I am trying Reaper for about one week now.
I had bad experiences with the previous releases (v3 and before), so I thought to check it again.

Well, at last the midi is good enough for me so I've begun a 'Testing' project. I liked the interface and workflow. I liked very much the price and performance.

What I really disliked are mainly two things:

When Reaper freezes, it freezes the whole system!!!! There is no way other than turning the laptop off by pressing the power button for 3 seconds or so!!!
This is really bad programming! why not capture the error and handle it?!!! For example Sonar, or studio one when crashes, it display error and windows complains, so i can close the application and continue with windows, but with Reaper, NO!

The other thing I really dislike is the configuration. Really?!! I mean really??
To change something is like playing a mini puzzle in a game. You try to solve this puzzle till you give up then try to find a walkthrough helping you to solve this puzzle! The solution would be in the last place in the "options" that you thought of.

I could change the default of 1.applying colours to the tracks and clips. 2.recording with midi overdub in loop mode. Let's see how stable it will be with my plugins.

Good interface design means you find your way mostly by guessing. No need for a manual especially if the things you are doing are not new!

I hope after changing the shortcuts (ctrl+R is recording! Why not just R?! Ctrl+M is Mixer, why not just M?!) I will be able to complete the 'Testing' projects without many frustrations.

What is your experience with Reaper? Do you think it worth the time spent in the beginning? Or better to avoid and keep saving for something like studio one?

Finally is there a list of plugins that crash reaper? I searched but couldn't find something.

REAPER is an outstanding host and yes, configuring it takes a long time. But it's very rewarding as you can just bend it to the way your work best. The actions system (coupled with the SWS actions) is my favourite time-saving feature. You can make it do almost anything!
To me, it's a DIY Host.
I tried Studio One but I felt was was too CPU demanding and there still seems to be problems with Kontakt and other plugins.
Because none of the major plugins crash it.

Seriously, REAPER has come a long way in terms of stability and is now rock-solid.

When talking about freezing, it could very well be your soundcard driver that hangs in such a way that nothing is making progress anymore.

I had that over the years with Sonar and RME card, and you were running certain plugins in a loop, when it suddenly hangs, and process could not be terminated or anything.

If a call never return from the drivers, you are kind of stuck there.

If even windows cannot terminate the damn thing - what makes us think that an application can.

What I have had freezes on are some 32-bit plugins that does not bridge so well, that's all. I use jBridge for Vsampler as an example, it works much better.

I ditched Sonar 6 month ago in favour of Reaper. Bought Reaper as 3.6 and it wasn't quite up there at the time, but now in mars I really felt it was good(4.20).

I think manual is pretty well written for Reaper. Take your time to read it through. Always good to have something in the back of your head as you work.

Configurations have this neat Find thingy that is really useful. Type a part of a word and let it look through all settings.

On the downside has really only been that not enough toolbuttons are made ready to use. You kind of have to search quite a bit to find all different command actions to connect to. It's much easier to remove tools you don't need, than to go through that process.

And it took an evening to figure out how to get tracks and clips colored in a way to quickly see what is active and what is not etc. But there is a separate forum for themes and stuff and I might look there to get something ready to go guicker.


I also changed Record to R only, why crippled finger positions to get such a common task done.

M though is for markers. I switched those to make M add marker with own text, which I always do.

But overall I so darned impressed by Reaper, it will take something really serious to make me go away.

Some things I appreciate is that Reaper is kind of raw and you don't pay for a lot of bling-bling plugins you probably never is going to use. Better with lower price and you buy what you need and all focus is on new features for your workflow.

I also like the open architecture with adding you own macros(several command actions) and there are extensions like SWS that makes you go beyond the raw interface.

I also like the programming abilities, like JS Script with built in editor and compiler to make all kinds of own handling of midi in realtime etc. Maybe not for everyone, but there are helpful people that make stuff you ask for as well.

And last but not least - Reaper forum is excellent crowd of people.

