http://reaper.fm

IMO, hands down the best-designed and best-performing DAW out there and the best I've ever used by a mile - and I've used most. The reason is it's the only full-featured DAW to be built totally from from scratch in the past three years. There are two developers, the lead is Justin Frankel who built and sold WinAmp to AOL for sixty skajillion dollars. He has not been sitting on his ass in the meantime.

No ancient codebase and no fifteen years of hardware support history means no dumb design flaws or inherited bloat in front of or behind the scenes. DP and Sonar began life as MIDI sequencers that tacked on audio later and it still shows in those anyeurism-inducing interfaces. Reaper's got a tiny RAM and disk footprint - it runs off a jump drive.

Every feature is where it belongs, almost always a single click away, routing and summing are excellent, been totally solid and stable for a couple of years under XP and one year under OSX pre-beta. Comes with a giant pile of plugs that include a great many handy tools along with the expected schlock. Supports VST, AU etc.

And it's free unless you use it, then it's $200 on the honor system. Uncrippled shareware.

Since the OSX beta is out, I figured I'd see if anybody else had used it. If not, unless you are 100% happy with your DAW, you should check out Reaper under XP. OSX still missing some features, but I worked with that version all year with no problems, so what the hell, check that out too.

Anyway, seriously. Not Crap.

-r

i just dl'd, set up and recorded a test track with my ms-20......

jeeeeeesus effing cripes....
what a piece of sshhhhiiiiiiiiiii nope! i aint gonna say it.
its really really well done. easy to set up loads fast. i already set up a new template for it to open up on each time so i dont have to arm and set things up over and over.
hell im the biggest hater of software , cant use ableton, dont understand reaktor, i usually use audition and thats it. i like the way fx are easily assignable and route able in this daw. now i wonder if i can get my midi controllers in there some how:D

thanks warmosk!

Reaper fo' life.

Seriously.

ok i tried a lil more. seems pretty good. but theres not much clip editing you can do from what i see. in audition you can tab to edit mode and eff around with the clip.. am i missing something in reaper?

Major wrote:Reaper fo' life.

Seriously.

Indeed.

I've been using it for a year or so, it's quirky perhaps, but it's absolutely ace once you've un-Cubased (or whatever) your mind a bit.

I've never tried anything but the most rudimentary midi task with it, but for straight audio it's hard to beat.

Not so keen on the insanely protective/proactive users who are verging on cultishness in their attempts to spread their indoctrinating word across the entire internets, but whatareyougonnado?

sonikBOOM wrote:ok i tried a lil more. seems pretty good. but theres not much clip editing you can do from what i see. in audition you can tab to edit mode and eff around with the clip.. am i missing something in reaper?

It doesn't feature destructive editing, although you can do most things non-destructively (trim/cut/paste/move/cross-fade etc).

If you need genuine destructive editing, you need an external editor which you can then set as default editor in Reaper so it'll open a clip in Audition (or whatever), then (once your editing is done) will replace the clip with the edited version.

If you need regular destructive editing to achieve results that Reaper is incapable of, it'd probably be a PITA to constantly have Audition opening an closing, so Reaper might not be suitable.

i tried it once one year ago, but couldn't get too much into it. mostly because its very similar to sony ACID ( the program i use ) but there are slightly differences that annoy me.

would like to give it another try, as i'm fed up with ACID at the moment.

i was having a hard time even just splitting bits up so i could cut and paste them ... but i figured it out... to split at the cursor... hit 's' lol seems so obvious but i couldnt find it in the manual.

I will never try it because I cannot find any space in my head for learning yet another DAW. I think it is great for people just getting started, but I cannot abide another project format. Hell, I can't even make myself learn Live and it has been sitting on my CPU for 2 years.

No more room.

warmowski wrote:Supports VST, AU etc.

Does not support AU (according to spec on website)

Does support .APE (Monkey Audio) files which is fucking cool.
Rob (or anyone else) have you ever experimented with this?

It sure does look great. It's feature loaded too. How is the routing?

One thing I would like to see in DAWs is a better patchbay/console buss style routing system... with mults. I know you can set that kind of thing up but it always seems clumsy.

Does it have any kind of Beatmatching/loop stretching on a grid shit?

And Finally, can you record in reverse?