Reaper

[Alison]

So, I don't know if this is the right forum or not but, I am finally diving into the world of Reaper. Started discussing this in "Let's Have A Listen" but, I think that's the wrong place for this so. . .

I started checking Reaper out late in 2021 but when the world came crashing down in 2022, I gave up on it and uninstalled it (long story). It's reinstalled but I am having major latency problems. I've googled and YouTubed myself crazy and cannot figure it out! I'm using the PreSonus AudioBox interface that I've always used and was able to figure out latency problems in Studio One but, Reaper has me baffled.

Any ideas or suggestions I should try?

In a way, I think I'm crazy to even try to change DAW's at this point since I am very comfortable with Studio One but, hey, change can be good (new song I'm working on ). Thanks!

[Armistice]

There's a few settings in there somewhere you'll have to adjust - unfortunately as I set mine up about a decade ago and haven't touched them since, I don't really know where they are anymore.

@Tadpui will be all over them, I expect. Others too. Let's see if there's someone on the other end of the bat phone...

Once you get past the latency issue, nothing much else goes wrong. You might also have to tell it where to look for any plug ins you're using, but that's usually easy enough.

Very stable and well worth the $60USD spend, if you decide it's for you.

And there's a YouTube tutorial for everything you could ever want to do courtesy of a guy who speaks so fast normally he's had to write down what he's going to say and put breaks in so people can

understand

what he's saying...

Welcome to the dark side.

[Tadpui]

Sorry, I replied in the other thread before I saw this post...

[Alison]

Sorry, I replied in the other thread before I saw this post...

No sweat, just me trying to change things up a bit. I need to learn to leave stuff alone! Anyway, I saw your answer and it does make my head spin a bit. I'll check it out soon. We have a "scheduled" power outage tomorrow, third one since we moved here! Oh, the joys of California. . . anyway, if not tomorrow, I will definitely check it out on Thursday. Thank you for your reply (in both spots )

[Armistice]

I reckon we have "scheduled power outages" in our future too Alison, although I hope not, and perhaps less chance here than elsewhere, but we'll see.

Perhaps, as it's undoubtedly going to be a bit of a journey to get into Reaper, keep this thread going and post whatever it is that's puzzling you at the time.

[Alison]

I reckon we have "scheduled power outages" in our future too Alison, although I hope not, and perhaps less chance here than elsewhere, but we'll see.

Perhaps, as it's undoubtedly going to be a bit of a journey to get into Reaper, keep this thread going and post whatever it is that's puzzling you at the time.

Oh, I will! I'm determined to give it a good go, after all, I'm in this to learn but, sometimes my brain hits a brick wall. . .

[JD01]

On scheduled outages... you both love in very sunny areas. Can you get yourselves some solar panels? I don't have many but I get 2 - 3kW when the sun is out. More than enough to run the fridge/freezer, a guitar amp, a laptop and my Internet hub.

[Armistice]

On scheduled outages... you both love in very sunny areas. Can you get yourselves some solar panels? I don't have many but I get 2 - 3kW when the sun is out. More than enough to run the fridge/freezer, a guitar amp, a laptop and my Internet hub.

You see, the thing is, I have enough solar power to light up a third world country - big roof, panels on both faces and lots of them - of absolutely no use whatsoever when the grid goes down as, to avoid electrocuting sparkies trying to fix power outages with home solar set ups feeding power back into the grid, it's all shut down. I'm in the dark as well. Grid goes down, solar panels are useless. That's the way it works here, and everyone pretty much has solar panels.

Now that's an unscheduled failure, not a scheduled outage, but I can't imagine it's going to be different. And if we get to that point where we're having scheduled outages there will be rioting in the streets and I'll be one of the rioters, given what a coal, natural gas, nuclear material, wind, hydro and solar super power the country should be, but isn't.

Even if you get a battery, that's no good either, you need a special inverter - can be done but way more expensive than a normal battery set up. Ridiculous ROI numbers on doing that.

Be surprised if your set up was any different. Happy to be wrong.

[JD01]

Yeah, mine is different I think. I'm not 100% sure though. Obviously something to do with the inverter - I'm not an electrician though.

