Reaper 7 released

[Guenon]

I did now check the settings deeper as well, to find out what this one was about, and I do think it's a shame it is causing this strong negative feelings. Bear with me here, Jens.

When you go to the appearance settings and, for example, search for "track", this setting is the first one to be highlighted, actually. I imagine, if actually having a problem of this kind with your tracks, it would be hard to miss this. What actually happened was, you chose to test some betas, got this setting out of whack so that it is set to an unusually high value, giving you the peculiar effect seen in your screenshots - and then didn't search for it in the settings or ask on the forum, instead letting the annoyance mount, annnd the rest of the result and mindset is what is written above. You already had certain views and misgivings about the program, and this sort of went with that, confirmation bias style.

(Also hey, doing a settings export in any software offering you facilities for that, before testing alphas/betas, is a very good idea, as we discussed previously!)

This setting wasn't added in version 7. I double checked on v6, and this was already there, it's just described better in v7.

That brings us to the description: Jens, you say it's "strangely described in the preferences - I wouldn't call it being 'at bottom of track' - sounds to me like they don't really have themselves too much of an idea what it actually really is" - when it actually seems they know quite well what it is, and it does do what the description in the preferences tells you:

v6: "Pixels between items on adjacent tracks; Vertical pixel spacing between adjacent tracks"
v7: "Vertical space at bottom of track; Vertical pixel spacing below media items, above the following track"

You have also repeated the question/exasperation: why would anyone want this? This is for showing the arrangement track background in all situations, so that you can target it with the cursor at all times, even when only showing (e.g. being zoomed into a busy portion of your project) a section of your project where all visible tracks are 100% full of items. This way, normally just having a small sliver of the background showing below the item(s), you can trigger anything on any particular track, that you have set to trigger when interacting with the track lane/background itself, not just the items, no matter what section of your project you are looking at, and all you might be seeing is an area full of items. The problem was, you had this value erroneously bumped up to being inconveniently large, leading to the effect seen.

Seeing how it really was, this doesn't have a bearing on Cockos "needing to stop adding stuff", or anything of that sort. Instead, it was just a misunderstood and misinterpreted setting, which was quite easy to search for, in the end. You are of course entitled to your opinion, as you describe above, and there's nothing wrong with that, in an of itself. However, as with any complex tool/environment/creative suite kind of offering, there comes a certain ethos and design philosophy attached. I get the feeling... you aren't using Reaper particularly aligned with the "customize everything, proactively know and configure the environment you use" ethos of the program, and instead, something like the above is enough to motivate disgruntled (and in my opinion, at least in this case, misplaced) criticism. It's okay to voice criticism like that, it's just that it's not necessarily relevant in the scheme of how the program actually operates, and how it's designed to allow itself to be operated.

[TheMaestro]

1) It's just a guess that me trying out the beta was the cause for it having been set to 40 here

2) I'm not "droning on about it like I've been deeply hurt at all". I merely said that I don't see the point of it and asked what it is supposed to be good for, to which you chose to reply (speaking positively about the feature without actually answering the question - you still haven't as none of the reason you gave really makes much of a sense if you think about it) to which I again decided to reply

3) please leave it to me to decide what and what not I criticize (about this or that product)

4) with that out of the way, I still think it's a nonsensical function that just helps to increase the mess in the already quite messy Preferences... er... tool? It's so deep at this point I don't know what to call it. It's also quite hard to find certain settings, even if you kown there are somewhere in there.
I think they really need to start showing some restraint when it comes to adding stuff and I gladly make use of this opportunity to say it. Whether that suits you personally or not is none of my business.

5) if you ask me, you clearly start showing fanboy symptoms here

You're tiresome, unoriginal and annoying, and constantly spew out jabs towards other users. Just in this thread alone, calling them stupid, fanboys, they don't know what they want, and droning on about a feature you pesonally don't understand, before calling the people that need this feature for stupid.

And we certainly can tell you how you "criticize".
Keep it up, and see if someone else agrees with me on that.

[VOODOO U]

This is for showing the arrangement track background in all situations, so that you can target it with the cursor at all times, even when only showing (e.g. being zoomed into a busy portion of your project) a section of your project where all visible tracks are 100% full of items. This way, normally just having a small sliver of the background showing below the item(s), you can trigger anything on any particular track, that you have set to trigger when interacting with the track lane/background itself, not just the items, no matter what section of your project you are looking at, and all you might be seeing is an area full of items.

Well I'll be damned. This is something that's actually really convenient. Not essential but convenient.
Haha....fooking Reaper, no matter how deep down the rabbit hole one goes, there is always an easter egg hiding somewhere.

[jens]

You have also repeated the question/exasperation: why would anyone want this? This is for showing the arrangement track background in all situations, so that you can target it with the cursor at all times, even when only showing (e.g. being zoomed into a busy portion of your project) a section of your project where all visible tracks are 100% full of items. This way, normally just having a small sliver of the background showing below the item(s), you can trigger anything on any particular track, that you have set to trigger when interacting with the track lane/background itself, not just the items, no matter what section of your project you are looking at, and all you might be seeing is an area full of items.

