To Reaper or Not to Reaper

[gorillaonabike]

So I showed my short around and mentioned my predicament to a sound engineer. He liked my short enough that he's lending me a load of professional sound kit! Yay!!!! Or maybe he just hated the sound enough that he wanted me to sort it out...

I have no idea what kit he's lending me but he used to earn his living from sound so is lending me a mixer and free audio interface. However, I will need to buy a little ol' piece of software to go with.

My understanding from a previous thread is Reaper will be a great little piece of software (and cheap at $60 USD) but are there any genuine alternatives? And is Reaper enough?

 

[AudioPostExpert]

Reaper is a great bit of software for the money and is good for composition but it lacks OMF or AAF import and a few other essential features which makes it far less suitable for audio post. So you'll have to find some other means of getting your edits from your picture editing software into Reaper.

You'll get all the basic audio editing tools with Reaper, quite a few built in plugins and access (through VST) to many other cheap/free plugins. If you're looking for high quality though, plugins is where Reaper (and every other DAW) starts to get expensive very quickly. It's worth baring in mind that both the DAW and many of the plugins have a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you're trying to get good quality out of them. Remember as well that your mixes can only be as good as your monitoring equipment/environment. It doesn't matter how good a DAW, plugins, other equipment or ability you've got, if you can't hear what's going on accurately in your mix, you can't create a good mix.

There is much better than Reaper for audio post, ProTools is the industry standard for good reason but it's going to cost you way more than Reaper and probably more in plugins. So if you've only got a small budget Reaper is certainly the best choice.

G

 

[gorillaonabike]

Reaper is a great bit of software for the money and is good for composition but it lacks OMF or AAF import and a few other essential features which makes it far less suitable for audio post. So you'll have to find some other means of getting your edits from your picture editing software into Reaper.

You'll get all the basic audio editing tools with Reaper, quite a few built in plugins and access (through VST) to many other cheap/free plugins. If you're looking for high quality though, plugins is where Reaper (and every other DAW) starts to get expensive very quickly. It's worth baring in mind that both the DAW and many of the plugins have a pretty steep learning curve, especially if you're trying to get good quality out of them. Remember as well that your mixes can only be as good as your monitoring equipment/environment. It doesn't matter how good a DAW, plugins, other equipment or ability you've got, if you can't hear what's going on accurately in your mix, you can't create a good mix.

There is much better than Reaper for audio post, ProTools is the industry standard for good reason but it's going to cost you way more than Reaper and probably more in plugins. So if you've only got a small budget Reaper is certainly the best choice.

G

I will check if ProTools is an alternative which will allow me to record directly to Mac (cost etc...) Thanks!

 

[Will Vincent]

Reaper is free to use for 30 days, completely uncrippled in any way. So, it's probably worth installing and playing around with to see if it will fulfill your needs before exploring significantly more expensive options.

 

[AudioPostExpert]

I will check if ProTools is an alternative which will allow me to record directly to Mac (cost etc...) Thanks!

ProTools lists at about $700 just for the software and can go up to well over $100k for all the professional bells and whistles and you can add another $20k to that for professional grade plugins. You can probably get a used older version of ProTools (say v.9) for a couple of hundred $ but unless you are dedicating your future to audio post specifically I don't think the benefits it provides are going to be worth it to you. ProTools is better for post than Reaper but not 11 times better!

You'd also need to check that your audio interface would be compatible with ProTools (and Reaper for that matter). Oh, and ProTools has an even steeper learning curve than Reaper but there are people here who can help you.

G