3 GAME-CHANGING Add-Ons for your Default REAPER Projects!

hey how's it going today i want to show you a few things that you can add to your default projects in reaper and these are not really workflow based because all of us will have different requirements from our default projects and templates overall these are more like extra features made by community members that you can't find in sws or reaper native and they will add certain functionalities to all your projects if you set them up as defaults so we'll get to those in a second but just in case some of you don't know i'm gonna show you how to create your custom default project in reaper and if you already know how to do that you can just skip this next chapter otherwise let's check this out so by default in reaper if you go to new project and open a new project you just get a blank window like this there are no tracks on it there's nothing on it there are some other daws for example ableton where when you open a new project there's already a couple of midi tracks on there there are a couple of audio tracks on there and there's even a couple of receive tracks on there so if we want to have that in reaper we totally can so right now i'm gonna just create a couple of audio tracks and i'm gonna set this one to my input two i'll also put a couple of midi tracks here and my midi tracks already come with the midi input enabled so basically i'm just gonna set up a bunch of new tracks i'm gonna create some sends i'm gonna make some parents and children folders i'm gonna name and color everything your tracks could also include any plugins that you want and any type of routing that you want for your default project all right and this is what i have obviously it's up to you how you want to set this up and now if i come and save this project as a template and i can call this whatever i want i can call this for example my new default and now if i come to my preferences and go to the project tab you'll find this option right here when creating new projects use the following project file as a template so i can just navigate to my template folder and i can use this as my new default project and now if i for example start a new project tab to open a new project you will see all the same stuff will be here so every time you create a new project all this stuff by default is there so that's how you do that and just remember that if i save this project i won't be saving my default every time you are making new modifications to your default project you got to come back here to project templates and save it and you can overwrite that project template and now let's get to the meat of the matter okay so let's start adding some stuff to our default project if you're watching from this point it means that you already know the basics of how to create your default project so while what we need on our default projects may be different from person to person here are a few things that i think will be useful to almost everybody using reaper and the first one is retrospective record this is a really awesome feature made by the amazing mpl that reaper doesn't have by default and i think mpl has done a great job of scripting this feature into reaper um so what retrospective record is you may already be familiar with if you've ever used another daw that has a feature like midi capture where if you're playing something on your midi keyboard and you realize that you haven't been recording it you can hit the midi capture and that will bring back whatever it is that was recorded where reaper doesn't have this feature by default but you can use the mpl retrospective record so in order to download that you would need rear pack get repack get sws it's really a prerequisite for pretty much anything i show on this channel so after you installed mpl scripts you can go to your action list and you can hit retrospective record and you'll get these three actions right here and i'm gonna show you how each one works very quickly so i'm gonna just create a new track and this is an empty track and i'm gonna put it at the top of my project with this track selected the first thing i'm gonna do is launch this script prepare select the track for retrospective record and i hit it and a few things happens master parent of this track will be disabled and its input is now set to midi all midi inputs and there's now a jsfx plugin on this track what this track is basically doing is setting up this midi capture or retrospective record function for us so i'm just going to hide this track i don't need to see it but now it will be the track one of all my default projects let me show you how it works so i have a midi track selected i'm just playing around [Music] i'm like oh that was interesting but i wasn't recording what can i do now well this is all you gotta do you go to this next action dump retrospective record tracker lock to select the track you hit it and you will get a midi item and this midi item will contain the last 30 000 midi notes that you played so whatever riff it was that made me realize i haven't been recording will probably be at the end so you just trim it and there's the thing that you were playing you can also use this action to clear it if you want but once you import it it'll be reset so now if i just start playing again and i'm like wow that was so cool and original and definitely my own composition so i can run it and there it is right there so it's a very useful feature and i'm gonna even add it to my top toolbar by going to customize toolbar add select it and let's give it an icon as well this one looks good and save it and now every time i'm doing anything in reaper and i forgot to record i just hit this and there's all the stuff i've been playing it's a really useful feature and it's important to set this up as your default project because if you're a person like me who forgets to hit record then you're definitely also a person who forgets to set this up for every new project so just set it up as your default project and it's pretty simple