Very substantial new Reaper version 2.4

[Art Evans]

Justin should hire a good project manager/business analyst to prioritize requirements and focus his talent on getting Reaper to the current state of the art, including an audio editor and vastly improved midi/workflow/gui.

Should he? Why? You're making some pretty sweeping assumptions about his personal and business objectives. Your advice sounds like a pretty good way to stifle his creativity and/or turn Reaper into yet another lookalike DAW.

Throw in a few unique features now and then to get eyes and dollars from all the seasoned DAW users.

You clearly have no idea about the way Cockos works. If that kind of "let's milk the customers" way of doing things is what you admire, that explains why you may have fallen for it from the other companies you've bought all those "top level DAWs" from.

I think the thing that is irritating about these "Great new improvements in Reaper" threads is that so many of the new improvements are not new at all - just new to Reaper and not in areas that matter to me and some others who have many top level DAWS already.

But it does matter to you. You're interested not only enough to read about it, but to bother to post about it too. You say you want Reaper to cover the basics. This is what some of this release is about. But you want that kept quiet? Why?

I truely could complete all my projects in Cubase, Logic, Sonar, DP, PT, Samplitude and even Live but never in Reaper as it currently exists.

Well, that's good to know. I can and do complete all my projects in Reaper, and all the better with each new release. So I won't need to spend the money you've spent.

Two years ago Reaper appeared to be moving fast in the direction of being a complete DAW but the line of "wait until tomorrow" is now old and worn. Justin could make Reaper the brightest star in the DAW world and may truely have that intention but until the basics are covered to the level of the current top DAW players Reaper will just be another new kid in town looking for some attention.

Two years ago Reaper was very new and the notion that it then "appeared to be moving fast in the direction of being a complete DAW" is pretty daft. What made you think that? In your opinion, given that you've clearly an expert in the matter, which of the current top DAW players had reached Reaper's current overall state of development after about two and a half years into their development?

You're also assuming that Reaper users are first-time DAW users - as, if your assertion of the clear superiority of the others were true, of course nobody using them would either add Reaper to their toolset, let alone ditch them for something else. A little reading in the Reaper forums would show you that a significant number of Reaper users find it better in many respects for the tasks they need to accomplish than the programs they were using before. Doesn't that completely undermine just about everything you've said?

If only people took the trouble to read the sticky thread at the top of this forum and reflect that there is no single perfect 'DAW' program, and there never will be. Reaper is a tool that is very good for certain jobs. As time goes by, it gets better for doing some of those jobs, and it becomes usable for doing others it wasn't good for before, and that's worth people knowing. If you didn't want it discussed until it fulfilled your arbitrary notion of a perfect DAW - well, sorry, just avoid threads with the word Reaper in the title.

[Bevoss]

Yes, a brilliant update! Scrub/Jog works perfect, and tested as super-accurate too on a one-sample click (<one sample). The cue rendering and drag-and-drop rendering have really rounded out the audio features now...who needs an audio editor when you can do it all in the arrange window of Reaper?

Nice to know there's going to be a few more of these giant updates before I have to shell out for V3 too...

[aMUSEd]

I've been requesting piano roll upgrades for months now and not a single person has even replied in any of my threads on the REAPER forums. Sadly, this feature (or lack thereof) is the only thing really holding me back and it doesn't look like it's going to get changed.

I've been requesting a number of midi improvements since I first bought Reaper such as spline automation envelopes and improvements to automation and they are beginning to get implemented so hang in there.

[koolkeys]

Ok, time for another "why do people say that" post(as if anyone cares, but I'm bored).

The argument that Reaper is further in three years than the major players were is completely irrelevant. Yeah, it's a good argument statement, and technically might be true. But it's like comparing last year's New England Patriots to the 1972 Miami Dolphins and trying to figure out who is better.

First of all, when the major players started, we didn't have the full range of features that modern hosts are expected to have. We didn't have the same amount of systems to be compatible with. They didn't have as many well-established hosts to compare to and draw ideas from. No, THEY had to do the brainstorming with all the new technologies coming into play. They had to deal with deciding the best way to implement even the most basic features. And they quite possibly had to do so with development tools that were inferior to the ones available today.

Not to mention that they had a smaller user pool to draw from compared to today. When many of them were first developing, the technologies weren't quite as accessible yet as they are today. Less home users especially.

They didn't get as far as Reaper did in three years time because they couldn't. It's not even fair to have expected that.

On the other hand, Reaper started in a world where hosts were widespread. It started where the "best practices" had already been ironed out in many cases. It did so in a world that had already evolved. So the natural thing to do is to code like a madman to catch up to the current standards. Take every idea you can from every host you can and put it in there. It's not like Reaper was developed as some revolutionary, workflow-changing miracle of software. No. It's a combination of the best ideas from multiple hosts, and that's been said by the dev himself at one point.

