I'm not afraid to post a Reaper thread...

[Numanoid]

[xNiMiNx]

One day i played 'It whips the llama's ass' backwards at 78 speed, and i saw reaper.

[fallacy]

Okay I will bite...
By no stretch do I "hate" Reaper. I will say however that after trying it (admittedly a few years ago now) the few plugins it did have included and the way they behaved lead me to believe that fans of the program probably have their favourite comps eqs, soft synths etc. covered by third party plugins... This was a little bit surprising to me...

So for the sake of conversation I ask, what makes Reaper to you that much better than any other DAW? I'm guessing it has something to do with mixing/routing or MIDI functionality? The price is certainly one good reason to like it, but I get the feeling that experienced people who have already spent a fortune on other DAWs have given it praise for other reasons... Enlighten me!

[lachrimae]

Maybe I missed it in the replies, but I don't think anyone said that Reaper is "that much better than any other DAW".
This thread was in response to the S1 thread where someone who loves their DAW was afraid to make a post about it because of all of the negative comments they expected to receive about it.
My point was to say that if you're happy with your DAW, why do you care what negative people say about it, especially if they're just saying the same thing over and over each time a thread pops up?

My personal opinion is that any of the DAWs that I own and am familiar with (S1Pro3, Cubase 8.5 Pro, Live 9 Suite, Reaper) are perfectly capable of being used to make good music. If someone spends their time shitting on them they're probably more prolific at complaining than making music...

I don't really have any interest in converting anybody to Reaper, just as I don't have any interest in converting someone away from their religion, so I'll just say that Reaper fits my workflow for day to day use even though I truly respect and sometimes use my other DAWs.

[incubus]

fallacy:

(gimme a beat)

"it's a joke thread, uh hun, it's a joke thread, ta dah, it's a joke thread, for laughs, it's a joke thread, alas"

It's was just the usual play on the studio one one, which was only 25% joke thread. (sorry blue)

[LawrenceF]

If someone spends their time shitting on them

It's just a "man thing". Men (more often, generally speaking) argue about and debate their "toys and stuff", from like, elementary school on.

Btw, Craftsman tools are king. All of the others suck. I was on the Black & Decker forum once and the people there pissed me off so much that I immediately sold all my B & D tools and now I only use Craftsman, the best!

B & D really pissed me off. I bought a B & D Phillips screwdriver once and it only worked on Phillips screws!!!!! Fool me once...

[lachrimae]

Ha, even my wife knows about the quality of B&D which she calls Black & Crapper.

A few years ago when I was on hiatus from music I recall someone saying on a motorcycle forum "You guys are the biggest complainers I've ever seen on the internet except for musicians".

I laughed because I knew he was right

[Boone777]

Just to answer the question why I like it so much:
It's faster than anything I used before (Sonar-Cubase-Logic).
Installation is faster, opening the project is faster.
And updates for me is on par with speed for importance. Nothing more frustrating than paying 500$ for a daw that stops working because no more updates.
The philosophy of Repaer team is to focus on existing functionality of the daw, the basic stuff, very well equipped basic stuff and not spend thousand of hours trying to create 'the new thing' so the platform is rock solid and constantly updated with more functionnality.
Other reason routing. In Logic you Aux,Bus,midi,instruments,audio... who cares! All tracks in Reaper can do anything no messing around. You want a bus? Drag and drop on track I/O to another that's it. You don't have to create a bus than assign 2 tracks for that bus using a drop down menu that takes forver to unroll...yuk I so don't miss that. Workflow is faster in general. There are some thing in Logic that I prefer though, tempo list or everything list for that mater but that's about it. Daws thare full equipped tend to be buggy and sluggish.
So yes keeping your money to buy your favorite plugins is a great addition. But when you are new to daws it's nice to have a selection so you can get to know what plugins can do and than compare functionnality/sound to third party.
Another thing cross platform was starting to be important for me too.
And themes that is so cool! Many themes to choose from, also track layouts you can change the appearance of your tracks it's nice to separate things in big projects.
Complete customization you build your own menus and buttons so the things you use the most are a the tip of your fingers. And macros lets you combine many actions..etc.
I'm a big fan but for good reasons.

[incubus]

"there is NO problem with liking reaper......."

