Is REAPER the current best long term choice?

[EnGee]

SAW Studio? It was coded entirely in Assembly! Very efficient but very expensive. It has its users though.

[sQeetz]

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

[FapFilter]

beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. i always found FL Studio to be kinda ugly, and a lot of their plugins, while technically being great, actually have a lot of idiosyncrasies that you won't find much anywhere else. and for good reason

[Artie Fichelle]

A wise man said: Predictions are difficult, especially if they concern the future.
But, having the choice to take one DAW to a remote island, I would take reaper. It will keep me busy for a long, long time

[sQeetz]

and a lot of their plugins, while technically being great, actually have a lot of idiosyncrasies that you won't find much anywhere else. and for good reason

I should also have mentioned that design goes beyond just aesthetics.... but good GUI design goes a long way.
And REAPER is far from it. You can slap some nice pictures on top of it, but the underlying shit will still be as it was

[GaryG]

and a lot of their plugins, while technically being great, actually have a lot of idiosyncrasies that you won't find much anywhere else. and for good reason

I should also have mentioned that design goes beyond just aesthetics.... but good GUI design goes a long way.
And REAPER is far from it. You can slap some nice pictures on top of it, but the underlying shit will still be as it was

F*** me, you're still at this? Don't you have serious music to make with your serious DAW?

[sQeetz]

F*** me, you're still at this? Don't you have serious music to make with your serious DAW?

Naaah. I don't make music. I just critisize GUIs. That's my hobby.\

[careyletendre]

Reaper? Not even close.

[Guenon]

Reaper? Not even close.

Heh

Well... There have been some often repeated clichés (of sorts) in this thread, so I'll chime in an additional time. Lol. There's the one that Reaper is the budget choice in the sense that all those people who "aren't impoverished" will (and should?) want to default to something else. This isn't true. Often, in professional contexts, it's not about the budget at all and Reaper is used because it's the best choice for the task at hand. The team/studio could literally use anything else, too, budget-wise - but goes with Reaper because of the functionality. Two, that the customization/expandability of Reaper leads to a workflow that is "never going to be as homogeneous" as something else, and that the expansions and customizations are merely attempts to cover functionality that is available elsewhere out of the box, nothing more. This isn't true. Again, in professional use, workflow and efficient operation is key, and the main reason for using Reaper often boils down to it being able to cater to workflows that literally work extremely quickly and with fast repeatability because of the customization on offer - and yes, that customizability for specialized tasks may even be tailored for the purposes of some singular project.

In the more mundane end, for me, some of the more common workflow traits I usually have in every project, my default template has hundreds of tracks and quite the amount of Kontakt instances loaded in a disabled state - also without their sample content, but custom multis appointed for each instance. When I need some specific instrument, like a certain string section, I click on that track and hit a keyboard shortcut that enables that Kontakt instance and preloads the sample content off of a M.2 SSD, and without doing anything else, a second or a few later I can play a part in, instantly, without even clicking anywhere else.

Another nice thing I have come to rely on is, all the common plugins and signal chains I use are behind their own shortcuts. For most of the time, I don't need to browse for a plugin. I hear a track needs EQ, I hit the keyboard shortcut that brings up Pro-Q 3 on that track, and then I just adjust that EQ, instantly. Same with everything else, my commonly used instruments and effects and chains. Some elements in this vein can consist of multiple pre-routed tracks, for example if I need a new Kontakt instance, I hit one shortcut and it brings me a multi-out routed Kontakt readily armed, etc. And these are just the most basic examples I think everyone can relate to.

Somewhat more intermediate stuff would be, for example, the subproject capability: a single item on a track can be a reference to the rendered output of an actual separate project file, and you can click that project open (it opens in parallel with the main project, into its own tab) and you can record new stuff into it, edit it, load plugins - just like any project. Then, you can go into your main project, and the item will have the rendered output of that subproject. It's like traditional freezing, but for whole projects loaded and referenced as single items. That comes in handy pretty often.

And well... For the most recent game production I was hired to work on, I did about a hundred pieces of music in Reaper inside one single project file; the longest songs were about three minutes, the shortest pieces were short phrases of a few seconds - in any case all of that lived inside one project loaded into Reaper, a bit over sixty Kontakt instances, the majority of them with 16 instruments loaded, the whole project file consisting of around 900 tracks when counting both audio ones and temp tracks and midi stuff. This always worked like a clock, efficiently and reliably, and could be rendered in one go into multiple custom named time regions (all separate clips with tails, inheriting their names and specified metadata from region names and other parameters, piped into filenames on the actual filesystem), this was handy when ever in need of a global change in mix or similar. These could then be imported direcly into the game engine for testing and building. The same project file also had multiple videos loaded, as some of the pieces were done to-picture, and if there was for example a change in the timing of some of the animations, this was just as easily accommodated: just update the video file and rework the corresponding material to work with the new timing.

And welll hmm, in turn, last time I talked with a friend from the recent God of War: Ragnarok (current Metacritic score 94, with 136 critic reviews) audio team, their particular gang at Sony were all on Reaper.

Anyway, my previous comment of... take all this forum jabber with a grain of salt... still holds. Including this message , eh. As with any tool that will become your actual work environment for much of your time spent on creating material, take your time and see for yourself whether something is your cup of tea or not. And don't let anyone else dictate it for you, myself included, lol.

[sQeetz]

Lots of words for a simple thing: categorizing.

[Guenon]

Lots of words for a simple thing is seriously something I could print on business cards, and everyone who knows me would just go "yep."

[sQeetz]

Keep it simple

[Guenon]

Question is: is that a good or a bad thing?

Depends on the context.

[sQeetz]

Depends on the context.

yes

[jinotsuh]

When it's all said and done, REAPER still sucks. The End