Well, kudos for at least coming up with a reason - but - sorry to say - it's still bollocks to me as a simple modifier (say shift) would do in that situation and would be a much simpler and more elegant solution (i.e. you could just click anywhere instead of needing empty timeline-space).

And at first nobody knew what it was and was assuming it was all kinds of other features and you even assumed it might be bug... admit it.

And even if the option already existed in R6 that still doesn't change anything about my opinion that Reaper is full of unneccessary settings and options that can be really difficult to navigate and keep track of.

I am not a Reaper hater - far from it - but in my book, there's a lot of much better reasons to love Reaper than the imo often quite cumbersome "roll-your-own"-mentality.

In my opinion it's the enthusiasm of the hardcore-fanbase that is kind of stopping Reaper somewhat from maturing because they keeps asking for more and more ways to customize everything. Personally I don't think that's particularly healthy. But that's just my opinion and I fully respect that you may wholeheartedly disagree.

But either way: this is apparently being blown out of proportions here since for me this is just a geeky discussion and suddenly everyone seems to become real touchy and all and - for some reason - appears to assume the same of me which is absolutely not the case at all.

[Odd Fella]

I turned off the check for updates option because I am pretty sure I will not upgrade.
Like with MS Word etc., I use about 5% of Reaper's features, and I won't use anything that will be added, I am pretty sure.
I wish they had made a final 6.x version that is free of bugs. A real final version, not that continuous update that could have happened at any point of the development.

I guess I will go back to Mulab now that they are adding VST3 support.
While Reaper is very efficient in terms of CPU, I noticed that I was much more productive when I used other DAW's. Reaper just doesn't invite me to do something.

[stoopicus]

I wish they had made a final 6.x version that is free of bugs. A real final version, not that continuous update that could have happened at any point of the development.

How is the final version of 6 not exactly what you are asking for?

No software is ever *completely* free of bugs. I'm annoyed by a doozy in Logic Pro right now, and it is very mature in its development (10.7.9!)

[Odd Fella]

I wish they had made a final 6.x version that is free of bugs. A real final version, not that continuous update that could have happened at any point of the development.

How is the final version of 6 not exactly what you are asking for?

No software is ever *completely* free of bugs. I'm annoyed by a doozy in Logic Pro right now, and it is very mature in its development (10.7.9!)

Reaper keeps adding and changing stuff all the time, hence introducing new bugs. They should have stopped that for the last couple of 6.x updates and focused completely on bug fixes in order to provide a super solid final version.
But Reaper development is continuous, the new major version is arbitrary, it might have happened at any time, there is nothing really new in version 7.
And the more complex and bloated it gets, the more bugs there are in it.

[Guenon]

Well, kudos for at least coming up with a reason - but - sorry to say - it's still bollocks to me as a simple modifier (say shift) would do in that situation and would be a much simpler and more elegant solution (i.e. you could just click anywhere instead of needing empty timeline-space).

And at first nobody knew what it was and was assuming it was all kinds of other features and you even assumed it might be bug... admit it.

And even if the option already existed in R6 that still doesn't change anything about my opinion that Reaper is full of unneccessary settings and options that can be really difficult to navigate and keep track of.

I am not a Reaper hater - far from it - but in my book, there's a lot of much better reasons to love Reaper than the imo often quite cumbersome "roll-your-own"-mentality.

In my opinion it's the enthusiasm of the hardcore-fanbase that is kind of stopping Reaper somewhat from maturing because they keeps asking for more and more ways to customize everything. Personally I don't think that's particularly healthy. But that's just my opinion and I fully respect that you may wholeheartedly disagree.

But either way: this is apparently being blown out of proportions here since for me this is just a geeky discussion and suddenly everyone seems to become real touchy and all and - for some reason - appears to assume the same of me which is absolutely not the case at all.

Yep, I would say that was a bug, if it really appeared out of the blue as you described. It's not supposed to set itself to a value that large, just like that, and show such a weird effect, at your display resolution (the value is set in pixels, so at a larger resolution it would be just gravy, I'd imagine). Hadn't seen that happen before, and didn't know what it was, as based on your screenshots I didn't associate so much empty space with this (which is basically supposed to be a small strip of clickable track background, no matter where you zoom or navigate - it has its own set of modifiers and so on, so the "why don't you do it with Shift" and other such musings don't give you the same outcome in actuality). In the shots, it looked more like free item positioning running in some way.

