Multiple Portable REAPER Installations

[EvilDragon]

If I save a configuration file from REAPER 0.999 and load it into REAPER 5.941, will it work? I don't know.

Importing/Exporting configurations wasn't possible in 0.999, that feature was added in v3.73.

[Tj Shredder]

If I save a configuration file from REAPER 0.999 and load it into REAPER 5.941, will it work? I don't know.

If I do 47 REAPER portable installs on my Windows 7 computer and save all of them to DVD-R and copy those 47 portable installs to my Windows XP computer, will it work? I'm almost sure it will work.

If you use DVDs to store portable installs, you need at least 3 copies as DVDs suck and fail ten times more than a usb stick that costs a fraction of a DVD. My advice, sell the DVD burner and buy Reaper for the money you got for the drive combined with the money you saved from not needing to buy DVDs. That gives you a 0$ balance...

Man, just get it!
And simply do those tests with the nagging Reaper version. That will answer all questions by itself... (and faster as well... (and as long you just test and do not produce sucking pieces, nobody will complain about your ethics))

[jancivil]

One reason so much music lacks originality, is people get cowed into
doing what works for the herd. They eat, drink, breath, and think the 'herd',
soon they have no soul, and then instead of using Reaper, you meet him
Cheers

I know, I know, it's the herd that uses features, better to manually maintain over a thousand separate installations of an application instead ...

Oh, absolutely, in only follows that the _unique_ methodology - combined with the dogged determination to avoid reading the fvcking manual - means originality in music and the assurance of retaining of one's soul, above all the cowed, doomed others who sadly trod along normally, doing their sad, conformist behaviors such as understanding how preferences function.

[harryupbabble]

If I save a configuration file from REAPER 0.999 and load it into REAPER 5.941, will it work? I don't know.

If I do 47 REAPER portable installs on my Windows 7 computer and save all of them to DVD-R and copy those 47 portable installs to my Windows XP computer, will it work? I'm almost sure it will work.

If you use DVDs to store portable installs, you need at least 3 copies as DVDs suck and fail ten times more than a usb stick that costs a fraction of a DVD. My advice, sell the DVD burner and buy Reaper for the money you got for the drive combined with the money you saved from not needing to buy DVDs. That gives you a 0$ balance...

Man, just get it!
And simply do those tests with the nagging Reaper version. That will answer all questions by itself... (and faster as well... (and as long you just test and do not produce sucking pieces, nobody will complain about your ethics))

That sounds like very good advice but it doesn't address this REAPER newbie's bafflement of REAPER's complexity.

If I buy REAPER now, I'm still stuck with "Huh, what did Evil Dragon did there in the Preferences, I don't understand."
So rather than understand Evil Dragon's or Guenon's solutions, I will just freeze those solutions by way of portable installs and then I could focus on my quest for a "satisfactory music-making method."

My experience with DVDs is pretty good. One failure per 20 is my estimate. I do make 2 copies. Just the other day, one of my housemates who regularly shops at Walmart got me a set of 10 DVD-Rs for about 8 dollars. That's 80 cents per DVD. So that's $1.60 for 2 DVDs required to save roughly 47 portable REAPER installations. Seems still pretty cheap. I don't want to sell my built-in DVD player because I already have so many data DVDs and I have a few rock concert DVDs like Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same. And I still borrow from my city's local libraries to play music CDs and view rock concert DVDs and BBC documentaries and stuff.

I don't want to buy REAPER at 5.941 because I have already waited 2 months and that 2 months flew. The KVR Developer Challenge was announced in April and suddenly it's almost September. Time is really flying when one is super-busy. But I won't complain if REAPER 6.0 gets here sooner.

What if I buy REAPER now and then it turns out REAPER 6.0 is just 6 months or less away? 6 months is nothing because 2012 to 2018 was nothing. Time flies. Pretty soon 2020 will be here just like that.

I am not sure about the "import/export configuration" advice because I presume REAPER is constantly evolving and how can it evolve without affecting the design of the Preferences dialog boxes? I'm afraid of the possibility that configuration files are not built for the future.
But "snapshots" or portable installs are more immune to the future, I presume. And also, "snapshots" can be run in older Windows XP? That's a big plus to me.

Anyways, I'm off to do something else. Thanks very much for the advice. Be back later. Okay bye.

[jancivil]

I'm sorry, you may have looked at the manual. I was really taken aback at making this about originality in music so I got snarkified.

REAPER is the kind of application you really need to look at some documentation though. But, what you want has been shown you, establish different preferences and the behavior follows that.

[glokraw]

What if I buy REAPER now and then it turns out REAPER 6.0 is just 6 months or less away?

Stop worrying. The grim reaper detects worrying vibrations

(besides, your licence will be valid thru an absurdly high number of updates!)

[Tj Shredder]

My experience with DVDs is pretty good. One failure per 20 is my estimate. I do make 2 copies.

That is even worse than I expected, it was that bad 15 years ago. A failed technology only put in place by the film industry...
Imagine your hard drive would create an error every 5 GB you write one of your precious Reaper Sessions. Your OS would go on strike, and you would break out in tears, at least if you come to the point where you start to like your own music...

