Just had a demo of Cockos - Reaper

[leedsquietman]

Live cannot put session view on one monitor view and arrangement on a second. Live does not have surround / multichannel options. Live does not have resizeable mixer windows and doesn't include certain metering options such as phasescope.

Live doesn't support .omf, broadcast wav files or export of mp3. It also cannot host VSTs in rewire slave mode.

Live's video options are more limited. Live's crossfading and fading options and automation are more restricted.

Many people run Live with another DAW and don't want it to become more DAW centric. They want it to concentrate on innovative and creative use for arranging/composition and live performance. If you came from a traditional linear DAW, then you realize what Live is missing - if you didn't spend a long time working on a traditional linear DAW (such as Logic, Cubase, Sonar, PT, Reaper, DP etc) then you have blissful ignorance of some features Live does not have. In Cubase, I still use the Logical Editor for MIDI quite a bit, something it's had since the MIDI only Atari ST days.

This doesn't mean we don't love Live or are Live fanboys as much as you. Trust me, people at the Cubase forum tell me to shut up about Live as much as some Live fanboys wish they didn't have to read about another DAW on this forum. Live REVOLUTIONIZED my workflow and creativity.

Use things to your advantage. Remember the saying 'Jack Of All Trades and Master Of None'. Restricting yourself to one DAW is fine if it suits your needs. Otherwise, use multiple apps that specialize and save yourself some time and effort. Example - Live's video is in it's infancy. Cubase and Logic offer more features, but I wouldn't use them. I would go to Vegas (PC) or Final Cut Pro (Mac) and do the job in half the time because they specialize in video. Mastering/audio editing - I don't use Live or Cubase, I use Soundforge because it's the best tool for the job (with 3rd party VSTS) - super easy to get audio statistical info not provided in Live, better metering, better super easy fades, DC removal, and many easy shortcuts and file options not provided in Live. Yes, I could master in Live to a degree, but would have to lean heavily on 3rd party vsts, more so than in Soundforge.

It's all good.

[Ben_Binary]

I am loving Reaper for mastering and remixing.
My tracks sound better 'to me' and its easier 'for me' to master in reaper.
... and i aint even looked at the customization stuff.

The Reaper PRODUCT and business model is awesome plus the price is great.


The way I look at it: Reaper is half way between Soundforge and Live.

I use all three on PC and swap Logic for SForge on OSX ... only Reaper is on Linux

[HeadrickProductions]

i can see the benefit in editing in another program just to be able to do something simple like fade one piece of audio into another.
even people that record into live and are mixing into something else because they think it sounds better are getting no benefit because everything was recorded into live in the first place.

I am new to this whole thing so forgive my ignorance. You are saying that mastering in tools, sonar, etc....is a waste of time and does not make the audio sound better???

[eldar]

edit

[d-track]

will i make better music with reaper?

[IP]

no.

[tezza]

4 years later...

Reaper is a total weapon.

I've been a casual Live users since version 3 and I will always use it. However, I have started using Reaper with increasing frequency due to it having superior performance and track management. I can't believe it's Live 9 already and still no take lanes LOL! I wonder if Bitwig has take lanes...

Personally, I think Reaper rivals pro engineer. I never have been one to be entranced by "industry reputation". I just calls it how I sees it. I bet Reaper has just as many features over Pro E as Pro E has over Reaper. Reaper takes a very engineering centric approach to an audio engineering tool - probably more so than any other daw out there. It's interface is relatively crude with massive context menus that are not well organised, but they really do allow an extraordinary amount of depth in your options with everything from fine tuning transient detection, track hierarchies (folders), to running audio effects chains on networked slave computers - all with 64bit floating point internal audio processing.

I still love my Live 9 DAW - esp with my APC 40, but Reaper now gets just as much love depending on the type of track I am doing. I will always do larger projects in Reaper due to performance (and less need to freeze tracks).

Ableton, please allow us the ability to show/hide tracks. Large projects really become a chore to manage.

