No Need to Fear This Reaper
Usually when I ask people if they’ve seen reaper before they tend to freak out and go on about how it “isn’t their time yet” or “I’m only 20 what are you talking about”. Today I will clarify that confusion with the Reaper I was mentioning all along.
Reaper is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that is unlike the regular competitors out there in the audio production field. More popular/common DAWs such as Ableton, FL Studio, Logic, and Pro Tools are very well known by music producers around the world and have been established for years. The thing that sets Reaper apart from these other platforms is its entire purpose for being built, and that was to be the most versatile and customizable tool to bring into the hands of more people without sacrificing any of the essential functionalities of a traditional DAW. And I will say this for a fact, I think they really hit it out of the park on this one.
For starters, when downloading Reaper for the first time you don’t get asked to pay anything until you actually open the program. That’s when the kind developers leave you a message in order to remind you that Reaper is a paid license but, they are willing to give you a 60 day “Evaluation License” in order to give you time to determine whether or not you like the DAW. They let you save any projects, use whatever plugins you have, and place as many tracks as your cpu can handle. Which I believe to be amazing considering that most other DAW trials don’t allow you to save any work or use any of their plugins and on top of that, only lasting a week or two. Reaper is only $60 for a personal license, which gives you access to about 95% of the things you’ll ever need in order to work on any project.
The reason as for why Reaper is so incredibly affordable is because it doesn’t need to over do itself. Reaper is pretty barebones when you open up that fresh install, but after a good amount of googling and YouTube tutorials, you will find that this DAW can be shaped to whatever you want it to be. You decide how deep you want to go in configuration and Reaper will function just the way you pictured, nothing more nothing less.
It also means that it doesn’t come with many plugins off the bat, but that’s okay! There’s an entire free and open source world of plugins that all it takes is a quick dive into some searching online (more to come on plugins in the future!). Once you’ve set yourself with everything you need, Reaper has now become an absolute working horse for you or your bands music, video projects, sound design, or voice overs!
Reaper is what you make of it, no matter how far you decide to go (not into the light of course).
I hope you enjoyed learning about Reaper today, as always if you have any questions don’t hesitate to reach out!
See you!
Raffy