Just the other day, one of my housemates who regularly shops at Walmart got me a set of 10 DVD-Rs for about 8 dollars. That's 80 cents per DVD. So that's $1.60 for 2 DVDs required to save roughly 47 portable REAPER installations. Seems still pretty cheap.

I would say for what you get and per GB pretty expensive compared to hard drives and even super fast SSDs.
Handling and speed of DVD: it needs some seconds to mount, then reading speed is slower as USB 1, holds max 5 GB. A pain to write in multiple sessions (necessary for your scenario). Price per GB roughly 10 cent.
Handling and Speed of a hard drive, ssd or even a USB stick: Read and write does not need an extra program, you drag and drop it, its 100 to 1000 times faster than a CD/DVD, you can start your portable Reaper directly from the media and it will write to it as well, no need to create a duplicate more recent version... Price per GB: a 1 TB hard drive is 50$ and holds 200 full DVDs that is 5 cent per GB...

I don't want to sell my built-in DVD player because I already have so many data DVDs and I have a few rock concert DVDs like Led Zeppelin's The Song Remains The Same. And I still borrow from my city's local libraries to play music CDs and view rock concert DVDs and BBC documentaries and stuff.

That is an argument, at least partially. The first thing I do when someone gives me a DVD/CD, I copy it to my archive hard drive (2 drives configured as RAID 1) Then all is in place, needs 1 million times less (physical) space than a collection of CDs/DVDs. Though I do keep some, I only load them from my archive and never ever put them into any player again...

What if I buy REAPER now and then it turns out REAPER 6.0 is just 6 months or less away? 6 months is nothing because 2012 to 2018 was nothing. Time flies. Pretty soon 2020 will be here just like that.

If you are that close to death you should stop waisting time and start waisting money, though with Reaper its not really possible to waist money...

[EvilDragon]

I am not sure about the "import/export configuration" advice because I presume REAPER is constantly evolving and how can it evolve without affecting the design of the Preferences dialog boxes? I'm afraid of the possibility that configuration files are not built for the future.

They're built for the future. Developers don't change defaults very often (almost ever), and Reaper is built to load stuff gracefully - i.e. it loads everything that it understands. So if something ever changes w.r.t. a certain preference in the future, that case will be handled gracefully if at all possible (and most often it is possible). Just don't worry about this at all. You worry too much and complicate things too much. Listen to experienced Reaper users.

This experienced Reaper user says using multiple portable installations like your initial idea is just plain bad.

[Tj Shredder]

I think he should not listen to experienced users, especially if he asked for advice.
He should listen to me, I am not using Reaper at all but have experience with CD-R and DVD-R.
He should switch to floppy disks. A technology which has more years of history and will never be obsolete.
It just needs patience to deal with it. Much more rewarding than just paying 60 bucks and making music...

[mcbpete]

He should switch to floppy disks.

I hot glue LS-120 discs into separate SuperDisk drives for each install. It's the only way I feel comfortable using Reaper as a portable app.

[harryupbabble]

I am not sure about the "import/export configuration" advice because I presume REAPER is constantly evolving and how can it evolve without affecting the design of the Preferences dialog boxes? I'm afraid of the possibility that configuration files are not built for the future.

They're built for the future. Developers don't change defaults very often (almost ever), and Reaper is built to load stuff gracefully - i.e. it loads everything that it understands. So if something ever changes w.r.t. a certain preference in the future, that case will be handled gracefully if at all possible (and most often it is possible). Just don't worry about this at all. You worry too much and complicate things too much. Listen to experienced Reaper users.

This experienced Reaper user says using multiple portable installations like your initial idea is just plain bad.

Yes, I think I will do it that way in the future, I will abandon the "multiple portable installations and save to DVD" idea. I'm going to trust your experience with configuration files.

Yesterday, I was testing my current music-making method on REAPER 0.999 and was not that amazed that it was doable. For one example, the region/markers function in 0.9999 is pretty much the same as the one in 5.9x or at least it was not too foreign. A lot of the functionalities crucial to my basic needs (except for processing mass MIDI data and lately the lua MIDI randomizer script) was there in version 0.999 and again, they weren't too different in comparison to version 5.9x.

And because of that, it's now easier to accept that configuration files will be the same no matter what REAPER version it is, well starting from the version that you mentioned above (version 3.73).

So yeah, I'm now accepting the idea that Justin and his development team are aware of users' needs to have, for one example, configuration files functional for the future and are not ignoring those needs.

If my idea was harmful, it wasn't meant to be. I got excited there for a bit and thought my idea will be helpful to other confused newbies. I hope that the worse that have happened is that portable installations were performed. I doubt if anyone even tried it for the first time anyway.

Thanks very much Evil Dragon for the "export/import configuration" advice which doesn't need the use of DVD as much or not at all and therefore cheaper and less time consuming.

[Guenon]

So yeah, I'm now accepting the idea that Justin and his development team are aware of users' needs to have, for one example, configuration files functional for the future and are not ignoring those needs.

If my idea was harmful, it wasn't meant to be.