And it's still catching up, IMO. But it's already got a LOT of groundwork already done for it. It has a higher standard it has to hit, and more technologies and system combinations and more users to draw from. It's growing up in a completely different world, and considering that it's not something revolutionary or vastly different from the competition, it NEEDS to develop fast or it will fall behind.

There is nothing wrong with this approach. Justin and co. has done a fantastic job of building a host in a short amount of time. But acting like it's somehow legitimate to compare it to the development speeds of the established hosts in their early days, that's just silly isn't it?

By the way, it's not always about the speed of development. It's about the implementation of the features that are there, and the usability. And for me PERSONALLY, it fails still in that area. I think THAT is what should be worked on before trying to become a host-killer(which is what many users seem to want). My opinion doesn't matter, of course. But I'm entitled to it, and I think it makes sense.

I think Reaper will continue to get better, and good luck to them. Competition is healthy. Just as Reaper has been influenced by several other hosts, and taken ideas from them, maybe other hosts will eventually do the same from Reaper. It all just means better tools for all of us, doesn't it?

Brent

[koolkeys]

who needs an audio editor when you can do it all in the arrange window of Reaper?

Do you even have to ask this? Are you implying(please correct me if I'm mistaken- it's late!) that Reaper can do everything you would want to do in an audio editor? Because there isn't a host out there that does, to my knowledge.

(I genuinely could be reading you wrong there, so please let me know if I did)

Brent

[headquest]

...who needs an audio editor when you can do it all in the arrange window of Reaper?

Is that:
A) a joke?
B) over-enthusiasm
C) lack of knowledge/experience of what professional audio editors like Sound FOrge, Audition, Wavelab, Peak, etc do?

Hopefully, A)...

[headquest]

Adobe with all their resources have only just started adding midi recording and editing to Audition, which (via Cool Edit) goes back to the ark.

Well, the late 90s anyway

I really don't think Audition is a very good illustration for your point though. Audition is first and formost a wave editor that competes against Wavelab and Soundforge (primarily), not sequencers like Cubase/Sonar/Reaper.

Also I'm sure you realise that the team who do Audition is a very small one too (compared to Sonar/Cubase/etc) and that in addition to MIDI sequencing they added a huge raft of improvements to Audition 3 last year...

...and that in addition to all that they developed (from scratch) and released a brand new product (Soundbooth) plus are now testing a major upgrade to that...? So they are hardly slacking!

At the end of the day I think what most matters is whether a programme does what you/I want it to do NOW, not the promise of what it *might* do in a few years time. The people posting here who have waited 2 years+ for better MIDI editing in Reaper illustrate that point quite well, in the same way that from your point of view Audition may presently be disappointing.

[Bevoss]

d) intimate knowledge of Reaper...

but feel free to post some examples of what you THINK Reaper can't do...

[headquest]

d) intimate knowledge of Reaper...

but feel free to post some examples of what you THINK Reaper can't do...

As an audio editor, let's start with:

+ snap to zero crossings (did Justin relent and add that yet?)
+ Frequency spectrum editing and processing with lassoo, marquee tools, etc
+ spot healing brush
+ Top/Tail views?
+ Batch conversion of sample rates, bit rate, file type, dithering etc
+ seperate L/R destructive processing of effetcs, sample reverse, etc
+ Spectral Pan and Phase displays
+ processing audio within video
+ Automatic Click/pop removal
+ Adaptive noise reduction

...This could all take awhile to list...

[koolkeys]

d) intimate knowledge of Reaper...

but feel free to post some examples of what you THINK Reaper can't do...

I think you are highly narrowing the width of what you think audio editors are used for. I sure as heck can't do spectral editing in Reaper. I can't do direct editing of every sample point in Reaper. Reaper doesn't have batch processing that would stand up to any dedicated editor. Adaptive noise reduction, automatic phase correction, advanced audio restoration tools; just a few examples of what audio editors are good for(and I'm just going by Audition). The list goes on and on.

There's nothing wrong with a host not being able to do these things. That's why we HAVE dedicated audio editors. But thinking for a second that any host can do what a dedicated editor can just shows that you maybe are limiting what you think of as "audio editing".

Brent

[headquest]

There's nothing wrong with a host not being able to do these things. That's why we HAVE dedicated audio editors. But thinking for a second that any host can do what a dedicated editor can just shows that you maybe are limiting what you think of as "audio editing".

Brent

+1

[Art Evans]

A) a joke?
B) over-enthusiasm
C) lack of knowledge/experience of what professional audio editors like Sound FOrge, Audition, Wavelab, Peak, etc do?

Indeed I suspect a fair bit of "a", but also, it does rather depend on how you define an audio editor and what you want to do. Reaper's ripple editing makes editing audio (music or speech) very easy, together with other features I won't bore you with summarising, but it certainly doesn't have the restoration features of (say) Audition.

