Reaper 5?

[lfm]

The issues happen when you're doing multi-tracking with instruments like synthesizers or drums and drum-synths. Here, that 5ms out-of-phase comb filtered effect is definitely audible because it isn't a minor timing issue that affects your playing, it actually applies a comb filter to the sounds you're working with!

Most important would be to calibrate all hardware inputs, even on the same interface.


I use RME HDSP 9632, which has two built in AD, and I have AI4S addon card with 4 extra inputs. Calibrating these 4 extra showed 6 samples shorter delay than built in.

When running both lined and miked input from a guitar, and one on built in AD and one on piggyback card it was enough to start a combing effect. It took a while to figure out why trying to mix in from both always turned to the worse.

So any multi mike setup, this may occur. A near mike and a room mike will comb a bit.

So if soundcard has some inputs and you add on input through ADAT - these other preamps with ADAT out might have different delays.

So calibrate it all and you will be fine.

So if to record live - the full setup calibrated and setup saved as a track or project template - and you are fine. I did that for Reaper with time_delay JS script set on appropriate tracks and recorded clips lined up nicely either input they came from.

Calibrating midi and audio is also necessary depending on gear. I found that external synths that have free running oscillators it will be a random thing where in the period of first wave cycle you get recorded. I you have a note with fundamental frequency at 1k you have 1ms randomness to anything you see, at 500Hz 2ms, at 100Hz 10ms randomness and bass note at 40Hz 25ms. So calibrate with at least 1khz note or higher, upper octaves - and gear delay is easier to find.

Reaper issue is monitoring through, if any plugin latency at all - because it adds one ASIO buffer if so just one sample plugin delay. So roundtrip latency increase by multiple of ASIO buffers if a single sample delay in there - so you better not use input plugins with latency or you are in for a treat. But external hardware monitoring and you are fine.

[aciddose]

So, I say go ahead and I'm positive they'll listen to you carefully (maybe EvilDragon can bring attention to your post there as well, as he is an active member there).

Well certain posts I've checked when considering posting about a new bug/issue. Some of these I posted years and years ago, like my suggestion for an option to deal with old style VSTGUI mouse-wheel handling.

That post got some replies (I think possibly even from EvilDragon) but no further attention, and now it... well, it's very old. I don't want to just bump the post over and over.

Anyway as far as that concern, since I've installed the latest version I'm trying to set up a proper test to confirm if it is still an issue or not. I see per-plugin you have "buggy plugin compatibility mode" although I'm not sure where I might find a list of exactly what measures this activates. The name isn't exactly self-documenting. It's plugin Raid to kill the bugs, right?

http://wiki.cockos.com/wiki/index.php?t ... ugin&go=Go

Nothing shows up here...

So I'll need to actually put in a ton of effort to test which messages are sent with a vendorspecific call logger/printout (special debugging plugin) after I confirm that a test-case plugin responds to the old message in my own host but not in Reaper with the options enabled/disabled. Even then due to limited documentation I still couldn't say for sure if the feature is actually in there or not.

So you can see why I get a bit demotivated.

[aciddose]

But external hardware monitoring and you are fine.

I think you don't fully understand all this stuff. Did you read all my posts in this thread on the issue and check the example .wav I linked?

Hardware monitoring when playing live would make sense, but this is totally irrelevant here and would actually be worse rather than better. (I'd need to delay the hardware to line up with the DAW output manually, but I'd need a hardware delay to do it! This would be insane.)

[aciddose]

Does anyone have a suggestion for where I should post such a thing in the Reaper forum? Looking at it I honestly can't figure out where such a technical report/question/suggestion should be placed.

Is it a bug? Well that depends upon whether it is actually possible and just a hidden option somewhere deep in the bowels of Reaper.

Is it a feature request? I suppose so, assuming it isn't in there. Do I really want to get buried with the billion other feature requests that are totally impractical for those guys to actually implement? I'd like the ability to post something technical and have people keep quiet if they don't understand. I'd like a programmer to read it and say "you idiot, that doesn't make any sense" or "wow you're right, we should fix this" or "didn't you RTFM?", that's all I want really. I don't want tons of replies telling me how to "solve" my problem that people don't even bother to understand before suggesting a "solution" that doesn't even apply.

[EvilDragon]

I think this is the first time (this thread) I've bothered to go into such huge detail about it and why it's a problem.