In any case: the "roll-your-own mentality" is what an environment like this is about. It is cumbersome only if you are not of that mindset. If so-called maker culture and custom tools and environments of that nature, solving use cases with customized solutions, crafting, etc. are not how you approach creative tasks, at least in part, and in music/sound, a large chunk of what makes this DAW special is lost on you - and it might even feel annoying for that. This is not "stopping it from maturing", and it isn't the way it is because the users "keep asking" for it to be that way; Reaper didn't come to be that way out of some pressure from the outside. Instead, it is actually very mature in its main focus nowadays, i.e. being extensible and configurable, themable, scriptable, and so on. That is its articulated core focus, along with efficient performance, and the main reason why it sees so much use in creative contexts where you need a performant, targeted custom solution to audio/music editing/processing/preparation workflows, and so on. Contexts that are highly professional and driven by efficient solutions, one might add - your talk about a "hardcore fanbase" and "fanboys" and so on also muddies the waters. (I mean, for these reasons you also have, for example, middlewares of the calibre of FMOD choosing integration specifically with Reaper https://www.fmod.com/docs/2.02/studio/a ... ation.html )

I'm just describing this at length so that you have an idea of what it's about, the "suddenly everyone seems to become real touchy" part and all; it's not like you need to change the way you approach creativity and music and so on ... Nobody is saying that your preferences or how you'd like to approach things are worse. What makes reading descriptions like yours potentially frustrating to people of a different mindset is, ultimately, that you do not "get" this software, or said mindset, and in turn, you also word your opinions in such a way that it seems like it describes those things being worse, haha. This is where the touchiness comes in. And, while you do all that, it's from the frustration with the software (and its associated mindset!), because indeed a lot of those things don't have value to you, and they feel unnecessary and confusing, and you "have neither the time nor the patience for these kind of experiments."

It is what it is, a vicious circle, hah. And again, why I rarely enter discussions like this

[elxsound]

Is there a way to change the width of tracks in the mix panel?

I only found the dpi 200% layout setting that didn’t change much of anything.

[Guenon]

Is there a way to change the width of tracks in the mix panel?

I only found the dpi 200% layout setting that didn’t change much of anything.

The track layouts are defined by the theme. See what is available in Options > Layouts > Mixer Panel, and so on. Or right click on a track > Track layout, if changing just for that one track. If there are no layouts there, or just a couple of them, the theme in use doesn't come with extensive alternative layouts by default.

[elxsound]

Is there a way to change the width of tracks in the mix panel?

I only found the dpi 200% layout setting that didn’t change much of anything.

The track layouts are defined by the theme. See what is available in Options > Layouts > Mixer Panel, and so on. Or right click on a track > Track layout, if changing just for that one track. If there are no layouts there, or just a couple of them, the theme in use doesn't come with extensive alternative layouts by default.

Got it. I’ll keep hunting for different themes.

I’m toying with the idea of using Reaper over Cubase for mixing. If I can customize it the way I’d like, it could work out.

[saint_william]

You surely can customize it. I have a configuration for music production/creation, one for music mixing, and one for podcasting. They all have the same fundamental mouse functions but all have different menus and some different shortcuts and hot keys. I’m fairly new to it. But if you wanna make this seamless it is totally possible

[enroe]

In my opinion it's the enthusiasm of the hardcore-fanbase that is kind of stopping Reaper somewhat from maturing because they keeps asking for more and more ways to customize everything. Personally I don't think that's particularly healthy.

You already recognized that quite well. That's exactly how it is.

Comparing Reaper to other DAWs is like comparing a Falcon F16 to a
Cessna: Imagine all DAWs being like a Cessna: You do a few checks, sit
in and with a few transparent operations you can take off - and have
a fantastic flight.

In this comparison Reaper is like a F-16 Falcon: You cannot just climb
into the cockpit and take off. No, you have to learn all the instruments
and switcher first, you have to take lessons until you can fly such a jet
fighter.

Reaper is like a F-16: After learning Reaper you can do things much faster,
but in all other DAWs you do things without learning so much.

[liquidsound]

In my opinion it's the enthusiasm of the hardcore-fanbase that is kind of stopping Reaper somewhat from maturing because they keeps asking for more and more ways to customize everything. Personally I don't think that's particularly healthy.

You already recognized that quite well. That's exactly how it is.

Comparing Reaper to other DAWs is like comparing a Falcon F16 to a
Cessna: Imagine all DAWs being like a Cessna: You do a few checks, sit
in and with a few transparent operations you can take off - and have
a fantastic flight.

In this comparison Reaper is like a F-16 Falcon: You cannot just climb
into the cockpit and take off. No, you have to learn all the instruments
and switcher first, you have to take lessons until you can fly such a jet
fighter.

Reaper is like a F-16: After learning Reaper you can do things much faster,
but in all other DAWs you do things without learning so much.

So, Reaper brakes the Sound Barrier without crashing?

[jethrobull]

I've been using Reaper for around 16 years now, and I can say I've hardly customized it at all. Some keyboard shortcuts for actions and re-sizing of tracks, but that's about it really. Even stuck to the default theme. I think it looks great and does everything I need. I'm just a happy customer I suppose