At the end of the day I think what most matters is whether a programme does what you/I want it to do NOW, not the promise of what it *might* do in a few years time.

I entirely agree, that's an extremely good way of looking at it. My whole discussion about the pace of development however is concerned with addressing the disappointment that some feel in either the pace or the direction. Cockos have actually promised very little - wisely! So I think most of the disappointment can only be related to what people hoped for rather than what they were told would happen. On the basis that the licence you buy is for the product as it is, all one can do is to bump the feature requests occasionally, in the hope that your view of the Reaper roadmap is the same as the developers'. The cue features in this version were first discussed in Feb 2006, for instance. It's taken a while to arrive, but it's typical that the way it's been done goes beyond the basics, and has features I know some Audition users would like to see (transfer of file cues to timeline markers).

The developers also continue to be extremely responsive to users' feedback - with the scrub features just introduced, you could say they spent too much time tweaking it to users' liking in multiple pre-release versions, but there's not much point in introducing that feature unless you do it the way people are going to use it (hence perhaps the fact that it's taken them a little while to grit their teeth and add it!). Again, Audition users would be glad to have the quality and accuracy of the result - assuming they are interested in scrub at all, which many are not. (Not to mention the configuration options - some argue that Reaper has too many pages of preferences, but options are the constant demand of users, and now the prefs have a search feature, the number of pages is less of a problem).

Coming onto the scene late in the day, sure they don't need to think out features from scratch, but looking at it the other way round, people's expectations are now much higher than they used to be. Unless each feature is implemented better than DAW "X" people complain. And the code still has to be written.

If you study the history of Reaper - which could make a quite interesting book - the first chapter is Justin sitting in front of DAW "X" and being profoundly dissatisfied with the product itself and with the company behind it. He set out to do something better for his own music making and ended up realising it could be of wider interest. It's bound to reflect his own approach and interests, but at the same time he certainly won't want to end up producing something too much like the product whose shortcomings (as he saw them) prompted the development of Reaper in the first place, nor will he want a slew of dissatisfied users out there who feel that promises have not been kept and users not listened to.

Personally I can't wait to see what the next release brings, but for those to whom it's all a big bore - well, you have the right to yawn!

[koolkeys]

If you study the history of Reaper - which could make a quite interesting book - the first chapter is Justin sitting in front of DAW "X" and being profoundly dissatisfied with the product itself and with the company behind it. He set out to do something better for his own music making and ended up realising it could be of wider interest. It's bound to reflect his own approach and interests, but at the same time he certainly won't want to end up producing something too much like the product whose shortcomings (as he saw them) prompted the development of Reaper in the first place, nor will he want a slew of dissatisfied users out there who feel that promises have not been kept and users not listened to.

This is pretty much how most new hosts get started. And Justin SHOULD keep on a planned path. I think part of the problem though(and one negative aspect of it) is that he has listened to too many users. I personally feel this is how Reaper has gotten to be a little less ergonomic and even bloated in some areas. Hopefully he can keep enough of a focused vision that it doesn't continue to get worse.

Brent

[Art Evans]

I personally feel this is how Reaper has gotten to be a little less ergonomic and even bloated in some areas.

Personally - ymmv - I find it quite easy to ignore the bits that don't relate to what I do. The interface hasn't changed that much since day one, when it's 'idle', in terms of content I mean. I can still pretend that none of that nasty midi stuff is in there to sully a great audio app. (Joke, ok?) Now if you add some of the great extensions people are writing, then you can indeed get to see some remarkably long menu dropdowns, but typically you'll be keyboard-shortcutting the stuff you use most rather than rummaging and right clicking. You can type "?" at any time then type in the action you are looking for. And once you get the idea that every element is a route to a context menu, it's not too hard to find your way around.

I think it's pretty significant that with each new release, the release notes say very little about how the new features work. You're just told they are there. The idea is that you find them where you would expect to find them, and the number of forum posts from people who can't understand how things work is actually pretty small. I know of one chap who is past retirement age and had never used a DAW before, and who now uses Reaper for editing classical music concert recordings for FM radio. He rings very occasionally for guidance, but he's "got it" pretty fast.

Now I've forgotten what we were talking about...

[Art Evans]

Ah yes.

And Justin SHOULD keep on a planned path.

As he hasn't told us the planned path, wisely, then for all we know he's sticking to it.

What seems to have changed is the daily releases. A more conventional pattern of beta testing bulk changes over a period now seems to be the method, perhaps reflecting the proportionately huge take on of new staff recently, (from two to three, it seems) and perhaps now that's more the way to go. Anyone wanting the bleeding edge versions know where to go to get bloody, and those who simply want to get on with using the program to produce results don't have the daily diversion of new versions.