Sorry, but this is not my experience at all. I would blame something in your system (audio interface driver, for example), but definitely not Reaper. Reaper is a lot of things, but "bad programming" is not one of them. Much the contrary, in fact.


EDIT: yeah, what lfm said

OP are you on a MAC? That might be your first problem with Reaper. It's just better on PC (IMO). I have tried both and the MAC one seemed so much more unstable.

Reaper crashes pretty badly for me from time to time. Say a couple of times a year.

At first i thought it was because of my own plugins i had made. Then a friend of mine who knows pretty much everything there is to know about computers said: "That isn't really possible. A plugin could never take down the system like that.No way".

Ok.

After a while i got fed up with and decided to see what was actually going on and installed one of those crash logger viewer programs. Lo and behold it was the soundcard driver. Asio4All together with some shitty HDMAX(to the extreme) onboard mobo soundcard. Damn i need a proper one.

Thanks all for your replies

@Karten:
It is nice to hear about your experience. Yes, I noticed that the cpu usage is almost unbelievable low in Reaper.
I remember which plugin that Reaper doesn't like at all! it is SQ8L!!

@lfm:
Thanks lfm for your detailed reply.
I also did just tonight the same as you did. I mapped "/" for mixer and "*" for recording and some other keypads. I tried to crash it (reaper) but couldn't so maybe I'm reaching a good result. All I did is return to the default skin.

btw, I'm using 32bit in windows 7 64bit. Also I'm using asio4all in not so new laptop but still good enough (i7 @1.6Ghz the old one, with 4gb ..etc).

yes indeed, the Reaper's forum is nice to read. I always find useful "walkthrough" for the puzzles! But i think just for the beginning. Also, I will try to use this "?" system for searching.

@EvilDragon:
I can't say my system is to blame really, but also I'm not sure it is only Reaper.
I think it is a plugin that causing something. Anyway, i want to reach good stability with Reaper and tonight i didn't have any bad moment with it. If this continue, i will start a new relation with reaper

@vaisnava:
I'm on windows.

Hmmm, so it is the asio4all. But, before about 2 years I had a desktop with a Tascam audio interface and reaper also freezed many times till I gave up and returned to Sonar. Reaper was ver 3.
Why other hosts don't have such a problem in my laptop now? yes they freeze sometimes but not taking down the system.

Anyway, i will keep trying and see what will happen tomorrow! For today, it was ok.

In my system, with an emu 1616m soundcard, Sonar has always been more stable than Reaper. Not much more, because both seldom crash, but I've found that I can make Reaper crash sending too many midi data at the same time, while Sonar swallows midi without a hiccup. The unstability gold medal goes for Live, though

When I started out with Asio4all, Reaper crashed very often, then I got an M-Audio card, it doesn't ever crash.

If you're on Vista or Win7 for PC, there's the Wasapi driver, I use it sometimes, you can have everything possible running in the background, and still get stable 3ms latency.

Asio4all has always crashed on every audio program for me, not sure if Reaper specifically doesn't handle it well.

@freezing: This is not happening to me. Usually, IF reaper crashes, it's just the host. Now, I do a restart (for other reasons) when it happens, but it's pretty rare.

I have two machines: One is win7x64 and the other is vista 32.

I will try the Wasapi driver with reaper. Thanks for mentioning it. I've never heard of it before.

I've never experienced the only host crashing with reaper. It was always freezing the system. This happened with the current laptop and about 3 years ago with windows xp (ver 3).

I know there is no "perfect" system, but I really want to reach a stable system with reaper. I will try everything possible before I reach to a final conclusion.

Thanks all for your replies.

Definitely try WASAPI if you're on Vista/W7. It works better than A4A over here.

I'm trying WASAPI today and it seems to work fine with little bit less latency than asio4all, though i don't know if the project now is 24bit or 16bit! I thought all onboard sound cards are 16bit but sine(edit=since) I used asio4all, i could choose 24bit!

I don't have wasapi so I can't check for you. Seems odd there is no 24 bit function.