Installing Reaper: Setting it up RIGHT! (Project Defaults/Project Directory)

hello and welcome to the most boring video you'll probably watch about reaper but it's very necessary what to do when you initially install reaper and how to configure it so that it looks how you want it to and so it stores files how you want it to so we're going to be taking project folders that look like this where all of your reaper projects are stored in one spot and making sure we're changing that so that every project has a folder that looks like this where you have your project file the audio files associated with that project your backups and this will be later but your renders folder as well and your repeats are not all within here confusing you as you go so the first thing to do we're going to change some initial settings just to get the defaults all set up the first thing we'll look at is the project settings menu we'll get very familiar with this so in file project settings you're going to go to the project settings tab make sure that project sample rate is unchecked this will make sure that it defaults to your hardware sample rate which is just a better practice then we'll go to the time base for items envelopes markers make sure it's set to time and the time base for tempo time signature envelope can be set to beats or time i like to keep it set to beats because that's usually what i work with but if you're not going to be doing a lot of click track creation or anything like that you can switch it to time this one's not as important as this one because what this top one will do is anytime you put in a track it will adapt it to the tempo that it is this is good for certain styles of music but i'm not usually working with tracks that need that kind of adjustment so time will keep it from adjusting the rest of these settings you can keep as their defaults whatever they are i may have different defaults than you but keep them as they are and you can change those later and you can always come back here and change these if you like per project next we're going to go to the media tab and just type in audio files in this path to save media files what that will do is every time you create a reaper project it'll create this audio files folder within the project directory and that's great because all of the files that are associated with that project will be stored in here instead of in this giant folder that you can't possibly search through the rest of these settings can stay the same unless you wanted to add a secondary recording path but let's just keep it to one for now next we're going to go to the advanced page and this is where you can set your pan law if you like the default is zero i set mine to negative 2.5 but 0 sounds just fine and once you've set all those settings up you can save these as the default project settings and that window will close now that's great but there's still some things that aren't going to be set up you know you'll still have some things that wind up in this giant folder we still got to get things to look like this so the next thing we're going to do is go into options and preferences and then under pads which is near the top under general you're going to store your peak caches in an alternate path we don't need to see all of these associated with our audio every time we make something so this is one that i actually do select a folder you remember before we typed audio files in without any folder that gave us a relative path so every project directory will have that folder we don't need that for the peaks files so i've just selected a folder that i created called reaper media that stores all the things i don't necessarily need to see all the time so i would pick a folder somewhere on your computer that all of the peaks files will go to next we're going to set up our backups so we're gonna go into options uh preferences if you're not there already options preferences and then project and under the project tab we're going to select timestamp backup right here i set it to every seven minutes when stopped and this means that it'll only save when the recording stops so after seven minutes hit the next time you stop it it will save i do this so that things don't crash or get hung up because when not recording will mean that it can save when it's playing which i don't necessarily want and any time it can save in the middle of a recording which i also don't want so one stopped is good and we're going to save this to a time stamped file in additional directory this is one that i do want to save just as a relative path so just type in reaper backups and that means it will create a folder called reaper backups where all of your backups for that project are stored within the project directory because it's likely that if you need a backup you're probably going to be going to the project directory itself all right and then lastly this is something i set for the kind of work that i do you don't necessarily have to set this up but once again we're in options and preferences we're gonna go to media item defaults and i set this to overlap and crossfade items when splitting and we will set this to like point one or something it's just a very short crossfade that it'll add and i actually got this from john tidy at reaperblog it's very good it keeps every it makes every item crossfade instead of splitting it the way that normally does where it just makes two fade ins and fade outs because i want to hide those cuts that i'm making once you've done all those things you can hit apply and close the window and a few other things i want to make sure i highlight in this video for people who are just starting off with reaper if you've got a smaller screen you might see something like this in your mixer window where you have this effects thing but there's no bars above it and i want you to get familiar with this green bar i usually tell people to hover around the stopped text find the green bar and move it up and that will allow you to see the effects bars and the routing area which is very helpful for later okay so now any time you make a new project and you save it let's uh let's save another bassoon ensemble thing we're going to call it bassoon test you have these options to create subdirectory for project and this is really important because we want to create a subdirectory for this project that's not in a folder yet it's going to create the folder for us and if you've already recorded some things into this you're going to move all the media into the project directory and lastly if you are taking audio from another source where you don't want to actually move so if you're taking it from a cloud-based source or something like that and you don't want other people to lose access you can copy into the project directory this is also good if you're using samples and stuff where you don't want to pull them from the sample library folder so these two options are just good to get familiar with move and copy and knowing when to use them for each one once you do this now if you check the project directory we can go to media explorer and project directory for that i'm going to go up a level and you can see that it's created an audio files folder and it has the project in there for you and it's really well laid out and nice and organized as it saves backups it will create that folder for you and store them in there as well so now you've got a really nice and easy project directory that you can look at and if you wanted to send someone a full reaper project all you'd have to do is take that new project directory that we've made zip it up into a zip file and send them this whole folder and they'll be able to have all of the projects backups and audio files that are required to run that project so this is a quick configuration of reaper to make sure that your project folders are organized in a way that doesn't make you want to scream and so you can find your files easily and get your backups sorted out so you don't lose your work this is something that was really frustrating for me early on so i hope this is helpful and it helps you reap the benefits of reaper

Channel: Reaper Tutorials

Views: 803

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Id: iiF5tCfHcvo

Length: 8min 10sec (490 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 03 2020