Why you left REAPER?

[keyman_sam]

The limitless options, customizing, theming it to look like DAW-xyz just didn't work for me.

I had to stop myself when after 10 yrs of using it, I was still customizing some nonsense. Moved to Cubase and never looked back. I find Cubase to be much, much better. Now I'm moving to logic but that's because of necessity more than anything. If Cubase were dongle free, I'd still be using it.

The whole concept of 'one-track-fits-all' sounds great on paper, works horribly badly in practice. This was apparent when I had to bounce stems to work with mixing engineers. You have to do the book-keeping yourself of separating the sends, groups, etc. It's just tedious. There are no advantages to the one-track-concept, except it sounding fancy.

All that being said, it's a great DAW for folks that make it work. Very fast, smooth, and perhaps great for audio-heavy production.

[TheMaestro]

You’re tedious AND ignorant. Good job.

You know zilch about Reaper, theming especially you are clueless about, yet you post your zilch trolling and can't understand a paragraph explaining what you don't know. Usually Reaper enthusiasts are not so dense.

I’ve made and customized my own Reaper theme. Have you? No? Then sit down.

The original point was that you can skin and customize Reaper to your own taste and workflow. Nothing you have said so far has contradicted that. Talk about dense.

You're backtracking and changing what you said. If you went "coding?!!!!" then your themes are minor default tweaks, as I said while you were sleeping. I can give you a lesson in theme coding if you need.

Not sure what I’m backtracking here.
I think you’ve lost the plot.

[dupont]

one fact I think everybody agree is that it has not yet been stated that Reaper is worst or better than other DAWs even if they are 4 to 10 times more expensive .
will you compare a car that cost 6000 $ to one at 60000 $ ? Are they the same quality, the same options, absolutelly no.
Yes, Reaper has no native instruments but who cares because has you becomes serious about music production, you buy 3rd party plugins anyway.

[mtelesha]

I don't work with recording audio or recorded audio as much. I work mostly with soft synths and midi. I use Bitwig

[toonertik]

I don't work with recording audio or recorded audio as much. I work mostly with soft synths and midi. I use Bitwig

Did you ever use Reaper?

If not.. then you never left..

If yes.. how 'bout a reason.. the topic question

and yes.. I use Reaper and Samplitude and Acid.. Just for effect..

[Crumbfort]

The limitless options, customizing, theming it to look like DAW-xyz just didn't work for me.

I had to stop myself when after 10 yrs of using it, I was still customizing some nonsense. Moved to Cubase and never looked back. I find Cubase to be much, much better. Now I'm moving to logic but that's because of necessity more than anything. If Cubase were dongle free, I'd still be using it.

The whole concept of 'one-track-fits-all' sounds great on paper, works horribly badly in practice. This was apparent when I had to bounce stems to work with mixing engineers. You have to do the book-keeping yourself of separating the sends, groups, etc. It's just tedious. There are no advantages to the one-track-concept, except it sounding fancy.

All that being said, it's a great DAW for folks that make it work. Very fast, smooth, and perhaps great for audio-heavy production.

Logic doesn't require a dongle?! You do have to own a Mac of some sort (I couldn't resist, hehe).


(This is not pointed at you in particular, keyman_sam) (Also I try to avoid threads like these so I'm sure I'll regret this, but ah well)

The casual and often smugly sneering disregard lots of people have for Reaper is always baffling to me. Lots of folk seem to delight in it. Weird.

I love Reaper because it doesn't tell me my business and force me to work in ways I find unintuitive and obnoxious. Sure, many other DAWs may feel simpler and more streamlined, but really (in my opinion) they're just forcing you to adjust to their workflow. If that workflow works for you, then great! Have not found another DAW that works for me in this way, and I've tried Cubase, Studio One, and used Logic for years and years.

The one-track-fits-all paradigm has also effectively ruined all other DAWs for me and makes set track types seem silly. Just works great for me, what can I say.

I've heavily modified a v5 theme over the years and now it's exactly how I want it to be. I don't have to deal with any workflow annoyances that I don't want to.