enough to set up in your templates and stuff as well so with a little bit of time you will have this feature unlocked completely working in all your projects which i think is super awesome and needed and has saved me more than a few times so that's number one the next thing i'm going to show you and again you need to get this from the old rear pack this script called solger soldier real launcher real launcher is basically this awesome window that can replace the regular windows that open when you try to open a project in reaper so this could be the menu you come across when you first open reaper this looks a lot better and is a lot more featureful than what reaper vanilla has to offer so if i show you how to set it up let's look at how reaper deals with this by default so if you go to your preferences and you go to the general tab you can see down here in startup settings you can choose from this drop down menu what happens when you open projects on startup it could be last active project this is not really desirable to me because maybe the last active project you have was one that crashes your computer or maybe the last active project you have is just a really large project that takes a really long time to load so i don't want by default whenever i click on reaper to potentially run into a really long loading screen for the same reason also the last opened project tabs is not very desirable to me another option you can have is new project ignoring the default template if you do have a default template like we do right here this will definitely be your fastest option so this will give you the shortest time between you clicking on the reaper icon in your os whether it's windows or mac until you have a project in front of you um you can also use new project which will just open your default template or you can say prompt so for most of you set to prompt and let's see how that works and here we are and this is the prompt menu so the prompt menu is pretty decent you can open your last active project you can just start a new project so basically all the options you were giving in the preferences earlier you have right here as well you can also see a list of all your project templates and you can see a list of your recent projects as well but what if i want to for example open a project from my hard drive that's not in any of my recent projects well with this system you got to now close this which then opens your default project and then you got to go to file and you go to open project and then you can navigate basically to anywhere you want on your hard drive so that is something that's missing from the prompt menu so for that reason i think the fastest way that still gives you access to your default project template is just to go to new project so i'm going to hit apply and i'm going to quit and one more time reopen reaper and now we are here and this is opening our default template for us it loaded up pretty fast once i hit the icon but now we are getting these two extra annoying windows as well on the other hand if you come to real launcher we can see that this menu is a lot more robust so you have everything you need in tabs these are my recently opened projects all in their own tab and i can also search through this so for example if i'm looking for tutorial this is some stuff that has the name tutorial on it so i can easily search through this which is really nice you can show or hide the paths if that's relevant to you i like to show it and then you have your project templates in the second tab you even have track templates here and you can just select one or a bunch of them you can say insert and they will directly go into the project that you're opening which is also a huge time saver and then you also have these four additional tabs and you can point these to any directory on your system that you want so if you just go to options you can see that you can set a path for all this stuff you even get an extra one where you can open some pdfs from it so for example i can click on the plus sign here and i'm going to point that to my ebooks folder which contains all the user manuals from my different plugins all that cool stuff that i can really quickly open and reaper so once you navigate to a path that you want you just say set i like to also toggle this box on show subfolder panel which requires a restart so i can just close this script i can launch it one more time and now if i go to my docs folder you can see that all my user manuals are here so if i want to quickly refer to the user manual for my vitamin plugin i just double click it and it opens right here which is super nice so it's a really great tool that can easily replace your default project and in order to do that first thing i'm going to do is i'll go to general and i'll set this to not prompt another thing i will do is i'll come down to this project tab i also want to untick these two boxes so prompt to save on new project and open properties on new project because by default when you launch a new project as soon as you run reaper it then will ask you to choose a directory for your new project and it will also then open project settings for that new project and we don't want this because we can set all of that up in real launcher as well so by unticking these two boxes i will assure that as soon as i click the icon of reaper i'm immediately landing in a new project so let's quit reaper and see how that looks and as you can see no extra menus open that we needed to like hit cancel on or anything like that it just opened right away but we still have to manually come and run this script in order to get the real launcher but there is a way to make that just pop up by default and in order to do that i'm going to select that script right click it and go copy selected action command id then if you have sws installed you go to extensions and you go here to startup actions and you go set global startup action i can paste my command id there and i hit ok and it will say script soldier real launcher