Some stuff about reaper is getting on my nerves, and I’m not able to phrase it correctly in search terms to get a decent answer from the forums.

Basically, I like highlighting the length of an entire song and recording in loop mode for any instrument.

This way, I can record myself in loop mode doing 3 or 4 entire takes of bass, guitar, voice, whatever without having to get up and hit record again. Once the song is over it just starts over again and I can record as many times as I want.

When you do this it looks neat enough in the Reaper project file, with 3 or 4 takes to choose from in the track. No problem

However it saves the 3 or 4 takes as one long fuckin’ audio file. I don’t want it to do that at all. I want it to record the 3 or 4 takes as 3 or 4 different song length audio files.

Anybody know how to do this?

My computer crashed at one point after I did this, so it saved the long dumb track but not the project file. I was able to find the take I wanted to put back, but it feels like a nightmare trying to put one of the passes back in time.

Really frustrating

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 10:14 pm Some stuff about reaper is getting on my nerves, and I’m not able to phrase it correctly in search terms to get a decent answer from the forums.

Basically, I like highlighting the length of an entire song and recording in loop mode for any instrument.

This way, I can record myself in loop mode doing 3 or 4 entire takes of bass, guitar, voice, whatever without having to get up and hit record again. Once the song is over it just starts over again and I can record as many times as I want.

When you do this it looks neat enough in the Reaper project file, with 3 or 4 takes to choose from in the track. No problem

However it saves the 3 or 4 takes as one long fuckin’ audio file. I don’t want it to do that at all. I want it to record the 3 or 4 takes as 3 or 4 different song length audio files.

Anybody know how to do this?

My computer crashed at one point after I did this, so it saved the long dumb track but not the project file. I was able to find the take I wanted to put back, but it feels like a nightmare trying to put one of the passes back in time.

Really frustrating

I am not sure if i fully understand, but could you duplicate that track enough times for each take then eliminate the extra takes in the respective tracks, then save?

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Thu May 25, 2023 10:14 pm Some stuff about reaper is getting on my nerves, and I’m not able to phrase it correctly in search terms to get a decent answer from the forums.

Basically, I like highlighting the length of an entire song and recording in loop mode for any instrument.

This way, I can record myself in loop mode doing 3 or 4 entire takes of bass, guitar, voice, whatever without having to get up and hit record again. Once the song is over it just starts over again and I can record as many times as I want.

When you do this it looks neat enough in the Reaper project file, with 3 or 4 takes to choose from in the track. No problem

However it saves the 3 or 4 takes as one long fuckin’ audio file. I don’t want it to do that at all. I want it to record the 3 or 4 takes as 3 or 4 different song length audio files.

Anybody know how to do this?

My computer crashed at one point after I did this, so it saved the long dumb track but not the project file. I was able to find the take I wanted to put back, but it feels like a nightmare trying to put one of the passes back in time.

Really frustrating

It’s:

Options - preferences - audio - loop recording - “add recorded media to project” - enable “at each loop”

There are several options, but I think that’s the one you’re looking for.

The way I handle this is to enable "Show all takes in lanes (CTRL-L on PC)" tht way if you expand the track height you can see all the takes at once. you can make comps of all the takes by putting down the curser and hitting "S" to split the takes, you then just click the takes you want and they splice together in playback. After that, if you turn off show all takes in lanes it will only show what you clicked on. If you show all takes in lanes again you can change the chosen snippits or whole takes. IF yo u want to further irradicate the other unused takes, you can highlight all the clips you have chosen and use the "Crop to active take" function by right clicking the edited takes, going to TAKES, Crop To Active Take. This will collapse the lanes to only show the takes you have selected, but still has the edit points for trimming if you want. When I am sure I am done with editing the takes, I will Glue them together. Select them, right click, Glue items. I made a quick key for this cause I do it alot. THis will create a single audio file of the edited takes with no edit points, just an unbroken long file. Part of my file management is that when I back up my projects I will first go to File, Clean Project Directory and delete ALL UNUSED FILES. This will delete ALL of the takes you are not using from the project... FOR GOOD so be careful if you do this.

This is just how I do it, it's Reaper so I'm sure there are like a thousand ways to do it.

^ that's nearly exactly the same as my workflow. I've hotkeyed all those commands.

added a little video

What theme is that?

MoreSpaceEcho wrote: Sat May 27, 2023 7:43 am What theme is that?

Standard theme, customized the colors and made some custom buttons for the top bar. I don't use fancy custom themes cause it moves shit around and I can never find stuff.

This is great everyone, thank you. I was worried about the file management situation at the end, so everything here helps, and I am literally looking at a song where every reply has a use.

I have been avoiding comping for the most part. That built discipline for basic instruments but started to hamstring me when arranging semi-random elements, like, bowed acoustic guitar or hand manipulated ring mod, so good eye on that side. Still 100% trying to avoid keyboard and mouse stuff as much as possible but some stuff shouldn’t be put off any longer

Just came up with a simple thing that I never thought to do in Reaper. In the channel plugin chainer I was trying to get a more complex tremelo pattern than just up/down using a really simple JS. tremelo. I wanted a really slow trem speed with a faint fast flutter as well. Stacking 2 tremelos in series kinda worked but I wanted to see how hard it was to have parallel plugin paths in a single channel chain without duplicating a ch or any such nonsense. It's actually really easy. In the chainer you can go to the IO section and tell the channel to have up to 64 paths, so I make it 8. This gives me 8 Parallel paths to rout plugs from. I inserted 2 tremelos, one fast and one slow and in the IO for each plug chose Inputs 1/2 for the first, and 3/4 for the second, set the speeds I wanted, and then inserted the JS Mixer plugin, and plended the parallel paths together. It would be just as easy and fun to do this with reverbs and delays, having multiple parallel delay paths on a single track that are submixed together to the fader. Just a fun thing that I did instead of actual work this morning.