[.jon]

The philosophy of Repaer team is to focus on existing functionality of the daw, the basic stuff, very well equipped basic stuff and not spend thousand of hours trying to create 'the new thing' so the platform is rock solid and constantly updated with more functionnality.

Besides you totally contradicting yourself there, lol, they have no such philosophy, and act in the exact opposite way- avoiding iterating on and fixing basic features at all costs (especially if it has anything to do with MIDI), introduce new bugs to old features and ship new features half-finished, even after spending ages on them. See: video editing, default 5.x theme.

It's hilariously unstable for a 10 year old app, and has more bugs than the rest of other DAWs combined. Users report hundreds of new bugs every month, and only 15-20 of these ever get fixed in a release. Which wouldn't be so bad, but there's always as many new bugs introduced as fixed , so the the backlog just grows and grows. Instead of working this backlog, they are currently working on a notation editor.

They literally do not test the code they release, because "testing never finds all the bugs so why bother at all". Give this a moment to properly sink in.

All that said, it's still a good DAW if you don't require reliability. When it crashes or I run into some new bug, I go to the gym or watch a movie maybe, nbd. When it works and you got it dialed in, it's amazing to work with. Furthermore with more features than anyone ever uses, it's statistically very likely that the new bugs simply didn't affect your workflow.

Cockos actual philosophy is "coding is self-expression", and apparently this desire to express themselves doesn't extend to testing, documentation, project management or quality control, which actually mean more to the user than whether the dev feels like a f**king wizard.

Probably no wonder to anyone why it remains a tinkerer's toy, good for hobbyists like me and maybe wannabe pros without clients so they have plenty of time to fiddle with the tool and not music itself. If sales figures actually mattered to Cockos, then situation would most likely be different. As it is, they don't give a rats ass whether anyone buys their software or not, they make it for themselves.

Ever wondered why it's so cheap? Because at regular DAW price, users would start expecting the same things they expect from Steinberg, Cakewalk, Avid et al. Meeting these expectations would require effort.

How's that for a daw rant.

[PALU]

I'm a Reaper user for few years now and to be honest it's reliable for me - no crashes here... But I fully understand why people hate it and the Reaper fanboyism is like a red rag to a bull .

[.jon]

It's never crashed on me in a "critical" situation, never lost a recording for example, so in that sense I can say it's reliable as well. I wouldn't hesitate to use for some important recording, it does that really well. However, using a lot of the other functionality causes it crash here a few times every week.

[MRT]

I was a Energy XT/Cakewalk user for years and both evolved to a point were I felt like I was spending more time fiddling with the app and not doing anything productive. I moved to Reaper and have been very happy about the move.
So I say find a DAW you enjoy using and stick with it and if your really lucky you will be able to make your M1 sound modern!

[woodsdenis]

I downloaded the demo to see what the fuss is about, amazingly customisable . There are pages of "Actions" you can key command/macro etc. The vids on the site by Kenny G (not the sax player !!!) are really well done. Some of the ideas notably the export naming, and the new automation actions are brilliantly clever.

Not intending to switch as Cubase suits me ATM but if I was starting out its amazing value and a massive feature set, very impressive.

[Boone777]

[

All that said, it's still a good DAW if you don't require reliability. When it crashes or I run into some new bug, I go to the gym or watch a movie maybe, nbd. When it works and you got it dialed in, it's amazing to work with. Furthermore with more features than anyone ever uses, it's statistically very likely that the new bugs simply didn't affect your workflow.

Probably no wonder to anyone why it remains a tinkerer's toy, good for hobbyists like me and maybe wannabe pros without clients so they have plenty of time to fiddle with the tool and not music itself. If sales figures actually mattered to Cockos, then situation would most likely be different. As it is, they don't give a rats ass whether anyone buys their software or not, they make it for themselves.

Ever wondered why it's so cheap? Because at regular DAW price, users would start expecting the same things they expect from Steinberg, Cakewalk, Avid et al. Meeting these expectations would require effort.

How's that for a daw rant.

Some studios run on Reaper. Truth is every DAW will fail at some point. Everything I've tried will crash eventually but you seem to have more bugs than everybody else that happens with some configs. The first culprit for crash are plugins.They are very quick to fix bugs, for request yes some of them have been on hold for a while.