It's a good thing you did. I do get the importance of the issue for you. I'll try and push it when I see the chance


As for where to put the forum discussion, technically if Justin replies on askjf that Reaper doesn't have that, it's a FR. If it does and something's broken, it's a bug report. But the most activity (apart from the lounge) is in the first subforum - Reaper General Discussion Forum. You could get the most attention there.

[aciddose]

Well the thing that bugs me is that he posted "Note: please do not ask questions about REAPER features, bugs or scheduling, use the forums instead."

I can completely understand why. Nobody wants to pollute the thing with a ton of "RTFM" types of questions.

I considered asking my question in "Q&A, Tips, Tricks and Howto", just that I'm led to believe that even if I posted exactly the same thing I posted on the "askJF" site some tiny fraction of people reading it would understand what I was talking about because the majority of people in the forum there are well, artists/musicians. They're generally not technical. I mean generally of course because I consider a programmer an artist equal to a painter or musician, just that unlike a musician a programmer generally if experienced enough will absolutely have to know the technical details of their tools.

For example asking about a language, a compiler or technique/algorithm on a general programming forum will usually get you pretty good answers, often by experts. On the Reaper forum however I think asking for technical information on the internals of Reaper you're only going to get good answers from the programmers and you'll almost certainly get a ton of pollution from guitarists who don't know what they're talking about.

Although there are some pretty bad-ass guitarists out there who can build their own guitars with little computers inside they designed and built themselves and so on, I just doubt they make up any significant percentage of the forum users.

I might make an attempt later on, we'll see what Justin answers.

[Hank the Knife]

I just want to add that I am a middle aged guy (my name is actually not HTK lol) and my ears are still excellent. So I gave it a try. What bothers me is that when I hear something went wrong, I usually can't detect what it is. Which is obvious, of course. For I'm just a noob. So I'm very grateful for all these posts, because my time is limited. Thanks. I maybe have 5 or 10 years til my ears won't hear high frequencies no more. If I'm lucky

[EvilDragon]

Yeah QA subforum might be also a good starting point. But General Discussion is where things are discussed a lot. However it's a bit crowded in there considering R5 just got out, so perhaps after that wave is over...


There are plenty of experienced Reaper users that could throw in their part into the discussion about the issue you proposed. Some of them are even here on KvR (Mercado Negro, for example, Lawrence, etc.).

[Burillo]

i don't have the funds to upgrade now (i had version 3.x license), but going back to discussion of REAPER in general, i have mostly positive feelings of it. most of the stuff in REAPER's workflow just "clicks" with me. maybe part of it is me being a software developer myself, so i kind of relate to the pragmatic mindset, but regardless, everything how i would imagine a DAW would work, REAPER just does. i used a few DAWs before REAPER, but none of them worked for me as i struggled to do even simplest things, because they were so unintuitive and assumed a lot of prior knowledge. and when i say "prior knowledge" i mean "the way hardware works" - because whatever the question about why this or that works this way or that way in a "traditional" DAW like Cubase, the answer is usually "because that's the way hardware mixers worked". REAPER is free of that legacy, and as a consequence becomes much more intuitive to people that don't carry the baggage of older days.

for example, i never understood the separation between MIDI and audio, mono/stereo/multichannel audio - i always thought of them as "signals" and saw no reason why they wouldn't mix (they obviously wouldn't in a hardware setting, but we're in software! we can forego this limitation!). other DAWs just assume they should be separate - and so they are, but lo and behold - REAPER does away with that.

i never understood the big difference between instruments and effects and why can't i treat them the same way instead of setting up some arcane routing for "instrument tracks", and even more arcane routing for MIDI generators like arpegiators or Jamstix - other DAWs do it apparently because it's a convention that someone came up with a long time ago. voila, REAPER doesn't, too.

i never understood why folder track isn't a bus by default, because that's the obvious direction the signal will flow. apparently someone thought that was a good idea, so most DAWs simply go with it without questioning why. REAPER doesn't. and it does infinite depth folders too.

i never understood why can't i route a track into any other track, or route part of the audio in some other track, or route MIDI the same way i route audio (both in terms of doing MIDI sends and in terms of bussing). REAPER does that too.

i never understood why can't i simply unload a plugin from memory or do partial freezes (i.e. freezing part of the FX chain, but not all of it). REAPER does that too.

i have my share of gripes with REAPER, don't get me wrong. and every once in a while i start to look around and see if something has come up that has a better GUI than REAPER, and better tools than REAPER (or rather tools that don't require so much manual work, installing extensions, scripting and whatnot), but alas, the things i mentioned above are nowhere to be found outside of REAPER. and since these are the core tenets of my workflow, REAPER is simply the only available choice for me - so i have to tolerate its downsides so that i can enjoy its tremendous upsides.

