Reaper Gets An Awesome Sequencer (Finally!)

[bungle]

I believe Reaper was conceived for the same reason as many open-source projects - it existed to 'scratch an itch'.

In fact it is quite clear (Ask Justin, he has a site for that very thing) that a few years back Reaper would have gone open source if Justin could have found a way around the closed source libraries and such that Reaper uses.
Schwa would never have been hired if Justin had a huge interest in Reaper like he once had, this also contributes to the slowdown in Reaper development and the over exageration of 3rd party add ons.

[ras.s]

Ok, thanks.

[Burzukh_Studios]

It goes waaaay beyond a mod, and is in effect a new sequencer now. Your logic is as sound as linking this forum to Turing in a discussion. We are talking about jnif's work, and no, the Reaper devs are not doing it.

No, it is a mod of baby sequencer, end of story.

I love how with emphasizing "for YOU" you can nullify my positive comments on its functionality and stability. Going that way, we could just do away with all discussion posts on all forums, since all discussions are based on individual experiences and POV's.

No i nullified the fact that this plugin (Yes JS is a plugin format) is awesome in general, but wait in comparison to what, yes in comparison to it's original version 'baby sequencer' in comparison to other plugin sequencers it is just a nice JS experiment like most things in JS.

Did you try v. 20 with a vst drum machine ? Its actually quite enjoyable.

So we have gone from awesome to quite enjoyable, that i can agree with

It is very very rare that i agree with Whyterabbyt, but in this case people should read carefully and take note, there is little interest from the devs at cockos to work on anything big anymore and little tweaks are the order of the day (50 tiny tweaks in the changelog make people think it is "The fastest updated DAW")

Why is that important to the silliness touted when something like this plugin happens, because when a 3rd party uses JS or indeed the API (SWS) to do something that is actually useful, it is over emphasized by a lot of users.
Don't get me wrong here, in the last year or maybe even a lot more, there has been nothing added to Reaper by it's own devs that i would personally find useful, but SWS team add things that have made Reaper way more useful.

1. I dont think its a mod anymore, its become a new plug-in inspired by that old one.

2. I think your are underrating the usability of the JS plugins set in general, and this in particular.

3. I still think its awesome, I just meant that YOU might find it quite enjoyable. Strange how certain words cause a knee jerk reaction (like "awesome").

4. Just the fact that there is so much third party developement / customization seems awesome to me in itself. It reflects a certain mindset and it shows in the userbase. Its like a fugazi DAW to your metallica DAW of choice.

Just to be clear, if there wasnt a single new update for Reaper ever, I'd still be using it for a looong time, just because it has everything I need. Infact, I have to grow as a musician and producer just to avail a lot that it offers.

Guess we will have to agree to disagree.

[whyterabbyt]

It is very very rare that i agree with Whyterabbyt

[LawrenceF]

It's just a plugin.

Whether I find it personally useful or not I do appreciate guys like JNif who have both the skill and the inclination to do things like that for no compensation. If anyone else finds it useful, and apparently many do, his efforts were not in vain.

Thanks JNif.

So what, it's not all that pretty to look at. So what, other tools for step sequencing may do more. So what? He spent his own time improving it and I don't recall JNif on here telling everyone it was the greatest step sequencer ever.

If other people do that, that's just what daw users always do... whatever new thing they really like is always the best thing ever.

[Arglebargle]

I think it's safe to say the Reaper community is the best and most talented around.

[LawrenceF]

I think it's safe to say the Reaper community is the best and most talented around.

I think it's safer to say that nobody could ever make such a determination unless they personally belong to every single community on the net.

But again, see above, that's just what human tribes do... portray their "group" as special. Nothing new there.

Are you - really - not aware that there are hundreds of people in (for example) the Vegas scripting and extension community that have been doing those kinds of things for over a decade? Before Reaper was even created? That Vegas people script in multiple languages? That there is a thriving community of extension creators?

Probably not.

That's very likely where Justin got the idea from since he was a Vegas user before he created Reaper and it had an API. This stuff is not new, just new to some people who apparently have never seen it before.

[Arglebargle]

More nuggets of that patented LawrenceF wisdom, I see. Fear not, all, Lawrence is here to explain the nature of things to us!

[LawrenceF]

More nuggets of that patented LawrenceF wisdom, I see. Fear not, all, Lawrence is here to explain the nature of things to us!

Not "explaining" anything. Just giving my opinion like everyone else.

If you choose to believe the Reaper community is "the best and most talented" on the entire net, that's your choice. But like everyone else here I have the right to voice my opinion on that right?