You just aren't (weren't) thinking things through. I'm not commenting any further on the general premise here; the reason for rejecting the configuration exports was something you might want to analyze for similar future situations, however

Even though you project a meticulous and analytical image, the most obvious "there's something off here" detail was: your main argument for installing numerous separate portable installations of a DAW, instead of exporting/importing configuration data, was the fear of said configuration data becoming unusable in a newer software version. Such a snag is unlikely, like ED outlined, but there is of course a greater than zero chance this might happen.

HOWEVER, because of the fear of this happening, you would go through the trouble of managing those numerous installations, by default, anyway. So why wouldn't you just roll back one update instead, in the unlikely situation that the configuration data does indeed become incompatible at some point, and react that way only if it actually happens?

Consider that you would of course still have access to the earlier Reaper version. You could then just install that, and your configuration data would still work. Maybe even install it as a portable copy, but do it then. And continue using the most recent version as another install . That is suboptimal, but hey, the point is, a moment ago you would have preferred the default situation of managing a load of portable installations frozen in a version from waaay back anyway.

Even if the incompatibility situation was final and there was absolutely no way to configure the then-newest version based on your configuration export (this is a purely theoretical example), at least you would then be stuck with a much more recent version for your different stored configs, alongside the most recent version for your most recent experiments, and by then you would most likely have a more unified environment to do your stuff in, anyway, as you didn't lock yourself in with the old portable versions from get go.

[harryupbabble]

So why wouldn't you just roll back one update instead, in the unlikely situation that the configuration data does indeed become incompatible at some point, and react that way only if it actually happens?

As I stated before, one of Evil Dragon's solutions stopped working because I had to do a re-install. I had to hunt for the picture of Evil Dragon's solution, the one that altered the default MIDI Editor Preferences quite a bit. There was no configuration file to import. You are expecting too much from this newbie. I'm not even understanding how rolling back to a previous update would have helped in that situation.

Consider that you would of course still have access to the earlier Reaper version. You could then just install that, and your configuration data would still work.

At that point I wasn't even aware of configuration files and/or that the Preferences is savable.

Maybe even install it as a portable copy, but do it then.

By the time I thought of the "multiple portable installations" idea, REAPER already expired by about a week.

And continue using the most recent version as another install . That is suboptimal, but hey, the point is, a moment ago you would have preferred the default situation of managing a load of portable installations frozen in a version from waaay back anyway.

I looked for differences between version 0.999 and 5.9x (I am remembering sessions I did with 5.9x) and came to the conclusion that Justin and company are not coitusing things up too much, meaning that what Evil Dragon stated about future REAPERs accepting older configuration files seem to be true. i couldn't test this but Evil Dragon could. He has versions 3.77 and 5.94? I will just have to believe him.

Even if the incompatibility situation was final and there was absolutely no way to configure the then-newest version based on your configuration export (this is a purely theoretical example), at least you would then be stuck with a much more recent version for your different stored configs, alongside the most recent version for your most recent experiments, and by then you would most likely have a more unified environment to do your stuff in, anyway, as you didn't lock yourself in with the old portable versions from get go.

Yes, you could do multiple portable installations if you wanted to.. I used to have one for mastering and one for writing/producing/mixing. But as time went on I realised that you always have those moments where you're working in one and you want the set up from the other one - so I went back to just one set up. Don't needlessly complicate things but also, try these things out for yourself to see what works for you. All the advice in the world is meaningless until you try if yourself.

In addition to the "snapshots" portable installations I was thinking of keeping a "normal install" for general composing. And if in the "normal install" I can't batch edit 20,000 midi items anymore, rather than configure or troubleshoot the "normal install", I could just use the "REAPER - Batch Edit 20,000 Midi Items" portable installation.

But I have uninstalled trial REAPER so I have to wait up to a year to buy REAPER 6.0.

I hope I've understood your points correctly and have answered accordingly. But this is all moot because I've abandoned the "multiple portable installations" idea. I have to say goodnight now because I'm waaaay late for my "test the current music-making method" time slot. It was a busy day offline too. I can't thank you enough for that solve. Super-helpful, that solve. Okay then, goodnight.

[Guenon]

I hope I've understood your points correctly and have answered accordingly. But this is all moot because I've abandoned the "multiple portable installations" idea.

Well, no, you are subtly talking about different things in your reply. I agree it's a moot point by now. Main thing is, all of this progressed somewhat, and you are on your way to making music, especially when you eventually get that Reaper license. I still have this gut feeling going on:

It feels like a big part of all this is just you trying to get all those reactions.

I'm not saying this just to you, as after reading your responses there is this pattern surfacing again, and I think there is a greater than zero probability you are doing these experiments also to get a rise out of people.

[bungle]

Where was it stated that Reaper 6 would be out in a year ?
I have never known them to announce any time frame on anything, in fact if i remember correctly the beta for 5 was about 18 months or something.
And why exactly are you waiting for 6 ?
Are you trying to maximise your buying potential by waiting for 6, thinking that you are getting more time with a licence ?
Stop kidding yourself and buy it now or just use it on the trial, you obviously aren't really serious about your music making so it is doubtful the developers would have an issue with you using the free trial until you are.