When you first launch Reaper you won't get any nasty surprises: its general layout follows that of most other MIDI + Audio sequencers, making it very easy to get into. There's the usual bar of drop-down menu commands across the top, with an icon-based toolbar beneath. To the right of this is a timeline, where you can click and drag with the mouse to define song selections and loops, while each of the horizontal track panes in the main area displaying audio or MIDI 'media clips' has its own Track Control Panel to the left, rather like the Cubase Inspector.
However, one major difference between Reaper and many other audio applications is that you can dock various of its windows onto the bottom Docker area of the main window and choose between them via tabs. Some of the items you can dock include the Mixer, a Media Explorer for importing MIDI or audio files, rather like that of Sonic Foundry's Acid, the Undo History, a Big Clock display, a virtual MIDI keyboard, an incredibly detailed Performance meter, and the very versatile Routing Matrix.
This is just so much easier than navigating between a host of floating windows containing mixers, FX, instruments, transport controls and so on, and of course you'll never lose one window behind all the rest. By default, Reaper places a transport bar beneath the main 'arrange' area, with the mixer in the Docker area across the bottom of the screen, but you can undock these and revert to floating window versions if you wish, or detach the entire Docker area and let it float on top wherever you wish. In this mode it features variable opacity, so you can still see what's going on 'underneath' it.
All of the various display areas and individual windows are resizeable, so you can, for instance, keep the mixer manageably small during the recording and arranging phases, then create really tall meters and faders during mixdown to better view your channel levels and edit your automation moves.
There is also a huge number of context-sensitive options available via a right-click with your mouse over different areas of the screen, while the Reaper Preferences dialogue covers a huge amount of ground, from general choices and keyboard shortcuts through a host of audio and MIDI settings, appearance options (there are also at least 50 colour schemes on offer, or you can create personalised 'skins'), editing and mouse behaviour, plug-in and visualisation settings, as well as options to add MIDI Control Surfaces and point to External Editors. This last meant that for the first time I could leap straight into my preferred Wavelab to work on WAV files, which you can't even do from Cubase, even though both are Steinberg products. Frankly, I was amazed by the number of options, and what's more, the default settings let newbies get stuck in straight away without getting bogged down.
One of the most exciting aspects of Reaper is its flexible routing (see screen above). Unlike most other sequencers, it allows you to set up almost any routing regime you can think of. Each track has its own green I/O button that appears both in the Track Control Panel to the left of the Track pane and in the appropriate channel in the mixer. Clicking on this button launches a dialogue window where you can decide where the output from the track is sent, although there's a sensible default routing which means that the novice can get started without being slowed down by all the options: by default, the outputs of all the tracks are routed to the Master stereo output in the mixer, which in turn is routed to the first two channels of your audio interface.
If, for instance, you want to set up a send and return for adding global effects like reverb or chorus, you just insert a new track (let's name it 'FX Reverb'), add your choice of effect plug-in to it, and then click on the I/O button of any track to which you want to add this effect. Among the comprehensive list of routing possibilities are sections headed Sends and Receives; you just tick the box in the Sends list named 'FX Reverb' and new level and pan faders appear beneath the tick box so you can set up send levels, along with the option to place the send before or after the insert effects and channel fader. Helpfully, when you next look at the I/O Routing for the 'FX Reverb' track, the Receives section will now display all the send faders routed to it, so you can tweak all your reverb levels in one place.
Thus each track can also function as a bus with lots of other tracks routed to it, whether as an effects send or a group channel. Conversely, using the various tick-box areas in the channel Routing windows, each track can also be sent to any number of other tracks, which is great if you want to run several simultaneous insert effects in parallel, for instance, or to split a single track into several frequency bands and apply further plug-in effects to each one. Each track can also be routed to any number of different hardware outputs, which could be handy for analogue summing or monitoring.
Using all these routing features and suitable effect plug-ins, it's also comparatively easy to set up side-chaining (where one track is used to 'key' a dynamics processor on another, such as when the kick drum is used to 'duck' the level of the bass line, or a pad sound is rhythmically gated by percussive elements from elsewhere). I'll return to the subject of side-chaining when I take a look at the bundled Cockos plug-ins, since some of these provide four inputs (main stereo input and stereo detector input) to help you perform such trickery. Cubase users are still waiting for such features, despite many requests over the years!
Other routing features in Reaper include Reamote, a way to link multiple PCs in a network and use the remote ones to add extra processing clout to your main computer. To do this you just install Reaper on each machine and then enable Reamote on the master machine from the Preferences menu. This in turn searches for Reamote slave machines on the network and adds their plug-in list to the armoury. There's also support for Propellerhead Software's Rewire, which allows you to connect Reaper to other similarly equipped audio applications, such as Cubase, Reason and Sonar, and send MIDI and audio data between them in perfect sync.
Rearoute, which was originally intended as a replacement for Rewire, before support for this was later added, is also worth mentioning. It's an optional ASIO driver that provides 16 inputs and outputs so you can send audio to or receive it from another application. It's still there as an option, and is certainly handy if you want to work with non-Rewire applications.
Finally, Reaper provides the Routing Matrix window (above) for those who want ultimate control over routing. This is a table displaying all possible sources down the left side, including track inputs, hardware inputs, and Rearoute inputs if enabled, and all the destinations from left to right, including track outputs, hardware outputs and Rearoute outputs. Here you can click on each input to Record Arm it, while where an input row intersects an output column, all your interconnections, such as sends, can be easily seen. New connections can be created by left-clicking, and the send level/pan settings and routing options can be edited by right-clicking to launch a small window containing the relevant controls.
Overall, this is an incredibly versatile system, which can be largely ignored by the novice, yet enthusiastically explored by the more experienced. It will certainly appeal to those familiar with traditional patchbays, who have been used to being able to plug any studio output into any input.
Via - Sound on Sound
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