Reaper is not an ugly duckling anymore !

[hibidy]

Cubendo

HA!

btw, is that what makes it 20-40% better?

[hibidy]

from the Oxford revised English dictionary of Digital Audio Workstations:

cluttered \Kluh-terd\, adj:
1. Logic
2. Cubendo
3. Logic
4. Logic

you forgot Logic

shouldn't we add digital performer to this list?

[Sickle]

Make a skin like this and I'm in. If I weren't so mind-f**king busy, I'd make the skin myself..

I'm fairly close to grabbing a license so my bitching and moaning has more authority..

[Pipelineaudio]

I'm fairly close to grabbing a license so my bitching and moaning has more authority..

I like that alternating vertical slice idea too

[gold]

4. Logic

you forgot Logic

shouldn't we add digital performer to this list?

I was thinking maybe Logic should be added?

[hibidy]

4. Logic

you forgot Logic

shouldn't we add digital performer to this list?

I was thinking maybe Logic should be added?

Oh, damn! I forgot about that one

[Klemperer]

Make a skin like this and I'm in. If I weren't so mind-f**king busy, I'd make the skin myself..

I'm fairly close to grabbing a license so my bitching and moaning has more authority..

...yes an EXT-look might be another nice addition . But for bitching and moaning you gain authority rather simple: buy a Reaper-license, then load EXT1.4 into it, resize and you got your skin. Then post a pic of it with our without your name (this of course adds or loses 9,8% auf authority) in the Reaper-"show your license" thread , or, errm.....so.....(in fact I'd like to load Ext into Reaper into Orion into Reaper into Podium and so on...not exactly sure what the benefit would be after the 117. instance besides crashes and losing any idea what your song was about, but at least it made my brains feeling like I solved a mathematical problem I never had fun to care about at schooldays .
Let's say at least this skin-thread would stop before it reached the maybe 421th page the "Amplitube2-is-nearly-finished"-thread had if we had 117 skins from 98 vst-hosts at our disposal, near as a mouseclick. After this experience we might look at our project and save it, and then going on just making music)

(I know about 27 people now who always laugh when reading our KVR - fanboy - and middle-class-shit-problems like if a button is slightly grey or more into the black zone or if you had to right-click for a menu or convert a mp3 into wav before loading in your app or not . The more jealous ones of them are always glad to see so many other musicians not making music. The others think we're a bit strange I always talk of Jens then who has about 3 millions of posts at KVR and makes as much music as I, for example, write).

I like KVR

[tamoore]

...yes an EXT-look might be another nice addition . But for bitching and moaning you gain authority rather simple: buy a Reaper-license, then load EXT1.4 into it, resize and you got your skin. Then post a pic of it with our without your name (this of course adds or loses 9,8% auf authority) in the Reaper-"show your license" thread , or, errm.....so.....(in fact I'd like to load Ext into Reaper into Orion into Reaper into Podium and so on...not exactly sure what the benefit would be after the 117. instance besides crashes and losing any idea what your song was about, but at least it made my brains feeling like I solved a mathematical problem I never had fun to care about at schooldays .
Let's say at least this skin-thread would stop before it reached the maybe 421th page the "Amplitube2-is-nearly-finished"-thread had if we had 117 skins from 98 vst-hosts at our disposal, near as a mouseclick. After this experience we might look at our project and save it, and then going on just making music)

(I know about 27 people now who always laugh when reading our KVR - fanboy - and middle-class-shit-problems like if a button is slightly grey or more into the black zone or if you had to right-click for a menu or convert a mp3 into wav before loading in your app or not . The more jealous ones of them are always glad to see so many other musicians not making music. The others think we're a bit strange I always talk of Jens then who has about 3 millions of posts at KVR and makes as much music as I, for example, write).

I like KVR

I think I understand what you're saying here.....

Quit bitching, and just make some damn music....

[Sickle]

The more jealous ones of them are always glad to see so many other musicians not making music.

Hey, I resent that; I make plenty of Muzak..

It's just that only 3.33% of everyone here approves of it..

[sjm]

You have to understand that I am talking about opening the application for the first time ever. n.b. I hadn't tried REAPER since 0.9x; I've since downloaded the latest version, and with the Younsoft skin it indeed looks a lot better than back then.

Nonetheless, when you first start the app (with the default theme etc.) with the demo song, the screen is cluttered, audio clips are difficult to distinguish from one another, the mixer is opened and takes up loads of space etc. Furthermore, the mixer appears at first glance to simply duplicate the track settings to the left of each track. The immediate response is "woah information overload!". Many of the icons on the tracks/mixer are unintuitive, the tooltips take a while to pop up etc. A lot of people will load it up, and be put off by what is (IMO) poor layout and UI design. That's what I mean by uninviting and cluttered. Why does the mixer appear to be nothing more than a vertical copy of the left hand side of the screen, for example? (It thus appears that information is being duplicated in a redundant fashion, which is not clear and concise.) Why aren't the clips clearly delineated instead of using a nigh on invisible grey and white triangles and a bar the same colour as the clip data (which thus blends into the clip)?

I've since turned off the mixer at the bottom, and it is indeed a lot less cluttered (the track icons are still higgeldy-piggeldy though). But if you don't convince a first time user that he/she actually wants to try and figure out how to customise the layout, they aren't all going to bother finding out how to do this. With most things in life, you have about 30 seconds to convince someone - because human beings are lazy and investing effort into figuring out someone else's work is unappealing - it's the responsibility of the person producing the work to make it instantly accessible to its target audience. This means that initial impressions are important (even if extremely superficial). In the case of an application, this is based on the default layout that a first time user sees.