[Greg_L]

You see, the thing is, I have enough solar power to light up a third world country - big roof, panels on both faces and lots of them - of absolutely no use whatsoever when the grid goes down as, to avoid electrocuting sparkies trying to fix power outages with home solar set ups feeding power back into the grid, it's all shut down. I'm in the dark as well. Grid goes down, solar panels are useless. That's the way it works here, and everyone pretty much has solar panels.

Now that's an unscheduled failure, not a scheduled outage, but I can't imagine it's going to be different. And if we get to that point where we're having scheduled outages there will be rioting in the streets and I'll be one of the rioters, given what a coal, natural gas, nuclear material, wind, hydro and solar super power the country should be, but isn't.

Even if you get a battery, that's no good either, you need a special inverter - can be done but way more expensive than a normal battery set up. Ridiculous ROI numbers on doing that.

Be surprised if your set up was any different. Happy to be wrong.

Yes, that ^^^^

Most residential solar panel setups are not backup power. They don't/won't/can't power your home in the event of a power outage. The backfeed problem is real.

I have a generator that will run my house if the power goes down. I have to manually flip my breaker box to not allow that generator power to go back into the grid. The generator will not work on the house until that breaker is flipped.

[Alison]

On scheduled outages... you both love in very sunny areas. Can you get yourselves some solar panels? I don't have many but I get 2 - 3kW when the sun is out. More than enough to run the fridge/freezer, a guitar amp, a laptop and my Internet hub.

You see, the thing is, I have enough solar power to light up a third world country - big roof, panels on both faces and lots of them - of absolutely no use whatsoever when the grid goes down as, to avoid electrocuting sparkies trying to fix power outages with home solar set ups feeding power back into the grid, it's all shut down. I'm in the dark as well. Grid goes down, solar panels are useless. That's the way it works here, and everyone pretty much has solar panels.

Now that's an unscheduled failure, not a scheduled outage, but I can't imagine it's going to be different. And if we get to that point where we're having scheduled outages there will be rioting in the streets and I'll be one of the rioters, given what a coal, natural gas, nuclear material, wind, hydro and solar super power the country should be, but isn't.

Even if you get a battery, that's no good either, you need a special inverter - can be done but way more expensive than a normal battery set up. Ridiculous ROI numbers on doing that.

Be surprised if your set up was any different. Happy to be wrong.

We have around 20 solar panels on our roof but whatever they generate goes back to the grid. So, as Armi said, power goes off, we go off.

There is also a huge windmill farm here in Tehachapi so, I really don't understand all this. Anyway, we've been thinking of getting a battery backup or generator to deal with these.

Apparently, these are "maintenance" outages. We've been here less than 3 months and this is the 3rd time. . . it's nuts!

[musicturtle]

@Alison maybe we can take the Reaper dive together.

Cubase is not running great on my computer and it is a giant program.

I downloaded Reaper and I am gonna record my next project on it using their plugins and the third party ones as well.
(Because mainly what I will miss are the stock plugins on Cubase)

It will be a learning curve but I already like how quickly it starts up compared to Cubase.

[Alison]

@Alison maybe we can take the Reaper dive together.

Cubase is not running great on my computer and it is a giant program.

I downloaded Reaper and I am gonna record my next project on it using their plugins and the third party ones as well.
(Because mainly what I will miss are the stock plugins on Cubase)

It will be a learning curve but I already like how quickly it starts up compared to Cubase.

Very cool! I'm hoping to fire up Reaper later today. If I can get this latency problem solved, I'll be recording a bunch this weekend, fingers crossed!

[JD01]

Be surprised if your set up was any different. Happy to be wrong.

Spoke to my Mrs about this, she orangised all our solar stuff. She thinks its something to do with having the car plugged in, all excess solar is diverted to the car. She thinks... guess we'll find out if we get a power cut during the day.

@Alison sorry for hijacking your thread, any questions on Reaper, give me a shout.

[Alison]

Okay, the latency problem is solved!! Thank you @Tadpui your help was spot on! I am recording something to post in let's have a listen but I am having a bit of a time finding everything (like Eq, reverb, rendering EZD to audio tracks or even listing the separate tracks. . .stuff like that). Studio One is a lot easier in that respect. Jury is still out but, I'm on my way!

