Polarized opinions about Reaper

[.jon]

My experience with Reaper since the day dot it came out is that, it's always been buggy and crash prone, which has been compounded with a convoluted, intimidating interface with huge bloated menu's within menu's (Yes you can configure them but that's not the point). There's lack of clear development, it's ad-hoc and unstructured, built upon 17 years of dated legacy code. It's a poor man's daw with big holes in it... Lack of core instruments, quality FX with modern GUI's is one of the biggest aspects, that has always turned me off from using Reaper and taking it seriously and is why I rather spend the time and effort using more established daws from the bigger players that do, and from developers that listen and understand what an effective learning and accessible workflow curve is.

Buggy? Crash-prone? Is that your attempt at irony?

It is buggy and more crash-prone than any other DAW except Tracktion/Waveform out of the one's I've used or tried. They believe in-house testing never finds all the bugs, so they don't do it. It's tested voluntarily by a small group of fans instead. In Reaper's case, this has proven to be less efficient at providing solid development than the conventional way. It's two steps forward, one step back, hence the frantic release pace.

INTRANCER has many solid and true points, but on the other hand Reaper has lots of very functional stuff that others don't and often even implemented cleverly.

It has a generous demo scheme and for a reason, if you're considering it do take the time and dive deep into it before committing completely. It is an indie project by a minimal team who mainly develop the software for themselves, and as such it's benefits and shortcomings compared to large scale software projects.

[Boone777]

Personnaly I've been having almost no crash compared to Cubase Logic or Sonar. Usually it's because of a plugin when crash happens.

[EvilDragon]

No, Reaper is not crash-prone at all. There are people recording massive multitracked live gigs with it. They wouldn't do it if it were crash-prone. In the unlikely event that it does crash, in 100% of cases over here, it was plugin's fault, not Reaper's. Solution? Firewall the plugin by running it in a separate process. Then Reaper continues sailing, and only plugin crashes, when it happens, it can be reloaded. Other than that, no... I can do all sorts of wicked stuff in Reaper DURING PLAYBACK AND EVEN RECORDING (like moving items around, doing edits on items, you name it), without it ever crashing. It is rock solid like that.

Crashes can, and do happen in prereleases, from time to time. Those are fixed immediately. But then again, those are prereleases.

[himalaya]

I have configured Reaper to run as a big 'synthesiser' with many project tabs, each tab housing a synth or several layers of synth plugins. Then, I have custom actions configured in such a way that I send midi program changes to Reaper (from a very special midi-controller) and it switches from one project tab to another ( from one massive 'preset' to another). But it does it in a very complex manner. The actions are designed to do lots of 'utility' tasks, to kill midi-stuck notes (if such appear) deal with audio 'pops', etc.

It never crashed even once when doing this.

This system was tested live at NAMM and MusicMesse. It works like a dream. The engine is as solid as I would ever wish it to be.

[EvilDragon]

...and there you have it. So much about being "crash-prone".

[jonljacobi]

Hmm, I've never had Reaper crash once on me. But my usage is rather simple and infrequent. I'd say the opinion polarization stems basically from the interface. The sheer volume of features and how they're described and presented is rather daunting. The menus in particular.

[BMoore]

Reaper has never crashed on me.
And it's default workflow and setup, to me, was a huge turn off initially.
But as I liked the quick startup, fast handling and light footprint, I took some time to set it up to fit my workflow (both GUI, editing, and tools), and I never looked back.

There are still some flows that could be improved, to my taste, but it's 95% there.

[Spencer Maddox]

I have to further confirm the notion that most have been saying. Reaper has been a rock for me. I've owned it for years and whenever I used it I have had positive experiences. I have many things that I will constructively critique about reaper but Honestly Stability is not one. Now of course everyone is different and its worth noting I use reaper for audio, so im not throwing on VSTIs all over the place like I am with Ableton or Bitwig. And I am also Not going to say that those who have had issues have invalid points because reaper could very well be unstable on their computer. Software can be weird.
But I personally, have had a positive relationship with the program.

[SJ_Digriz]

I actually have found that pretty much every host is rock solid unless you stumble across the magic button. As said before, it's almost always a plugin problem, not a host problem.

[Winstontaneous]

IME Reaper on Windows is very stable, OSX not so much. Also last I checked the awesome tab/plugin window handling I love about Reaper on Windows doesn't carry over to OSX.

It's definitely a hacker/RTFM/roll-your-own-functionality program, kinda the modular synth of DAWs. For some this feels like complete freedom, for others it induces extreme anxiety.

I generally prefer programs with a more focused feature set that I can fully master, great built-in instruments, and comprehensive control surface support so I use Ableton Live more.

One thing I love about both Live & Reaper compared to most other DAWs is the simplicity with which I can record arbitrary combos of realtime audio output (not bouncing or rendering) without complicated bussing/routing/plugins/system audio stream capture.

[ghettosynth]

I actually have found that pretty much every host is rock solid unless you stumble across the magic button. As said before, it's almost always a plugin problem, not a host problem.

I have not found this to be true at all. Cubase and Live have been consistently more crash prone than Reaper given the same set of plugins. So, even if it's ultimately the interaction between host and plugin, Reaper has been consistently more stable in identical environments.

That said, both Cubase and Live have become much more reliable in recent years.

Now, when we combine both reliability and efficiency into a single score, Reaper wins hands down.

The new instability and inefficient top pig on the block is Reason with VSTs. It's really almost useless for big projects with lots of plugins.

[SJ_Digriz]

I actually have more Reaper crash problems than Cubase crash problems. Reaper works for shit with VEP.

[EvilDragon]

That could also be VEP's problem... do they officially support Reaper, even?

[Guenon]

It is buggy and more crash-prone than any other DAW

I use it for large projects (hundreds of tracks, 60-ish Kontakt instances in the main template, some Reaktor instances, Zebras, a load of Fabfilter and Cytomic stuff, and so on) and literally have it on for days on end. That is, I'm not closing Reaper or the open project(s) in the mean time, and they stay open, don't crash, don't hang, and it's dependable as hell, 24/7. The uptime of my dedicated music/audio workstation (Win 7 64bit, i7-3770k, Asus P8Z77-V, 32GB RAM, RME HDSPe AIO) is usually in the magnitude of several weeks, and when ever I'm running large projects like that, Reaper is doing the heavy lifting, staying on for days non stop. When I was still using Studio One, there were crashes when pushing the system too hard. With Reaper, none. Purely anecdotal and "only" forum talk, but then again, in the interests of someone being able to find this DAW, it's nice to put experiences like this out there .

I have no other horse in this race than thankfully using the tools that work this reliably for me, and if it was the other way around, I sure would tell you. Have a happy jolly season!

[aMUSEd]

I actually have found that pretty much every host is rock solid unless you stumble across the magic button. As said before, it's almost always a plugin problem, not a host problem.

It is, but Reaper has multiple systems for minimising the damage buggy plugins cause (Bitwig also has one of them).