I don't have to deal with a ton of feature bloat (including plugins and instruments) that I will never, ever, ever use.

I mostly work with hundreds of tracks with heavily unquantized MIDI (large orchestral/hybridy templates). I love MIDI editing in Reaper and it's blazing fast for me.


All that said, I would never try to push Reaper (or any DAW) on anybody. Use what ya like and what works best for you.

[mtelesha]

I don't work with recording audio or recorded audio as much. I work mostly with soft synths and midi. I use Bitwig

Did you ever use Reaper?

If not.. then you never left..

If yes.. how 'bout a reason.. the topic question

and yes.. I use Reaper and Samplitude and Acid.. Just for effect..

Reason MIDI and Softsynths aren't Reaper's strengths. Bitwig and Waveform have a modular backbone. Bitwig everything can modulate anything and it is so much fun. I don't do music for money anymore so fun is more important for me. Also I do alot of live performance and having a clip launcher is crucial.

My General Overall Rating
Quality of the DAW
Reaper 9.5/10
Bitwig 9/10
Waveform 8.5

My Fun Rating
Bitwig 10/10
Waveform 10/10
Reaper 8/10

[Stirner]

I've worked with Ableton for two years and Cubase (Elements) and both are great programs. There are some things you can do in Ableton, that are not possible in Cubase and vice versa, but nothing essential. Music can be created in both DAWs. But both of them are very expensive, especially if you want to stay updated. As music is my hobby, I decided to go Reaper - much cheaper and you stay updated for several years, for 60$.

I would not say that Reaper is that much better or worse than Ableton or Cubase (or more stable or much faster). It's very similar and some things are different and learning a new DAW is hard work, but Reaper is not that different or difficult. I can work in Reaper faster than in other DAWs. I would say, that in my case, for my workflow, it seems that Ableton has fewer features than Cubase and Cubase has fewer features than Reaper. Some things were not possible in Cubase (like templates of groups of tracks or advanced macros for MIDI assignment) and even more things were not possible in Ableton. It also means that some tasks in Ableton were easier and faster to do, because of fewer possibilities. In Reaper there is a workaround for almost everything, but of course not for everything.

I mostly do MIDI stuff, either from keyboard input or from the piano roll. And it works well, not that different than in other DAW's. Automation and the routing workflow are much better in Reaper, but I miss some things like the racks from Ableton or the useful media explorer from Cubase.

The biggest arguments for Cubase or Ableton are the included instruments, effects and samples. And of course features like the clip matrix in Ableton or the integrated channel strip in Cubase. But for me it's better not to pay for all this included stuff but to have a powerful and slim DAW and pay only for the core functions and to spare my money for buying other plugins.

I think as long Reaper gets updates I will stay with Reaper. I can't go back to Cubase and forget all the workflow shortcuts that are possible in Reaper but not in Cubase. But to be honest, every time I see a video where someone uses Ableton or Cubase, I become nostalgic and wish to go back in time - this programs were incredible good and time I spent with them was good time.

[toonertik]

I don't work with recording audio or recorded audio as much. I work mostly with soft synths and midi. I use Bitwig

Did you ever use Reaper?

If not.. then you never left..

If yes.. how 'bout a reason.. the topic question

and yes.. I use Reaper and Samplitude and Acid.. Just for effect..

Reason MIDI and Softsynths aren't Reaper's strengths. Bitwig and Waveform have a modular backbone. Bitwig everything can modulate anything and it is so much fun. I don't do music for money anymore so fun is more important for me. Also I do alot of live performance and having a clip launcher is crucial.

My General Overall Rating
Quality of the DAW
Reaper 9.5/10
Bitwig 9/10
Waveform 8.5

My Fun Rating
Bitwig 10/10
Waveform 10/10
Reaper 8/10

Well stated sir..
no b1tching and winging, just a good sensible answer..

I agree with quality.. Reaper is very good, interface aside (I have no problem with that, though).
Like you, I don't sound engineer for money any more and just record up to 16 tracks from my modular and either Reaper or Samplitude are fine for that.

I have the Bitwig light and for sure it has some great things going for it.. but doesn't fit in with my workflow now.