is defined as global startup action so what this means is every time you open reaper it will bring up real launcher automatically but it does not do it when you open a new tab it will only do it when you are launching reaper for the first time so another thing i'm going to do while i have this action right here is i'm going to go to my options customize menus and toolbars and from here i'm going to navigate to this one main file that is this file drop down tab that you have right up top here and what i can do is for example right here i can say add action i'll select this and i'll go select that will be added here i can rename it by just calling it real launcher and i can hit save and i can close this now i will also have the real launcher just right here if i need it so instead of having to launch it from the action list whenever i need it i just come down here and i click here and there it is and so for the last time let's close reaper and open it again and now it will be opened with this awesome launching platform which i think is in many ways superior to the prompt menu that reaper native offers from here you can also navigate to the folder of each thing that you need so for example i can click on that and i can open it from here i can just open project and i can use it to navigate to any place in my hard drive you can open a new project you can also open a new tab you can load a bunch of projects in a row in a tab you can save stuff as a new version as you open them good job to solder or soldier however you pronounce that and of course big props to lukas cena who has made user interface scripting possible in reaper and the last thing i want to show you that you can add to your default projects is part of the hulfa for you free vst download bundle um which you can get for pc mac linux all that stuff these are a number of plugins that are not necessarily like audio effects so the one we're looking at for example today is project time which i think is super useful and a great candidate for something that we should have on every project ever so i can bring that into my master track and this plugin doesn't do anything to your audio but if you're paranoid about it you can just keep it disabled it'll still work and basically as soon as you have this on it'll get a timer going so it will tell us when our project has started and it'll tell us how much time we have spent in this project so imagine having this in every one of your projects and you will always be able to quickly find out how much time you have spent on this project so this is super useful for example if you need to quote a client a certain price for a task that you want to do with them so you know maybe you're really gifted at doing auto tuning but if somebody wants to hire you to do that how much are you going to charge them well one way to do that is to find out how long it normally takes you to tune up vocals in a three minute recording and then multiply that number by whatever you think your hourly wage should be and there you go there's your price so i think overall it's really useful for us to keep track of how long we spend on every project it's really good for time management it's really useful for knowing for example where our kind of weaknesses and time inefficiencies are and i personally put this on the master track so i can quickly pull it up whenever i want but you can also put that on any track like your retrospective recording track that you set up you can also put this one there so that's it these are some things that you can add to your default projects i think really cool features by members of the community and i would say that's overall a very pimp default project so let me know in the comments if there are other custom scripts that need setting up like this that you really enjoy using i know a lot of people use header script and reticulate those are very complex so i thought to give them their own episode but if i find out or if you all tell me some cool ways and new scripts that i can use to enhance my default project then we will collect all of that and make another tutorial like this one as well and real launcher is super cool and i learned about it from one of my viewers alan so thank you so much alan for the awesome tip i really like overall learning so much from my viewers so thanks to all of you who schooled me on various aspects of reaper and that's it for today thanks for watching if you like the work i do you can donate to me through buy me a coffee.com the link to that will be in the description thanks to all our previous donors and last week i was really happy to receive a record amount of donations so huge thanks to rafael who bought me six coffees that's truly incredible thank you so much rafael another ginormous thanks to clifford for buying me seven coffees and also huge thanks to yvonne who watched their long ass live stream and donated really appreciate it and and finally thanks to randy for your donation i'm truly humbled and i've never needed more coffee than last week that we did us i think it was a 16-hour livestream thanks to all of you who are there and yeah i truly appreciate all the donations and hopefully soon i will have enough money to buy an actually nice looking camera and embarrass myself in full hd instead of this crap so for the 3 millionth time thank you so so so much to all of you take care of yourselves here are some other videos you can watch and i'll see you very soon bye

Channel: IDDQD Sound

Views: 6,635

Keywords: reaper custom scripts, reaper midi capture, reaper midi buffer, best reaper addons, realauncher, mpl reaper scripts, reaper realauncher, reaper prompts, reaper addons midi, hofa4u, hofa project time, hofa plugins, reaper how to see project time, reaper how to capture played midi notes, reaper how to change default project, reaper default project, reaper custom features, reaper add-ons

Id: APEZ75IOJ0o

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MrDogHat]

Yes! That timer plug-in is the hero I didn’t know I needed!