PS. I bought Harrison Mixbus on a sale, and I use it for mastering. It's brilliant. I export stems from Reaper or Live. Using Jack Audio, it is possible to route outputs from one daw into the inputs of Mixbus, but it requires a lot of CPU and memory, so I just import via stems. Reaper has AWESOME options for rendering - making stems export quicker.

I'm still waiting for a DAW manufacturer to offer accelerated DSP by way of CUDA cores. Imagine that! This is a patent waiting to happen. Massively powerful commodity hardware as the poor man's UAD. A lot of multimedia people have powerful GPUs for video editing already.

[jlgrimes]

4 years later...

Reaper is a total weapon.

I've been a casual Live users since version 3 and I will always use it. However, I have started using Reaper with increasing frequency due to it having superior performance and track management. I can't believe it's Live 9 already and still no take lanes LOL! I wonder if Bitwig has take lanes...

Personally, I think Reaper rivals pro engineer. I never have been one to be entranced by "industry reputation". I just calls it how I sees it. I bet Reaper has just as many features over Pro E as Pro E has over Reaper. Reaper takes a very engineering centric approach to an audio engineering tool - probably more so than any other daw out there. It's interface is relatively crude with massive context menus that are not well organised, but they really do allow an extraordinary amount of depth in your options with everything from fine tuning transient detection, track hierarchies (folders), to running audio effects chains on networked slave computers - all with 64bit floating point internal audio processing.

I still love my Live 9 DAW - esp with my APC 40, but Reaper now gets just as much love depending on the type of track I am doing. I will always do larger projects in Reaper due to performance (and less need to freeze tracks).

Ableton, please allow us the ability to show/hide tracks. Large projects really become a chore to manage.

PS. I bought Harrison Mixbus on a sale, and I use it for mastering. It's brilliant. I export stems from Reaper or Live. Using Jack Audio, it is possible to route outputs from one daw into the inputs of Mixbus, but it requires a lot of CPU and memory, so I just import via stems. Reaper has AWESOME options for rendering - making stems export quicker.

I'm still waiting for a DAW manufacturer to offer accelerated DSP by way of CUDA cores. Imagine that! This is a patent waiting to happen. Massively powerful commodity hardware as the poor man's UAD. A lot of multimedia people have powerful GPUs for video editing already.

Yes Reaper is great.

For mixing and automation, it is surprisingly full featured. Between Reaper and Studio One, I think those two are my favorite programs for mixing and automation and I think Reaper have a slight edge when it comes to automation.


Only gripe is that when it comes to composing and midi, Reaper is kind of bad IMO. It is not necessarily the lack of features. It is more the implementation of the features, and a weird GUI. There are some Reaperheads that get by fine with it, but Reaper's midi is definitely a program that's designed to be customized to get to work to your liking vs Ableton's almost "one size fits all" approach. Logic follows a similar philosophy to Reaper but you do get to see features of Logic's midi that does stuff that is incredible that would be tedious in Ableton. I think Reaper probably has some of those features as well but Logic puts it together a little nicer (for the most part).

[sowhoso]

Reaper sucks for creative work, but great for mixing

Live kinda sucks for mixing, but great for creativity

so, i love and use both as needed

[fishmonkey]

I'm still waiting for a DAW manufacturer to offer accelerated DSP by way of CUDA cores. Imagine that! This is a patent waiting to happen. Massively powerful commodity hardware as the poor man's UAD. A lot of multimedia people have powerful GPUs for video editing already.

it's not a DAW, however Acustica Nebula has been able to use CUDA for a while now.

GPUs and CUDA have their limitations though, that processing power is not generally applicable to all kinds of calculations...

[UncleAge]

I'm still waiting for a DAW manufacturer to offer accelerated DSP by way of CUDA cores. Imagine that! This is a patent waiting to happen. Massively powerful commodity hardware as the poor man's UAD. A lot of multimedia people have powerful GPUs for video editing already.

it's not a DAW, however Acustica Nebula has been able to use CUDA for a while now.

GPUs and CUDA have their limitations though, that processing power is not generally applicable to all kinds of calculations...

I think there also was a version of Reverberate that used it.