P.S. Right after the last scheduled power outage, they scheduled ANOTHER one. That'll be number 4 in less than 3 months! Seems like it's every week and a half or so. Mike and I are looking into battery back-ups for our solar panels. . .

[Tadpui]

Okay, the latency problem is solved!! Thank you @Tadpui your help was spot on! I am recording something to post in let's have a listen but I am having a bit of a time finding everything (like Eq, reverb, rendering EZD to audio tracks or even listing the separate tracks. . .stuff like that). Studio One is a lot easier in that respect. Jury is still out but, I'm on my way!

P.S. Right after the last scheduled power outage, they scheduled ANOTHER one. That'll be number 4 in less than 3 months! Seems like it's every week and a half or so. Mike and I are looking into battery back-ups for our solar panels. . .

Hey I'm so glad that you're past the latency issues! And equally bummed about the outages, that's a big bummer. At least you get some fair warning so you can prepare, if that counts as a plus.

About the plugins and browsing/searching for them...one thing that I use every time that makes it much more manageable is the ability to filter the plugins by name or type or manufacturer. See if these steps make it easier to use for you:

• click the FX button on a track
• if there are not already effects on that track, it'll bring you straight to the "Add FX to:" dialog box
• if there are already effects on that track, click the "Add" button at the bottom to open the "Add FX to:" dialog box
• towards the top of that dialog box, there's a spot where it says "Filter". In the text box next to that label, you can type what you're looking for and it'll filter that huge list down to just the things that match.
• For instance, if you want EQ, type "reae" and it should filter the list down to just ReaEQ. Type "reai" and it'll show just ReaInsert. Type "comp" and it'll show any plugin that has ...comp... in the name, like ReaComp or ReaXComp.
• Or, instead of the text filter, you can click on the categories in the left-hand pane to filter by category (like Developers->Toontrack will just show plugins from Toontrack).

That should help tame the intimidating long list of plugins.

And for EZDrummer in Reaper...if you have the patience to watch a video, I did a rundown of how to get up and running with EZDrummer in Reaper. You can skip the first 4 minutes or so, since you're already that far along. Hopefully you find it helpful in creating individual tracks for the kit pieces. It was one of my first videos so it's a little rough around the edges. But it's received a lot of positive feedback over the years, hopefully it'll be of help to you too.

[Alison]

Thank you, @Tadpui, I wish it was a bit simpler but I will give it a go tomorrow. It's so much easier to find plugins in Studio One.

Today I spent most of my time trying to figure out how to cut and paste. Not a simple thing in Reaper! Also, when I got out of the visible EZD on my DAW, it took forever to figure out how to get it back! I had been focussing on a guitar line I put in so I didn't want EZD in the way. I'm thinking I may have to redo everything. . .will check out this video tomorrow, today, my brain is fried!! I'm determined to give it a good try though.

Thanks for your help!

[Armistice]

It's one of those things that once its set up and you've used it a bit you never think of again, as all your plugins are in the Recent section.

Envelopes and track groups are the other things to learn.

Once you've got them under control that's about 99% of what you need,

[rayc]

Solar unavailability is due, I've been told by the power company who buy it from us disgustingly cheaply, is due to the likelihood of linesmen working up high and not being safe with inconsistent, unexpected or non standard voltages across the grid.
It needs to be set up via batteries to be readily & logically available.
REAPER is a keeper.

[Armistice]

Solar unavailability is due, I've been told by the power company who buy it from us disgustingly cheaply, is due to the likelihood of linesmen working up high and not being safe with inconsistent, unexpected or non standard voltages across the grid.
It needs to be set up via batteries to be readily & logically available.
REAPER is a keeper.

What's your feed in tariff? I changed plans to go to the highest tariff but also with a higher per kwh grid rate, and so far it seems to have reduced the overall bill, but I haven't seen a summer bill yet, so hard to tell. And the feed in amount is capped as well.

The glory days are over for solar feed in rates, I'm afraid...