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jorsh wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2025 3:38 pm have any of you mastered an EP or album within Reaper?
if so, i'm curious how you set it up when doing multiple songs.

like are you just mastering each song separately in its own Reaper project, and then rendering the mastered versions and listening to how they all work with each other as a collection, and then going back in and making adjustments in the individual projects as needed?

or are you rendering an unmastered .wav file of each song, and then importing all the song wavs for the release into a new Reaper Project so that you can hop around between songs easily? and if that's the case - are you importing each song into a separate track within the project and adding any mastering plugins you're using on the track FX chain?
i feel like that could get weird having the mastering processing on the track FX chains rather than on the master bus FX chain, but maybe i'm missing something.

i'm sure Kenny Gioia has 17 videos about this, but i... would rather... hear it... from.... the PRF

thanks in advance

I do that in wavelab, but yes render an unmastered mix from your songs and then make a Reaper setup with just a single track. If you don’t have a specific mastering plugin, I would insert an EQ, a compressor and a limiter at the end of fx chain. You could even line up all the songs and then easily compare the loudness.

I just "mastered" an EP in Reaper. My process is render a stereo mix from each of my Reaper mixes.

Bring the individual stereo renders back into Reaper to sequence and hear how they work with each other. Like I may hear one song is boosted too much in the 4-12k range or lows compared to the other tracks. I'll use something like TDR Arbiter or Nova to adjust. I'll also balance the volume accordingly between all the tracks. I'll only put a vst on the track fx, never the master.



I've tried mastering limiter plugins but typically never like how they mess with the EQ balance I've already dialed in outputting the original mix.

To hear the finished master - https://theshavingparty.bandcamp.com/al ... fanpub_fnb

handsbloodyhands wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 11:22 am TDR Arbiter or Nova

Love TDR plugins, but I never use them for mastering, no real reason, I just haven't.


I put all songs in their own track, insert Izotope ozone on each song, and put Ozone on the master output. I do 90% of the processing for each song in the Track, and use the insert on the master to do "generic" Glue or whatever term you want to use. My mastering chain of FX rarely includes anything other than Ozone. Sometimes maybe a saturater, but not much else since Ozone has like every tool in it, and I try to be done with anything heavy handed before I get to the "Mastering" stage. I'll Hit my LUFS/Peak target in each track, and the Master Insert is doing very very little. I make regions for each song so sliding them around to try new track orders is easy. I place a 2 sec space between each song as a general rule. I always render out a Full Project and "side A&B" as well as each individual track in MP3 320kbps, Wave 16/44.1, Wave24/48K, and Flac. That is the extent of my mastering procedure. People tend to make too much of what happens in Mastering these days to sell you a bunch of stuff. I say find one tool set like Fab Filter or Izotope etc, that has all the tools and stick with it. When it comes to Mastering I prefer the route of Neutrality.

I want to share Reaper sessions with a bandmate. By that I mean, we are taking turns working on a project til it's done. We have a pattern like this
Person A: does some work on project on local machine
Person B: Copies Person A's files locally to machine, does work
Person A: Copies Person B's files locally to machine, does work
etc, etc.

A lot of copying and it would be cool to eliminate that.

I ALMOST had this working by creating a project that lives in Google Drive that person A and B both can access. Unfortunately the rpp file references resources with a path that's not just "wavs/16-vocal1_20250122-1922.wav", but instead contains a path with a username in it and some long numeric token. So Person B gets all these broken references. That seems like an issue with how google drive works and maybe there are other cleaner cloud solutions out there.

The other thing is I think there are tools that can keep directories on two different machines in sync - maybe look at something like that?

I dunno. Surely this is a common work pattern and we are in 2025 so there should be good ways to do this. Educate me!

