Reaper 4 Release Candidate
I'm still using Reaper as my main DAW and I still love it. I'm hacking away at the next album with it. Reaper 4 should be released shortly as they're up to Release Candidate 4 as of this posting. Here are some of my favorite things in v4:
- ReaEQ - They added a live spectrograph to the EQ, which was a feature other EQs (like the one in logic) made me want.
- Selecting chunks of audio in the media explorer is pretty sweet when you have compatible VSTis. You can preview an audio file and select a section from the waveform and drag it right into the plugin or timeline. Very handy.
- Midi Track Controls (ReaControlMIDI) - I'm not actually sure if this was in v3 but I know I was trying to get a weird midi controller to control the tracks long ago and had no luck. This makes it easy.
- Project Bay - Now you can see and manage all the effects and media you're using in your project.
- Screensets - save and recall Reaper window layouts easily. Nice.
Here are some things I am not fond of:
- The default theme is too dark and the color coding of tracks is really hard to see. I was finding it really tough to organize my projects so that I knew what was going on at a glance. So I switched back to the v3 theme, which is OK for now.
- The Media Explorer is slow on my Mac. Hopping between files with the cursor keys is weirdly slow. This was never a thing on Windows.
And here's my wish list:
- I'd like a simple multi-sampler. A Battery-style 'pad' sampler would be my preference. Setting up many tracks of ReaSamplOmatic5000 is cumbersome.
- Some metadata/search in the Media Explorer would be great. I have a ton of samples kicking around but if they're not easily at hand.
- Workflow improvements - Reaper is already so far ahead of the competition in functionality that I think it'd benefit from some time spent on its usability. While it's awesome that each pulldown and context menu and preference page are overstuffed with cool options, it can be overwhelming. And I'm a pretty huge nerd so I assume the less techy out there go into cardiac arrest at the sight of it.
Anyway, great job Reaper team.