Is REAPER the current best long term choice?

[jinotsuh]

LMAO. But Reaper is not a pig!

[dupont]

I used to make dozens of techno tracks with Reaper, which can sounds strange as Reaper is mostly used by rock bands.
Now I use Bitwig as I can both work in the studio and perform live gigs, Reaper lacks native clip launchers (playtime is not convenient).
Reaper can also be time consuming, sometimes, i spent hours to try new skins, build better toolbars, try new scripts, tried the pre releases, almost one per day, and at the end make no music !
And thinks are moving fast at Reaper and if you miss some features, you have to constantly learn them, thanks to Reaper blog and Kenny.
Also since I switch to a 5K screen, Reaper fonts are too small.
In Bitwig, insert a few devices, modulate some parameters and make music ... it flawlessly runs on linux too, i use an old linux thinkpad laptop for my techno live performances.
Now, I think reaper is a great DAW but needs diciplin or it can can be a rabbit hole, and is not the best choice for every kind of music. (advanced sampler, easy modulation, good native instruments, clip launchers, clean UI...

[ElVincente]

Well said Dupont, could not agree more...

[aShane]

The Reaper is very powerful, versatile in its own way, well customizable and definitely interesting.
But time does not stand still. It's important to understand that any DAW is an option...in the long run mastering a few varieties of weapons will be the best choice.
It's good to have that choice

[Trensharo]

SAW Studio! Butt f**king ugly. A glaring example for how good coders are very poor designers.
One exception is gol (FL Studio). Who retired... sadly

Yes.

Engineering and Design are two completely different domains. It's actually pretty normal that someone is better at one than the other. This is why we have Architects and Interior Designers - not usually people who do both

[Danilo Villanova]

Yeah, REAPER's coders are NOT designers. I wish they would hire someone to redo the UI. I think they don't care, which sucks.

Still, in terms of features and value for money is unbeatable. Studio One and Cubase are just too damn expensive to buy and upgrade being from a lower-mid income country.

[jlgrimes11]

For midi though, I find that I have to tweak its default settings which can be a bit weird. That said there are alot of great YouTube tutorials now so it is a bit easier now but for people who want a good workflow out of the box, it can be intimidating to tweak. Reapers default view is probably near the most basic barebones look compared to any DAW with minimal toolbars, but it's complexity is hidden via, numerous default key bindings, mouse modifiers, menu items, and an encyclopedia level of action list.

I'm still confused as why the MIDI is considered so horrible. The Reaper midi editor, to me, makes a lot more sense than Ableton Live's where you can only draw notes by double-clicking and then CONTINUING to hold down the mouse button before releasing it, while Reaper's works, well, the way I'd expect it to work.

Plus, there's the fact that you CAN change the settings, unlike in Ableton Live.

I'll agree that there are a lot of defaults in Reaper that make zero sense to me, but I don't understand why the MIDI editor gets singled out so hard.

I'm on the opposite end. While Ableton's piano roll is "simple", I always found it simple in a good way where most things came across as intuitive.

That said I use the piano roll primarily for drum programming where I think Ableton's workflow shine the most but for simple performance editing it gets the job done. But I would not want to write a song with it but I probably wouldn't want to write a song in any piano roll.

That said Reaper follows some of Ableton's principles of piano roll design where it's default is highly minimalistic like Ableton but I probably never learned it and didn't understand the action list and mouse modifier settings to get the most from it which seems to be a necessary curve for Reaper.

So now I see Reaper users with a customized decked out Piano Roll with almost FL like bells and whistles.

I think with its initial design, I had too many questions that needed answers and sometimes they were hard questions to even ask properly as in Reaper you can almost build features.

For audio I found Reaper pretty rewarding as most of its defaults were pretty intuitive and some of the custom macros, were pretty amazing created by normal users. As I remember when Reaper didn't have a proper Track freeze and a user created a Track Freeze that worked better than about any DAW implementation I've ever worked in.

[RyanM12]

It feels sad and depressing using Reaper. Stick with Cubase, Studio One, Logic. Ableton is laughably bad at almost everything compared to those three.

[jlgrimes11]

It feels sad and depressing using Reaper. Stick with Cubase, Studio One, Logic. Ableton is laughably bad at almost everything compared to those three.

I wasn't too impressed with Logics workflow either. On the midi side, it seemed similar to Reaper where it was so customizable I just got lost trying to do simple stuff.

That said Logic comes with amazing content, without that it would feel more like Reaper.

Ableton on paper seems bad but after using it, I fly with it compared to other stuff.

in some ways it is like Reason where it's sequencer is pretty intuitive by default but Reason has alot of limitations (or at the time), where Ableton improved on alot of the stuff I was needing.

[mdstudio]

Wait, is it really true that I'm Ableton you have to double click to enter each MIDI note? In Reaper I remember the defaults were weird, but I have it configured to insert note with a left click, move with a left drag, select with a right drag and delete with a double click or the delete key. I insert more often than delete so I don't care about deletes needing an extra click or key press.

[jamcat]

Reaper is the Linux of DAWs.

[ozinga]

Wait, is it really true that I'm Ableton you have to double click to enter each MIDI note? In Reaper I remember the defaults were weird, but I have it configured to insert note with a left click, move with a left drag, select with a right drag and delete with a double click or the delete key. I insert more often than delete so I don't care about deletes needing an extra click or key press.

You can use pencil tool
Enter and Delete by just one click

[FapFilter]

Reaper is the Linux of DAWs.

have you tried Linux?

i recently did (for the first time actually) and it really depends on the distro.
but i have to say i'm EXTREMELY impressed by the GNOME desktop, which basically is very macOS-esque, but in most ways even better / more focused and streamlined - like some enhanced macOS rethought from the future, without most of the gimmick-crap ported over from iOS Apple is putting on macOS recently because they need to lure some more customers on annual basis as macOS has not been their main interest for ages now.
And Gnome even has WAY less ways to adjust / tinker with right out of the box. but of course you can change most, if not everything if you really want to go that route. but that stuff is completely locked away from the user unless you install additional tools, dig deep into some config files, or alter the Kernel yourself.
but of course you can still find some distro too where you actually need a computer nerd certificate to get things going at all too

[twal]

I used to use Reason and FL Studio but they were old versions, so I wanted to try something new and chose Reaper. At first I wasn't sure if I wanted to use it, but Kenny/Reaper Mania was an incredible joy to watch and learn from so I stuck with it. I think Reason has too many bells and whistles, and FL's mixer workflow is atrocious personally. They are both good though. I then tried Studio One but it was so different off the bat from Reaper I didn't care to learn it, and then I tried Mixcraft but it was just more work to figure out and I disliked the "fx" interface a lot. I also tried Waveform and it just did not click with me very well. I tried to go back to mixcraft and then wanted to try Waveform again but decided against it. The bugs of those two and the price points on the former daws turned me off. I eventually want to use another daw along with Reaper just for flavor, but I cannot get used to anything enough for me to pause from Reaper, it's just fantastic in so many ways. Eventually I will switch it up for excitement.

EDIT: If I were to try a new one it probably would be Bitwig.

[do_androids_dream]

I've come to the conclusion it is. It makes more and more sense to 'go off grid' with software. I despise dependency on serials, phoning home, ilok etc. I've been using a portable Reaper install with only drag 'n drop dll freeware plugins for all my professional work for years now. I foresee the internet becoming a more and more 'hostile' place so I'm extremely glad I made this decision. Reaper is the only product capable of pro work that's not a massive pain in the arse to install, authorise, configure etc. so that's where I'll stay for good now..