10 Reasons REAPER is better than PRO TOOLS

hi everybody adam steele here big reaper user i am one of the guys you'll see on youtube if you search reaper tutorial and today i'm gonna post something that's going to annoy a lot of people this video is 10 reasons why reaper is better than pro tools now i'm not saying that pro tools is inherently bad it works people use it you know some really big albums have been done with it so it is fine but that doesn't stop me from making the arguments that reaper is better than pro tools not because of some established standard but because of these reasons and i'm sure there are reasons people will find to say that pro tools is better than reaper but the number one oh it's the industry standard that's not an argument that doesn't count so without further ado number 10 but first let me tell you about our ultimate reaper course on pro mix academy if you're looking at getting into using reaper for all the reasons we're about to talk about then it's something you might want to grab it's a long ultra detailed course that walks you through step by step getting set up getting working getting recording getting a whole drum kit recorded getting a whole song put together effects all sorts of clever stuff that you can do in reapers some of which you can't do in pro tools without some very clever trickery now on with the show in a number 10 reaper is cheaper so this is one i wanted to cover right off the bat because it's one of the most obvious glaring reasons that a lot of people are looking at reaper in the first place if you look at the subscription cost for pro tools it's quite a lot of dollars every month and if you look at their perpetual however much that costs that is this much and reaper is this much reaper is 60 that's for what they call the discounted license which is basically are you using this as a big money making company no then it's 60 are you a big money making company using reaper to make money 225 all in and of course doing what i do i have paid the full license gladly because of all the reasons we're about to talk about today and the fact that well this is what i do but if i was just learning doing this at home reaper is not free and i keep seeing people saying oh i can just get it for free no it has a 60-day trial and then you can use it for as long as you like if you have to without it locking up and freezing and just locking you out but if you can buy it do so 60 dollars not a huge deal cheaper than most audio gear that you'll find and will probably stand you in better stead than anything else number nine reaper is really stable now when i say stable i mean it doesn't crash very often and when it does crash it's usually because of some third-party plug-in crashing and trying to take the system with it which is exactly the same thing that happens with pro tools now i've heard some anecdotal stories about pro tools how if you look into some of their source code a reliable friend tells me someone who can get hold of the source code and read it that some of the code in there is actually from old mac like power pc pre intel max and it's still there and they just use some code around it to make it work to make it work on modern macs and on pcs maybe that's changed recently but the fact that i could be told that story not very long ago about hardware that stopped being supported a decade ago that's not a good look for avid uh whereas the guys who make reaper they recompile it and change it all the time they keep it up to date they keep it so that there's no code in there that shouldn't be everything is using the latest kind of build which leads me on to number eight number eight reaper can run on anything now that's a slight exaggeration you probably can't run reaper on a toaster but if there's a smart toaster that runs on some sort of arm-based processor maybe you can reaper is designed in such a way that it doesn't really care what sort of platform you run whether it's a windows pc whether it's mac os whether it's linux or whether it's a type of processor that doesn't even count any of these like arm processors so good example of that is a raspberry pi the tiny little computers that you can get you can run reaper on those i mean don't expect massive amounts of like plug-in performance on those things but if you just want to record silently on a cheap system you can do it and it will work with just about any interface you can think of if you're on windows and your audio interface supports aco which is one of the more high efficiency low latency systems that's great if you're on mac os you can use their core audio if you're on linux there's a system called jack that you can use that does that reaper supports all of this it supports all of the different plugin types as well for any sort of separate plugins that you can use virtual drums you know synthesizers eqs compressors all that good stuff and the notable exception is pro tools is aax system but i can't think of many plugins that are pro tools ax only most plug-in manufacturers at least make one other version of their plugins whether it's a u which is the logic plugin vst is a very common one even the mac systems like lv2 that's all supported and reaper will just drop them in and go in at number seven you can change the way reaper looks a repurp on its default installation is a little bit gray a little bit kind of bland and plain looking personally i kind of like it because it means it's not getting in my way and it means that i'm not being distracted visually by all sorts of different things that i don't need on a second-second basis but i can change anything i can change the colors of any of the tracks i can change entire skins themes i think they're called in reaper yeah themes so i can change the whole system to look any way i want and importantly when you change it to look the way you want it can actually move different elements to different places according to where those theme designers want them to be so if you prefer a system where the the volume and the the phase button and the effects are all flipped around there might be a theme for you if you're colorblind