ESSENTIAL File Management in REAPER DAW Tutorial

hey guys welcome to another Reaper blog tutorial today we're going to be looking at one of the most important things for you to understand using Reaper that's file management file management is super-important you need to understand this so that you never lose a file and you record something you know exactly where that's going to go and if Reaper crashes you know what to do where to go to find your auto backups these are some areas where I think the Reapers defaults are not very good and not user-friendly and so these are some of the most important things that you need to change in the preferences we're gonna start this off by looking in finder this would be the same as a Windows Explorer on Windows and we're gonna look at the different hard drives that I have set up my MacBook has the built-in hard drive this is where all the programs go my private documents and my plugins are installed to this drive then I have this project drive this is an external drive so everything that a record using reaper goes to this project drive next I have a sample library this is a dedicated hard drive just keeps everything organized so everything that I download contact libraries things like that those all go into that drive and because I do a lot of videos I have a dedicated hard drive just for videos and yeah so I'm when I'm editing a video or importing footage from my camera it all goes on to that hard drive you can really see that I don't have a physical backup drive that's because I'm using a service called Backblaze they're not sponsoring this video but I have been using them for over two years and it's been absolutely worth it it's saved my butt many times before that I was using time machine and that was really good as well but in the end my big physical hard drive that I had for network storage ended up dying and then I've just been using the online backup since then you always need some sort of backup I'm comfortable with just using the online backup it takes quite a long time to get everything uploaded to the cloud but once it's there it's it's totally seamless and you don't even notice it until you need it and it's been fantastic so the next thing is something that I'd like you to set up on your system if you go over to the users your user account and then create a folder called temp I do it all caps so it's easy to find this can be pretty much anywhere I used to recommend putting on the desktop but just based on the way that the operating systems actually access things that are on the desktop I wouldn't recommend it any more desktop is just for temporary storage and quick access so it's not recommended to put it there just somewhere that you can find it easily you will be accessing this folder kind of on a regular basis make a folder called temp and in this folder you need two subfolders one called backups and one called reapeaks and this is where you're probably guess Auto backups will be saved here and peek files will be saved here to make this easier to find I recommend putting a shortcut to this on the desktop so on Mac you go right click make alias I need to drag the alias to the desktop so here if Reaper crashes double click temp double click backups and the one at the top is my most recent auto backup so now let's look in Reapers preferences preferences is in the options menu right at the bottom and so we're going to go to the second option in the left column called paths default path to save new projects I've got this set to my project's Drive and this is basically when you hit command s what folder are you first going to see here this isn't super important but if you have a dedicated spot to save your projects just choose it here I don't do a default render path if it's empty it's just going to use my project and to me that's the best most logical place for it so you can just leave that blank now default recording path this is for projects that are unsaved so I've got this set up and the default path which is the user name documents Reaper media and again that's easy to find under documents and Reaper media right here and then this is just that I've recorded without saving and you know honestly I could probably delete all of it you don't want everything that you want to keep in that one spot you want to set up project folders for every project next this is a super important one check this box store all peak caches reapeaks in alternate paths and then you choose that temp folder you go to browse and you find your Peaks folder and then click on open and peak files are just that visual waveform that you see when you record something or import a file and without using the setting that peak file will be right beside the original file and so for every file you've got to now and putting these all in one folder means that you can easily delete anything that's old anything that's unused it's totally safe to delete these because reper just rebuilds them next time you load the project so you don't want to have peak files from five years ago cluttering up your hard drive taking up space and being backed up put it in one place means that you can just go through there occasionally and then clean up that folder either manually or automatically moving on to the project page of preferences at the top we can choose a default project template we're going to come back to this later on today but we will set up our auto backups here we want to make sure that these first two boxes are checked so say project file references with relative pathnames rather than putting the specific path to a file in there we can save this with a relative path and then as long as ever all the files are together you can move the entire project folder and put it somewhere else and it will still open up without throwing up an error but with that off then it would look for the original hard drive location and you'd have to re link all the files so I like to have that the relative pathnames box checked when overwriting your project file rename old project to RPP - back i like to have that on just