My opinion - with which another $0.15 you can buy a Mars bar - is that such things are kinda silly. That talented people are everywhere... and yes, some are in the Reaper community also.

It's not wisdom, it's common sense.

Take note that - just like yours - my comments started with the two words..."I think."

[lfm]

b) another thread about future of Reaper stated one of admins there - that we don't understand the idea behind Reaper. Also stating there is no ambition to be top daw.

I tried to sum up my own conclusions on these statements and find that most probably Cockos team work on Reaper as money is coming in - no more than that..

Unlikely. CockOS was formed by someone who had made himself very wealthy from previous endeavours, and had zero need for income in the first place. Given that his shares in AOL were once worth nearly $60million, he's probably worth more than all but the largest audio software companies. Reaper's pricing and demo policy is undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that he doesnt have to care about revenue, an advantage no other audio development company Im aware of has.

I know Justin does not need to work another day in his life.

But how does that turn to - yes, we all go for Reaper, it has a brilliant future coming?


Is admiring Justin going to do that.
I admire Justin too but I'd say the opposite.

As a programmer I did a try to estimate what happend during the 3 years since I bought Reaper - and found the amount of improvement was not even one fulltime employee.

I suspect I'm not too far off in my idea that what ever comes in - goes to develop further. Justin is not sitting all days sweating over Reaper anymore.

I want a daw that is maintained properly, if there is such a piece of daw software. If that means fold and going against all my principles and getting hardware locks and run Cubase or ProTools - I don't know.

Some things are really cumbersome in Studio One - but I feel ambition and progress. And it works pretty well. And Presonus buying Notion would most likely mean S1 3.0 will have notation - progress, maintenance, progress, maintenance, progress....

To make a swedish reference - would you buy a SAAB car today?
You can possibly get spareparts for a while, but it will not make progress, will it. What you have is what you get, kind of.

I'm getting this further off topic I think - sorry, about that.

[woggle]

Just returning the the ot - I do like how each instance of the sequencer has continuously variable rate. I have not seen that before but have always wanted it. From an earlier post someone mentioned Modulys which also might have it, but costs about as much as Reaper in total.
So just that little aspect of the sequencer makes it a handy tool

[crimsonwarlock]

As a programmer I did a try to estimate what happend during the 3 years since I bought Reaper - and found the amount of improvement was not even one fulltime employee.

There is no way you can calculate (or even estimate) that without having access to the codebase... and I'm pretty sure you don't have that

[DocShay]

Wow @ people being negative just to be negative...smh the sequencer is very good, the v2 020 update made it better than fl's step sequencer for me.

[lfm]

As a programmer I did a try to estimate what happend during the 3 years since I bought Reaper - and found the amount of improvement was not even one fulltime employee.

There is no way you can calculate (or even estimate) that without having access to the codebase... and I'm pretty sure you don't have that

As a programmer and system builder you sometimes have to make written offers without having written a single line of code - so yes, I think I can. You go from experience how long different things take.

But sometimes you estimate wrong and need more hours, sometimes you are in the green.

I just tried to understand what is going on at that place - and why so little is happening and old bugs remain in there.

But if Reaper 5.0 now rise suddenly from the ashes - with VST3 support, VCA groups, all bug reports from 4 years back fixed and God knows what people have been screeming about - then my estimate would be dead wrong - obviously.

It's nice when products have progress and maintenance - safe investment, kind of. Bigger chance things eventually are fixed - whatever turns up.

Reaper is a stunning daw - it's really deserves better than rot with freeriders only using it in the end.

[deadbeef]

Sheesh, it's a bit much having to read people writing about you in this way.

A lot of my attention these last few years has gone into trying to make things work as well as possible, i.e. fixing bugs and improving compatibility. There is also a great deal of effort that goes into making sure that new features do not break things -- while you might complain about not enough getting done, the absolute worst thing would be for us to release new versions that have serious regressions.

Another limiting factor is, honestly, that it is much more difficult to write features that you do not wish to use yourself. Which isn't to say that we don't add features we don't intend use, because clearly we do add many features that we don't personally use, but it's just an order of magnitude easier to add something when you have a clear vision of what it is you want to use.

Anyway, to look at a finished product and say "in three years X people could do Y" is complete nonsense; if you wanted to exhaustively enumerate the feature set, performance, and stability differences between REAPER 3 years ago (I believe 3.73 or so) and REAPER today, that might be more revealing, possibly something you can draw conclusions from, but until that is done, meh.

Justin