[lfm]

But external hardware monitoring and you are fine.

I think you don't fully understand all this stuff. Did you read all my posts in this thread on the issue and check the example .wav I linked?

Hardware monitoring when playing live would make sense, but this is totally irrelevant here and would actually be worse rather than better. (I'd need to delay the hardware to line up with the DAW output manually, but I'd need a hardware delay to do it! This would be insane.)

No, I did not read all your posts, just a reaction to and expansion of the quoted one.

If all is setup to sound properly with external monitoring, and you calibrate your recording device for different internal delays - they will sound the same when starting to mix the recorded material.

This is nothing to do with lining up room mike to get a transient in the same spot as a near mike, they should be different due to time of travel for sound per se. Just converters and asio interface stuff need to line up every input on the sample.

If you record mixed audio and midi, special care might be needed to calibrate those. If having midi triggers on drums etc to easily replace later, or as help to line up project with tempo grid. Different synths may have different propagation delays from midi in to audio out etc, but if doubling with VSTi in daw no delay compensation is usually needed.

That's all I meant to say, maybe in too many words.

[lfm]

i never understood why folder track isn't a bus by default, because that's the obvious direction the signal will flow. apparently someone thought that was a good idea, so most DAWs simply go with it without questioning why. REAPER doesn't. and it does infinite depth folders too.

Yes, that is one of the greatest daw mysteries, why not every daw has that copied that by now. And also available in mixer/console view.

Some daws let you place a bus in a folder track, but some don't even allow that. Your project become spaghetti routing with poor overview.

[Burillo]

No, I did not read all your posts, just a reaction to and expansion of the quoted one.

which is why your posts don't address concerns that aciddose has raised.

If all is setup to sound properly with external monitoring, and you calibrate your recording device for different internal delays - they will sound the same when starting to mix the recorded material.

...which is totally not what aciddose was talking about. he was talking about latency compensation when doing live output. recorded sounds and background sounds do sounds align on the recording, but don't align during monitoring (i.e. the live output is not latency-compensated against the background).

[egbert]

Good stuff, Acidose. I appreciate that you took the trouble to spell out the issue - your last post was very clear and I think anyone who wants to could follow.

I wish some of the others that bag Reaper would be a bit more specific about what they want to and can't do. I use other hosts too but find the fast starting, very stable and extremely efficient Reaper indispensable. Score display of MIDI is coming later in V5 and (hopefully) also in S1v3.

[Obsolete236871]

I really like the whole idea of Reaper, but it never clicked with me when using it in the past. Everything seems so counter-intuitive and I don't want to spend a month in order to customize it to a point where it might be halfway usable. Reaper seems like a DAW that appeals more to the typical tech-nerds and experimentalists who like to write scripts (hence the inclusion of a script IDE makes sense) and customize their user interface and setup complex effect routings etcetera. For someone who just wants to make music, especially music that is midi/virtual instruments based, it might be too much of a hassle setting it up.

[Burillo]

I really like the whole idea of Reaper, but it never clicked with me when using it in the past. Everything seems so counter-intuitive and I don't want to spend a month in order to customize it to a point where it might be halfway usable. Reaper seems like a DAW that appeals more to the typical tech-nerds and experimentalists who like to write scripts (hence the inclusion of a script IDE makes sense) and customize their user interface and setup complex effect routings etcetera. For someone who just wants to make music, especially music that is midi/virtual instruments based, it might be too much of a hassle setting it up.

i wouldn't say that. while i consider myself a "tech nerd", i never customized anything in REAPER beyond going through the trouble of picking a skin i like and moving a couple of toolbars. (and according to the interview, neither does the developer). well, and created a couple of template tracks and a default project, if that counts as customization. while i appreciate the depth and will likely try writing a few scripts at some point, when i'm using it, i take of my "tech nerd" hat. but, as i said above, REAPER has indeed "clicked" with me, so maybe it's simply not for you.

that said, i don't see much in REAPER 5 that would warrant the upgrade from v4. i will upgrade, of course, because last time i paid something to the devs was during early 3.xx days and i'd like to support further development of REAPER, but really, i don't see anything as big as stuff that came with 3.x or 4.x releases.