so that you have your previous save in the project folder and is really easy to find that one and you're never going to have more than one of those old backups in the project folder I don't like to keep multiple versions timestamp back up or keep undo histories I've never needed those things and they just clutter up the project it's harder to find what's the most current project when there's all these timestamp files in there it's really annoying for me but those options are there if you need them I like to backup every six minutes when I'm not recording but you can also have this on when stopped or at any time I don't save the timestamp file in the project directory instead I save it to the additional directory which again is that backups folder we set up at the beginning so if Reaper crashes and you haven't saved you never lose more than six minutes once you have this set up and you know exactly where to go I can just go to my desktop double click on temp double click on backups and there is my backup from 1014 today we're going to go over to the media page and we're gonna check this first box here copy imported media to project media directory so we're gonna enable that and that just means like if you import a sample from your sample library drive into a project it's going to keep that file in with the project so it's not referencing files from other hard drives it's just really convenient to have everything kind of in one spot I will show you a setting that you can use to disable that so we're going to go to the file menu project settings and on the media page we can actually set this on a per project basis whether we want to copy the files or not so copy media it's project path or do not copy or use the global preference all my audio recording projects like music production I like to have it copy but if it's a video project I don't want to duplicate stock footage any sort of assets that I use on a regular basis I don't want to just keep duplicating them so I do not copy and I have that set in my video project template so here's another important thing path to save media files and you just type in audio files or you can type in media this is the project media folder and anything you import goes here anything that you record goes in here it's really simple to set up this is just gonna make a folder called audio files the first time that you save a project so every new project is going to have a folder called audio files you don't have to set this up every single time you can just click on this save as default project settings option here and then all future projects will have this set up we can also set up a template so let's say we want the BPM to be instead of 120 most of our songs start at 130 so we'll just do that let's add in five tracks as a start and we can name them we can color them I'll just put it in a random color like that we can set our grid to whole notes and if we wanted we can have effects on here we can change the inputs all those sorts of things that can all be saved as a default template so let's save that file project templates say project this template I'll just call this default two and save and you go into the Preferences go to the project page and then you just choose that default template there and apply so now if I do a new project it comes up looking exactly as we save it to that template so I think there's one more thing to show you here in the Preferences and if you go to audio recording page there's the options for aiming the files as you record them I like to use the wild-card track then a dash then the wild-card record pass and three digits I'm going to close this for a second and then name this just name it guitar and if we go back to the preferences we'll see that in this example it says guitar - zero zero one so if you're not using this record pass wildcard then the first take will be just the name of the track and so the second take will be the track name - a 1 even though it's take 2 and that gets really confusing so I find this a lot better the first take is labeled 1 the second tape is labeled 2 pretty convenient and there's a lot of other wildcards you can use there's track track number parent track project record pass different date and time options and some computer information options if you want to me this is the most simple kind of streamlined way to do it so I'm just going to show you what a typical project looks like once you've got this system set up you've got your project RPP file that's your current version of the project then you've got the RPP - back file that's the previous time you saved then you've got this audio files folder and inside there's everything that you've recorded or imported into the project and then here I have some other exported files so I know this stuff is kind of boring but this this stuff comes up constantly on the forums on my Facebook group in private messages and in most of the one-on-one sessions that I do this is how I set up most people that are new to Reaper or that they've run into some sort of problem like they didn't know about the auto backups or the their losing files or you know they're getting all these errors work with files and once you have this setup you don't need to worry about it it it just works for you instead of against you so that's it for this video thank you so much for watching I hope this has been helpful please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already you can follow me on Facebook and Twitter support the reaper blog through patreon and visit reaper blog net for a lot more tutorials [Music]

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 43,994

Keywords: the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, reaper tutorial, jon tidey, cockos reaper, reaperdaw, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, file management, reaper project folder, reaper default settings, reaper preferences, auto backup, rpp-bak, reapeaks file, best settings for reaper

Id: tk6WLWDYlyU

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/DigitalPerceptionn]

great stuff!