for example there are plenty of themes that are designed around that so that the sort of colors that that wouldn't work for you are not used uh if you want to go as far as saying using the star trek l cars system if you want your mixing system to look like you're working on the your deck of the enterprise you can do that not my thing but you do you and it's there and hell if you really want you can actually make reaper look like pro tools that option's there too someone made a theme that makes it look like that do any of these things cost you extra no number six reaper supports a thing called ara now i'm guessing that the pro tools guys will eventually catch up to this if they haven't already but this is something that's now been in reaper for a while ara is a really funky system especially for guys who use melodyne and vocaline i use melodyne quite a bit i get sent songs to mix from all over the world and sometimes the tuning needs a little bit of help melodyne is in my opinion the best most malleable way to do that it's the way that i can get the most control over what i'm doing so that the vocal for example doesn't just sound like hatsune miku or t-pain i can do the best things with it but melodyne traditionally is a bit of a royal pain in the backside because you have to transfer an entire track into melodyne separately it then saves its own wav files and then anything that comes out of melodyne from that point is kind of baked in up to that point and if you change anything like if you edit some some gaps out in your daw on your track you have to then re-transfer that into melody and do the whole thing again huge pain whereas ara is this new system um there are more dws that support ara it's not just reaper but in amongst these reasons that reaper is great it's something i thought i'd best mention and what ara does is it's a specific add-on to the vst system vst3 specifically and when i drop melodyne on a track if there's a load of effects on there it automatically puts melodyne right at the start then it transfers the entire audio right through to melodyne in a split second because it doesn't have to wait in real time for me to play the whole thing through like i'm transferring to tape or something and from there then it's in and if i edit anything or move anything in reaper then that will update in melodyne instantly if i change takes if i do anything like that done that saves me huge amounts of time hours of time and so it's definitely worth mentioning here number five reaper has a super active community and i don't just mean like a support hotline i mean there is a massive forum at the reaper forums there are places you can go like there's a whole discord the unofficial reaper users forum where not only if you have problems people can help you but also there are people out there who are just offering hey here's this cool thing that i've done or asking questions like i'm trying to do this really weird specific thing does anyone know how i can do this because quite often there's an answer and somebody out there will know and as well as all the themes that i talked about with customizable looks there are also loads of extra plugins that are made for reaper the sws extensions is a really good example where you can do really nice rainbow colors on things which is just just a tip of the iceberg there's an entire mod for reaper that turns it into something for rock band where you press certain buttons and it just magics up really quickly a rock band file that's a thing you can do there are loads and loads of really cool mods and options there's even now a plug-in manager for reaper where you can then double click on something that looks cool download it install it done and that is part of the huge community and if somebody in that community has done something cool you can usually just go ahead and ask them hey is this a thing i can do with this and it's a really friendly really open community and at number four reba has very regular updates and i mean every few weeks a lot of big companies have it included in my experience will drop an update for a program maybe every six months three months if you're lucky but quite often you're waiting up to a year for an update and if there's something that's broken tough you wait and if you're lucky it gets updated in the next version reaper's not like that it's designed by a team that are very agile as far as i'm aware quite a small team so they can all communicate very well because they're not a big company they're not pushing to put the big new fancy thing in the next version they make sure that stuff works first because that's important is you know making sure that stuff works all the time but these new updates do quite often add new features as well which is number three number three there are big features sometimes added to reaper in between new releases rather than just holding off and holding off until like version seven here's all the new stuff version eight here's all the new stuff no with with reaper it doesn't work like that there are small incremental updates which are free updates by the way let's say that you bought reaper six at reaper 6.00 anything they add in all the way up to reaper 6.99 you've already paid for you have it you own it so when they put new features in like um very recently they put in musical score notation they put in the ara thing that i talked about before just as a a small number update they're like we've been working on this it's ready now here have this uh they've just put in a 3d surround sound panna so now if you're working with something like dolby atmos you can now have panning so that your items can go anywhere in a 3d space and they just added that in there you go have fun there are all sorts of these little things not just bug fixes but some real life enhancing things that come in just incrementally razor editing was a new one that just was slipped in there by the way this is new have this and so that means that anything new that comes up as soon as the developers have done and they know that it's not going to break it you get to play with these new toys instead of waiting months