[dupont]

Reason MIDI and Softsynths aren't Reaper's strengths. Bitwig and Waveform have a modular backbone. Bitwig everything can modulate anything and it is so much fun. I don't do music for money anymore so fun is more important for me. Also I do alot of live performance and having a clip launcher is crucial.

My General Overall Rating
Quality of the DAW
Reaper 9.5/10
Bitwig 9/10
Waveform 8.5

My Fun Rating
Bitwig 10/10
Waveform 10/10
Reaper 8/10

My fun rating, Waveform 11/10 because it is so fun to deal with crashes everywhere in the middle of a project.
Crashes even with native plugins, crash fest.
I've been a licenced user from tracktion 1 to T7 but decided to stop licence at waveform 8. Each time I DL a demo, crash....On OSX I even got a kernel panic, I didn't even know it was possible on OSX. I was so scared my imac did not reboot, first think I did after reboot is to uninstall waveform.

[mtelesha]

Reason MIDI and Softsynths aren't Reaper's strengths. Bitwig and Waveform have a modular backbone. Bitwig everything can modulate anything and it is so much fun. I don't do music for money anymore so fun is more important for me. Also I do alot of live performance and having a clip launcher is crucial.

My General Overall Rating
Quality of the DAW
Reaper 9.5/10
Bitwig 9/10
Waveform 8.5

My Fun Rating
Bitwig 10/10
Waveform 10/10
Reaper 8/10

My fun rating, Waveform 11/10 because it is so fun to deal with crashes everywhere in the middle of a project.
Crashes even with native plugins, crash fest.
I've been a licenced user from tracktion 1 to T7 but decided to stop licence at waveform 8. Each time I DL a demo, crash....On OSX I even got a kernel panic, I didn't even know it was possible on OSX. I was so scared my imac did not reboot, first think I did after reboot is to uninstall waveform.

It is much better than before but to be honest it didn't crash on me as much as others said. I have never had a crash proof DAW. Heck my drummer use to use Logic for loops and it crashed 50% of the time and I would use Waveform 8+ and it never crashed on me live (Might be more luck then anything else). In Waveform 10 they made it recover from crashes in 1 or 2 seconds and I never lost a single note due to crashes. I think the issue is that

[bungle]

I left Reaper to go take a piss, came back a few minutes later and carried on.

[Liero]

Reaper is amazing and it will probably always be my DAW for mixing and audio editing.

That said, Cockos are really shooting their own foot by sticking with the person they have responsible for GUI/theming. I can totally understand anyone who thinks the default look of the program is just about as ugly as it gets, the designer obviously has zero sense for visual aesthetics and use of color (and should be fired).

The saving grace is that you can customize almost anything, and once you put in the hours you will have a DAW that is made just for you.

[Danilo Villanova]

When you first start using Studio One or Cakewalk you learn the shortcuts to show/hide the most important parts of the interface: browser, mixer, docker, inspector, etc. They all work with a single key, they make sense and are easy to memorize. Why does REAPER have to use Ctrl+Alt+X to open the browser, Ctrl+Alt+M for the track manager, Alt+D for the docker, Ctrl+M for the mixer... it makes no sense, except that the developer is purposely making it difficult in order for users to get annoyed so they’re forced to change them and they learn the power of customizing REAPER?

I mean, I’ve changed then myself but why are the defaults so absolutely insane? Why?!

And windows focus... if I’m using the on screen keyboard I have to click on its ui again each time I click somewhere else on the interface , making it useless for quick sketching... Reason, S1 and CbB all have this figured out, why not REAPER?

I’m sticking with it because I need it but these things are just annoying...

EDIT: typo

[declassified]

if I’m using the on screen keyboard I have to click on its ui again each time I click somewhere else on the interface , making it useless for quick sketching...

If you right-click the bottom grey area of the keyboard (e.g. where it says "Center note"), a menu opens and you can choose "Send all keyboard input to Virtual MIDI keyboard".
How intuitive, right? And how sensible that this is not the default.
To be clear: I'm not a Reaper user, for these reasons. I just thought this might be of help to you.