When you save your reaper session are you checking the box that says "Copy all media to sub directory". Or whatever, and also always default to "Create Sub directory" as well when you originally save the session. This creates a folder and will alway move all the audio clips into the media folder in that session folder when you save. Then, when you want to work on the folder, you download the session, work, and re-upload the whole session folder into Drive. Not sure if GDrive does this, but Box will replace the old version with a new version, V1, V2, V3... etc, each time you upload and you can see the date and time it was last modified. There should be now appendage to the file names of the audio files at all by cloud storage if you do this. In Reaper you can set the default file naming structure Under Settings>Audio>Recording you can choose your Wildcards there for autio naming. I just use $Track Name, $Take. As long as you have the same plugins everything should be totally interchangeable. Heather and I even pass projects between PC and Mac using Arturia Synths. As long as we both use the VST3 version (never use AU or other horseshit) everything opens fine.

Oh thanks for the nice reply.

Yeah I definitely did select to copy and move all media into the local folder. But the rpp, when I look at it in a text editor, the wavs aren’t just “wavfiles/olivettiTake1.wav” . It has a few other directory paths in front of it like “/myusername@gmail.com/525734565345553/…”

I think that’s some GDrive identifier that my Mac OS needs in order to access gdrive like its own file system? But yeah when my bandmate accesses it his Mac is wouldn’t be able to figure that out.

Dropbox may integrate more cleanly for this stuff and if you’re doing it smoothly, I’d like to give it a shot when I have time to test it out.

Appreciate the help.

twelvepoint wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 6:01 pm Oh thanks for the nice reply.

Yeah I definitely did select to copy and move all media into the local folder. But the rpp, when I look at it in a text editor, the wavs aren’t just “wavfiles/olivettiTake1.wav” . It has a few other directory paths in front of it like “/myusername@gmail.com/525734565345553/…”

I think that’s some GDrive identifier that my Mac OS needs in order to access gdrive like its own file system? But yeah when my bandmate accesses it his Mac is wouldn’t be able to figure that out.

Dropbox may integrate more cleanly for this stuff and if you’re doing it smoothly, I’d like to give it a shot when I have time to test it out.

Appreciate the help.

So that I am clear, on your desktop, your Reaper Project file, and all the media for that project are in a folder, you are moving that folder and all contents to GDrive, and When you download the project on another computer they file names are appended? Either way, I do not think there is a way to get around RE-Downloading the entire project EVERY time it moves from one computer to another. If G Drive isn't great for this, you can try an off the shelf NAS solution like a WD My Cloud device, but you are still going to absolutely have to upload, and download the entire project every time a change is made.

Actually no. I just keep the project and all media on gdrive and as long as my Mac has my gdrive mounted as a virtual drive (iirc, I needed to install a gdrive app to do that), I have reaper point at the gdrive location and run it without any resources existing on the local drive.

I think I mentioned that earlier in the thread and that’s been my work pattern for a year. This is for like 16 tracks or less, but it’s been really great because I just spin mixes to the same cloud directory and they’re shareable .

My hope was I can also just have bandmates run Reaper using the same gdrive resources.

twelvepoint wrote: Tue Jan 28, 2025 7:30 pm Actually no. I just keep the project and all media on gdrive and as long as my Mac has my gdrive mounted as a virtual drive (iirc, I needed to install a gdrive app to do that), I have reaper point at the gdrive location and run it without any resources existing on the local drive.

I think I mentioned that earlier in the thread and that’s been my work pattern for a year. This is for like 16 tracks or less, but it’s been really great because I just spin mixes to the same cloud directory and they’re shareable .

My hope was I can also just have bandmates run Reaper using the same gdrive resources.

Interesting. Crazy this works at all. I wouldn't do it that way, but if it works for you go for it. I can see how there is some google based file meta data type issues now. I tried to do this with my cloud storage and it wouldn't work at all.

Yeah I was pretty prepared for this to crash and burn, but the gdrive for desktop lets you use it like a logical drive. I kept waiting for some showstopper issue but it kept performing fine except for path issues breaking the portability.