Views on Reaper!

[jonljacobi]

Customization is not necessary but it sure as hell helps. Reaper’s default menus, primitive dialogs, and to some extent the look, are the reasons many uninstall after just a short stint. Despite it being cheap and very competent.

[Breen]

To get the best sound quality in Reaper set all options in Project Settings to 64 bit.

[VitaminD]

I consider Reaper as the Linux of DAWs

[chk071]

Minus the bug proneness.

Oh, and Justin doesn't seem nearly as full of himself as Torvalds either.

[whyterabbyt]

It’s not actually complicated, but the menus would have you believe that. There are tons of commands and they’re not very nicely or concisely displayed. You can edit the menus, so look for some more coherent ones from users in the forums before you run screaming into the night.

the stock menu layouts are atrocious. reamenus makes a considerable difference.

[Trancit]

Don't get it why people keep saying that you have to "customize" Reaper before you can get things done. Sounds like an urban legend to me. ...

No, it´s not and It´s quite easy why...
Reaper doesn´t do many things out of the box or doesn´t do it in an usual way... ie "Render in place" where Reaper thinks it´s the best way to render every bit from the project start (optimized for stem export) even if you just want to render a little bit at the very end...
Reaper is created/optimized for a quite limited way of working like it is used for band recording/ multi track recording/editing in general...
As soon as you want to let it do something else as needed for i.e. electronic music styles you do have to make your hands dirty... or you will miss a lot of advanced features...

There it starts to put all the custom actions together to convince Reaper doing at least a little bit of what you want... dealing with tons of custom scripts... that´s why many users call Reaper the linux of all DAWs

If you really want to work with Reaper seriously with other music than multitrack recording, there is no way around customization... it lacks out of the box a lot of many specialized features for other music styles

[elassi]

As soon as you want to let it do something else as needed for i.e. electronic music styles you do have to make your hands dirty... or you will miss a lot of advanced features... There it starts to put all the custom actions together to convince Reaper doing at least a little bit of what you want... dealing with tons of custom scripts...

Well, if a user thinks he must turn Reaper into Ableton Live before he can work "seriously", well, than this might be necessary. And complicated.

[AsPeeXXXVIII]

Is it a very complicated daw to use? I demo'd it ages ago and it seemed very cumbersome.

I believe any DAW is cumbersome when you first get into working with one - but once you learn your way around it, it starts to feel natural. Either that or you can customize it to fit your specific workflow. And REAPER is one of, if not the most customizable DAW out there.

Me, however, I'm comfortable working with REAPER in its default state.

[Trancit]

Well, if a user thinks he must turn Reaper into Ableton Live before he can work "seriously", well, than this might be necessary. And complicated.

Sorry, but this is nonsense... if you don´t get, that different music styles need different steps/ workflows... well that´s your problem... and this has nothing to do with Ableton Live/ respectively it´s session view is what you want to refer to...
And it´s not, that this kind of work isn´t possible in Reaper ... without customizations it just take a lot of clicking to get things done...

[elassi]

Well, if a user thinks he must turn Reaper into Ableton Live before he can work "seriously", well, than this might be necessary. And complicated.

Sorry, but this is nonsense... if you don´t get, that different music styles need different steps/ workflows... well that´s your problem...

[inkwarp]

to those that say Reaper is ugly, it's not too bad, it looks like utilitarian at worst but there are a huge amount of themes available so that does not have to be a problem. which brings me to that other thing that Reaper has in spades, a really good community. you can get a tonne of addons and scripts, there are even some extensions that will simplify the menus. i don't think it's to hard to learn. there are plenty of videos and the help is pretty good too.

[Dewdman42]

Reaper is still unusable on Retina/HiDPI screens as far as I'm concerned. They've been talking about it for several years and I expect it to be several years at least before they finally catch it up with the rest of 4k society. That is just one of many many GUI related issues that drives many users bonkers with Reaper. A lot of reaper users end up wasting an inordinate amount of time trying to customize their gui to be more usable... I think that is fine for certain people with a certain mindset, but for me it has always sent me away. I have even paid for the program, I don't mind. Its fine..maybe they'll get there someday..it has some interesting capabilities that other DAW's don't have..but I don't have time to mess around with all the customization that most reaper users seem to spend time doing...and there is a reason they have to..I don't care what anyone says about it.

[cantaloupe]

Been using it for two years. Very lightweight, fast, stable, cheap, capable, fair price, excellent developers, tons of extensions, excellent arranger and editor, fast keyboard-centric workflow. Very fun. Personal. No bloat or huge bundles. Great and helpful community. Very good for mixing, recording, processing audio, arranging etc.

However it can be endlessly frustrating if you make music mostly on your laptop with virtual instruments and virtual keyboard + midi, which a lot of people do these days. The workflow is an absolute inconsistent mess that seems to be a dice roll. MIDI editor zoom behaviour seem to have no thought behind it a lot of the time. In fact, a lot of things seems to be added with little thought as for how it integrates into a whole. The virtual keyboard is borderline unusable and makes recording a simple quantised midi melody much harder than it should be.

After two years i still don't get how the few benefits of "audio and midi are the same track"-paradigm outnumbers the massive amount of frustration that comes from not having separate settings and options for audio and midi tracks.

It is in constant development, yes, but i've been following dev builds regularly for a year, and a large majority of the updates are very eclectic features and bugs and stuff that concerns few (i assume), while the massive oversights and obvious inconsistencies and very common workflow frustrations seems to be untouched for years. It also has an endless amount of UX inconsistencies that you just have to memorise because there is no predictable logic to a lot of things. It is very keyboard centric in general but some of the keys only work in certain contexts and not in others without reason. There is no way to tell what part of the UI has current focus. No general design guidelines for most UI elements. Etc etc etc. An endless list of minor troubles that adds up over time.

And yet, it does so many things so effortlessly and make many other DAWs look like incapable toys in certain aspects.

So yeah. Reaper can be frustrating. But pretty much every DAW is absolutely terrible. Reaper is still the best for me and for a lot of people for a good reason.

[THE INTRANCER]

Personally, I switched from Reason to Studio One 2, 6 months later version 3, and presently using version 4 which has taken a good 7 months to fix almost everything to be in what it should have been on it's release. Reason was my primary DAW from 2001 right up to November 2014 where switching to Studio One 2.6 was like a fish to water. I made a simple track within one hour of using 2.6.. here's a link to it.. https://soundcloud.com/scott-moncrieff- ... son-221214 and everything else I've created has been with Studio One since then.
Reaper will probably leave you more frustrated and overwhelmed than many other DAW's, I'd rather go back to using sound trackers and producing music that way like I did in the 1990's between the two if given the only choices. Renoise is another DAW that follows on from that tracker family...that you might like to look at, it's cross platform. I considered it after looking to move from Reason... but Presonus announced an offer that was too good to pass up.

[Bombadil]

My experience with Reaper is limited. I tried it when it was first developed, and then a few years later. Even bought a MacProVid tutorial on how to use it. I am currently using Logic, which I know half-decently. In comparison, I found Reaper to be clunky and annoying, so I didn't pursue it further. However, if Apple annoys me enough (the possibility is growing, in that regard), and I switch to PC, Reaper will probably be my first choice. Dragged. And Screaming.