Is REAPER the current worst long term choice?

[liquidsound]

[aMUSEd]

No, yes, maybe, artichoke

[Roman Empire]

I´m a Cubase user since the dawn of time, but when I decided to set up a raspberry pi in my living room for a goto solution (with WAF) fullfilling my needs to have a midi keyboard and a sample player with an instant piano sound, Reaper turned out to be the best performing DAW software for this need. There are only few choices under Linux, where Reaper is one of them and at the same time very cheap. I tried Ardour and Tracktion, that had much worse performance with crackles and pops on the same latency setting as I´m using in Reaper (buffer = 128 on a hifiberry card).
I must admit that the experience of understanding how to use it is pretty uphill, especially now that I have decided to use it as a multitrack sequencer and not just a quick way to always have an available piano sound. Obviously this would never be my choice for a primary daw, but the more I use it, the more I learn, so I would say that Reaper in the long term is not a bad choice for this particular purpose. Instead that would be in the short term, since it did not have much out-of-the-box appeal to me.
Apart from being the best under Linux and also being cheap, I should add that it´s stable as a rock here, just sitting there month after month and letting me play my piano soundfont without any glitches.

[rafa1981]

Well, being Reaper a 2-man show, if something unfortunate happens to Justin or John the software can be in trouble. I think that Justin said that it would be open sourced if they get tired or can't develop it (?).

[swivel]

I'd recommend anyone considering Reaper to check out Jon from the Reaper blog's video series called something like "The Defaults Are All Wrong". It took me like a good 18 months to land on almost identical settings across the board, then that video series came out. If the Reaper devs just used his settings as defaults for new installs, I really think a lot of users would be up and running a lot quicker.

I second this, really makes a big difference. I don't think this is the same guy, but Alejandro from reapertips.com has a pdf as well as videos that really do a good job of going through the settings:

Reaper the Perfect Setup (pdf)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WhAblK8z2U

[Michael L]

The above setting recommendations are no-brainers and show how Reaper could easily be more user-friendly but instead they created another a male equipment fetish that needs endless tinkering like analog racks, vintage cars and high-end audio.

How many women will put up with Reaper?

[liquidsound]

^^^Don't you know women love expensive items?

[xbitz]

Actually, you can really get by with the config, having 4 completely independent mouse handling sets is funny though

Screenshot 2024-03-27 at 08.57.28.png

But at least they were made with a predefined purpose in mind, it's entirely possible that, as mentioned above, it's simpler to work with multiple, but differently configured, portable Reaper installations at once.

It's relatively hard to resist scripting, there are some really fun-usable ones among them

Screenshot 2024-03-27 at 09.04.52.png

[enroe]

@xbitz:

Ooh, I used Reaper, but didn't know there were "alternative modifier sets".
And yeah, I see you just copied page 148 of the reaper manual. Thank you
for pointing us to this feature!

[jinotsuh]

My license expired at the end of v5, I just use the FREE version now.

[mabian]

My license expired at the end of v5, I just use the FREE version now.

I know what you're doing

[jinotsuh]

damn

[Roman Empire]

Wasn´t Reaper the first DAW to have flexible buffering, allowing tracks that are not live to not be impacted by a low latency setting? Basically the same thing is with ASIO Guard on Cubase, if I´m not mistaken.