Take the analogy of a CV, for example. The first time someone looks at your CV, they are probably going to skim over it to glean the most important information (assuming more than a handful of applicants); this decides whether the CV goes into the pile worth a second look, or straight into the bin. It doesn't matter how suited you are to the job - if you can't convince the person looking over the CV in 30 seconds, you're out of the running. So you need to pay attention to the layout of your CV. They need to know in 30 seconds what qualifications you have (e.g. university degree and in what field), past experience (fields of experience, number of years you held the position) etc. This important information thus needs to immediately stand out from the rest (white space and formatting are your friend).

Only once you make it into the limited selection worth a second look is anyone really going to bother reading through the actual textual content.

So if your initial impression is somewhat chaotic and strewn all over the place, chances are that your CV/application won't be given more than a quick glance before being discarded. It doesn't matter how good it really is, if it can't hook you almost instantly. I don't doubt that REAPER can do loads of great stuff. But before I find that out, it needs to make me want to! For this reason, the initial default screen layout needs to be convincing - in order to draw me in and make me want to use it. The fact that this thread even exists (and is on page 20) must be testimony to the fact that I am not the only one who finds/found the UI/layout unconvincing.

And no, I didn't vote in the poll, because it was so obviously redundant. I'm sure I am not the only one who ignored it for this reason

[alex zonder]

You have to understand that I am talking about opening the application for the first time ever. n.b. I hadn't tried REAPER since 0.9x; I've since downloaded the latest version, and with the Younsoft skin it indeed looks a lot better than back then.

Nonetheless, when you first start the app (with the default theme etc.) with the demo song, the screen is cluttered, audio clips are difficult to distinguish from one another, the mixer is opened and takes up loads of space etc. Furthermore, the mixer appears at first glance to simply duplicate the track settings to the left of each track. The immediate response is "woah information overload!". Many of the icons on the tracks/mixer are unintuitive, the tooltips take a while to pop up etc. A lot of people will load it up, and be put off by what is (IMO) poor layout and UI design. That's what I mean by uninviting and cluttered. Why does the mixer appear to be nothing more than a vertical copy of the left hand side of the screen, for example? (It thus appears that information is being duplicated in a redundant fashion, which is not clear and concise.) Why aren't the clips clearly delineated instead of using a nigh on invisible grey and white triangles and a bar the same colour as the clip data (which thus blends into the clip)?

I've since turned off the mixer at the bottom, and it is indeed a lot less cluttered (the track icons are still higgeldy-piggeldy though). But if you don't convince a first time user that he/she actually wants to try and figure out how to customise the layout, they aren't all going to bother finding out how to do this. With most things in life, you have about 30 seconds to convince someone - because human beings are lazy and investing effort into figuring out someone else's work is unappealing - it's the responsibility of the person producing the work to make it instantly accessible to its target audience. This means that initial impressions are important (even if extremely superficial). In the case of an application, this is based on the default layout that a first time user sees.

Take the analogy of a CV, for example. The first time someone looks at your CV, they are probably going to skim over it to glean the most important information (assuming more than a handful of applicants); this decides whether the CV goes into the pile worth a second look, or straight into the bin. It doesn't matter how suited you are to the job - if you can't convince the person looking over the CV in 30 seconds, you're out of the running. So you need to pay attention to the layout of your CV. They need to know in 30 seconds what qualifications you have (e.g. university degree and in what field), past experience (fields of experience, number of years you held the position) etc. This important information thus needs to immediately stand out from the rest (white space and formatting are your friend).

Only once you make it into the limited selection worth a second look is anyone really going to bother reading through the actual textual content.

So if your initial impression is somewhat chaotic and strewn all over the place, chances are that your CV/application won't be given more than a quick glance before being discarded. It doesn't matter how good it really is, if it can't hook you almost instantly. I don't doubt that REAPER can do loads of great stuff. But before I find that out, it needs to make me want to! For this reason, the initial default screen layout needs to be convincing - in order to draw me in and make me want to use it. The fact that this thread even exists (and is on page 20) must be testimony to the fact that I am not the only one who finds/found the UI/layout unconvincing.

And no, I didn't vote in the poll, because it was so obviously redundant. I'm sure I am not the only one who ignored it for this reason

mmmm... and yet it is my impression that so far REAPER seems to have SOME sort of success as a new DAW...

pretty weird...

incomprehensible, to say the least...

and I don't suppose either that the popularity of a thread like this has anything to do with REAPER's success... but, indeed, with its unattractiveness instead...

so I guess you're absolutely right...

mmmm...

[koolkeys]

Well, another reason the thread is long is because people generally use these frequent Reaper threads as a "catch all" thread to talk about everything so the forum isn't cluttered up. Just a guess though.

However, I think there was a LOT of good stuff in that post, as well as a couple other recent posts in this thread. I don't remember who wrote them, but I think it's been some good stuff that may help Justin if he is reading.

Brent

[Bevoss]

Check out this theme developed by Tallisman at Reaper (ex-Cubaser)...(slight colour changes by me on the tracks)

It's actually the first of the new themes I haven't got tired of fast...something to be said for Steinberg after all.

Here's the link for the big pic:

http://stashbox.org/30095/Reabendo.jpg

[Bevoss]

Here's the thread for the download, and Tal's screenshot:

http://stashbox.org/30058/reaBendo.png

http://www.cockos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=11059

[John Vulich]