and months and months for the company to finally go here's a whole load of new stuff also i think that's great because that means that if they add one new cool feature at a time if something's not working they'll get a load of emails from the community about that one thing that say this isn't working that isn't working this isn't working please fix and they fix it very quickly and probably a small update and carry on rather than something being a cool new feature but being kind of buggy and broken for a year let's say so that means that these cool new features very quickly are go-to's for me and everybody else in at number two there's a thing that i use all the time called spectral peaks spectral peaks is something that saves hours of my time and it's really cool broken down what it does is you see the waveforms when you've recorded them in reaper and if you change them to spectral peaks mode they do this kind of rainbow thing and yes it's pretty but it has a genuine purpose spectral peaks mean that there is a spectrum of colours it detects roughly what the dominant frequency ranges millisecond to millisecond give or take and it colors the waveform appropriately and what this means is if there's like a real subsonic boom or a bit of sibilance that sss or something else that's really overbearing you can see it on the track immediately and that means that it's someone who's editing audio i can go there's a loud sibilant there's a sibilant there's a pop there's a bass part there's a mid vocal part and i can very quickly see the audio which you might say well why do you need to see the audio why can't you just listen to it let's say i'm looking at 10 minutes of audio i can go there's a problem there's a problem there's a problem there's a problem fix them then listen to it and i've already fixed those problems and i can look for something else and that means i'm not doing pass after pass after pass and if i do hear a problem and i've got let's say 10 waveforms going if i hear a problem i can look at them and go that one's got the problem because that one i can see a sibilant that one i can see a pop time savers i mean reaper stands for rapid environment for audio production something something so rapid is why i started using reaper in the first place i didn't want to put in a point that just says it's faster because that's harder to quantify but this specifically is one thing that really saves hours of my life and number one automatic file naming this is something that might not be a huge deal for everybody but when you've got loads of complicated files that you need to get out of your daw rendering stems in pro tools can be a pain to begin with if you've got let's say you've got 15 tracks you want to export and you want to have them all named like this is kick this is snare this is bass um i think you can export them all at the same time now but you have to name them in certain ways and then you'll have to go into the folder and change them all in reaper that's not a problem because of things like the region manager and wild cards so wild cards are the real kind of mvp in this situation let's say i've got 20 tracks i want to export this bit that bit and this bit i make them all into regions by just adding regions that start and stop in the right places i can name those regions so like this is track this is the first track this is the second track this is the third track and then i can then export this and then say name me this is the name of the project this is the track number this is the name of the track this is the name of the region or any way round this is the date and this is the time stamp and i put those in as wild cards and i hit render not only does that save me time because it does them all in one go but also if i have to come back to this because i've had feedback from the client that says yeah that's great but i need it again can you just change this change that change this i open the project i make the changes and then because my wildcard had the time and date in it as well as all these other things i hit go and it makes me another set of files time stamped dated done full list right away no messing i can even make it so that using the wild cards it puts different regions into different folders all at once massive massive time saver that's the kind of thing where let's say you're making a virtual instrument and you've got to export every single note i can have it so that when i export them all and use the wildcard thing in regions or markers whatever it is that i want to use they all get properly named and then if i decide playing it back actually needs a little eq here i can open the project and not go oh i've got to export a thousand files i can just go change my eq sounds good export again folder done massive time savers that's why i use reaper so i hope you found this really interesting um i know it sounds like a massively anti-pro tools but if you use that and it works for you great but if you're not tied to somewhere like a production house and you're not tied into using pro tools maybe consider using reaper and maybe consider looking at using our ultimate reaper guide from pro mix academy link is in the description for that thanks everybody for watching hit the like button if you found this useful subscribe to the channel for more reaper content mixing content guitar tone content all sorts of stuff and i'll see you in the next video goodbye hey everyone that might be the end of the video but if you fancy carrying on this conversation we have a discord server link is in the description we're also on patreon which is something you can really help us with we also are on facebook instagram and twitter at hop poll studios see you there

Channel: Adam Steel

Views: 43,515

Keywords: reaper vs protools, reaper daw, best daw, home recording, music production, home studio, reaper tutorial, digital audio workstation, reaper daw tutorial, sound design, cockos reaper, reaper tips, pro tools, reaper daw 101, reaper daw for beginners, reaper daw free

Id: bmzDCzUQpJU

Length: 20min 41sec (1241 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 13 2021