure this out. i also can't figure out how to simply highlight a part and delete it. i mean i can highlight it, but hitting the delete button doesn't do anything.Oh man, I had the same issue(s) with Reaper when I tried it. I use Protools and decided to try Reaper a few months back for the Tribute series based on everyone's love for it. I figured it would be relatively easy since I already know how to use the basic functions of Protools. Turns out, no, I couldn't figure out how to do shit easily. Eventually I totally gave up. One of these days I'll try again, but it's not at all like driving a car vs driving another car.

Clicks are super easy: Options > Metronome > Enable. You'll probably need to adjust the click track volume as well (Metronome Settings), I find the defaults a little low. Reaper also defaults to a grid and snap, making cutting/pasting blocks super easy.For fake drums I usually do that within EZ Drummer and render it to a few stems (kick track, overhead/traps stereo, maybe an additional room mics stereo) and just import those Wavs. Programming MIDI or even triggering it within the DAW seems like hell.

Yeah I'll have to play around with that more but I've been recording drums first for so long (going back to the 4 track era) that it's a little hard to imagine needing to replace sounds as I go. (which is still doable anyway)