Hello, everybody. This is Ken from Home Brew
Audio. I had a request from someone on our YouTube channel to do a video explaining what
all of these icons mean in the Reaper toolbar. It occurred to me I've never done this before,
so let's just go ahead and get started. First of all, I have a couple of tracks put in with
just some, "Testing. One, two, three," audio files here, so I'll have something to use
to demonstrate some of these functions. This is Reaper 5.1 and I'm using Windows, the toolbar
may have changed over the versions. Here's what version 4.8 looks like, and this one's
on a Mac. So back to the explanation, let's start at the top left. This button just means
'New Project'. So that's the same as going 'File: New' and you do this in pretty much
any software. The next button is 'Open a Project'. Same as, say, 'Open a File' like in Word or
some other program. And this one is 'Save A Project.' If you wanna 'Save as... ', you
go to File and save the project as. This fourth one here, which used to have a wrench icon
and now just has a piece of paper with an 'I' for information, means 'Project Settings'.
In the Project Settings window, you have things like your 'Project Sample Rate', your 'Project
Beats Per Minute', which is important if you're recording music. Also, your 'Time Signature', which is also
important. If you're recording music, you can set this to whatever time signature you
want. Obviously the defaults here are 4/4 and 120 beats per minute. There are all kinds
of other things you can change, but the main things I use it for are the beats per minute
and the time signature. And you can see there are other tabs here with other things that
you can change: 'Audio format', where you save projects to by default if you're working
with video. Here's some options and here's even more options, most of which I have never
even used. Next, we have the 'Undo' button. You should know what that means by now. And
this is the 'Redo' button, gotta have a redo if you have an undo. The next button looks
like an old-fashioned metronome. If you've ever used one of those before, you'll know
what I mean. And this also is something that you use when you're recording music. The metronome
will click according to the settings in the Project Settings window that we just looked
at. For example, listen to it here. One, two, three, four. So, that metronome is providing a click track
at 120 beats per minute with a time signature of 4/4. Let's quickly change that to 3/4,
that's like waltz time, and we'll change it to 220. It should be faster and it should
sound like waltz time. Notice that the information in this top bar changed as well. One, two, three. One, two, three. So that's what a metronome is for. And if
you don't wanna listen to a click track, you just turn it off. Next, we have the 'Auto-Crossfade'
being enabled or not enabled. What a crossfade is, is when you have two audio items and they
start to overlap. Pay attention to what happens when I drag this item to the left and it starts
to overlap. You see that 'X' looking thing? What's happening is, it's automatically fading
this audio out as this audio begins. And the more they overlap, the longer the crossfade.
Here's what it would sound like. So you noticed that even though the audio
items overlap, you don't get talking at the same time because the first one's fading out
as the second one's fading in. If I turn this off and drag this back out, it leaves the
initial fades that it put in there, so I'll get rid of those. Okay, now watch what happens
when I overlap them. There are no crossfades and so when I play the audio back. So you heard both voices at the same time.
You may want that at times, but usually you don't so it's a good idea to leave auto-crossfade
on. By the way if you hadn't noticed, all you have to do is hover your mouse over any
of these buttons to find out what they do. That's pretty typical. So the next button
here is, 'Item Edit Grouping Enabled' and 'Selection Grouping Disabled'. What the heck
does that mean? Okay, well all of these rectangles here are
audio items. Sometimes I want to edit these audio items by reducing the volume, which
you can do by dragging that top line down like that. But sometimes I wanna do the same
edit to multiple items so I would want to group them, and sometimes I wanna group items
that are on two different tracks. So here's a demonstration of what happens when this
is enabled. I'm gonna right mouse click and select these three items, then I'm gonna hit
the 'G' button to group them. Now, you can see this little chain icon that shows that
these three items are in a group. So, if none of them are selected and I'm going about my
project and I want to suddenly do something to all three of those, like, say, reduce the
volume of all of them, all I have to do is click on one of them and hit 'CTRL G' and
it selects all the items in that group. You'll notice that this also said 'Selection
Grouping Disabled'. What that means is this: Let's right mouse click on this, and you see
the that 'Enable Grouping' is checked, but 'Selecting One Item To Select The Group' is
unchecked. Which means I have a group here of these three items and if I select one,
only that item is selected in the group. You have to hit 'CTRL-G' to select them all. If
I put a check mark in 'Selecting One Item Selects The Group', what do you think will
happen when I select one item? Gold star! Yes, selecting one item selects all the items
in the group. To be honest, I have never used this feature but I can certainly see where
I might. Okay, moving on to a feature that I do use quite often, 'Ripple Editing'. The
default is disabled, I'm going to enable it to demonstrate what it does. Right now, I
have it set for ripple editing per track, let's show you what ripple editing means first.
I'm going to click on this item on the left and hold down the left mouse button and drag
it to the left and back to the right. Note how the two items to the right of it moved
right along with it. One thing to know about ripple editing is that it only effects the
downstream items, the items to the right. So, in other words, if I were to select the
second item here, the one in the middle, and slide it, you see the first item to the left
doesn't move, only the item you have selected and everything downstream, by which I mean
that happens later in time, move along with your item. Also notice that only the items
in this track are moving, that's because ripple editing per track is selected. So let's click
it once more and now you'll see that ripple editing all tracks is selected, and that does
what it sounds like it does. Let's choose the first item, the thing that happens first
in time, and that's this one in the second track, if I click the left mouse button and
hold it down and drag it to the right, you see everything else moves along with it. If
I were to select the first item in track one, notice that only the items that happen after
it move, the ones that start after it. See this one doesn't move because it starts before
it. This is very handy in working with multiple items, however you need to be very aware when
it's on because if you're zoomed in to something and you want to, say, shift it to the right,
if you forget that ripple editing is on, you will have moved everything downstream of that
item and you may not have wanted to do that. So be very careful not to leave this on when
you don't want to move everything else, that's why the default is off. Next is called 'Envelope
Points Do Not Move With Media Items'. So, first you might wanna know what is an envelope
item. Well, if we click this icon here, 'Track Envelopes', you'll see all the things that
you can effect with an envelope. I'm just going to load up an envelope track so you
can see what that means. So on track two, you have this audio, but I've loaded up a
volume envelope track for track two and you can see that I've got these points here that
effect the volume of the audio above it. So right here, this audio would be turned up,
and right here, this audio would be turned down, etcetera. I use this a lot, especially
when fine tuning lead vocals. These little points are called envelope points, and if
you should happen to move the audio item above it, notice that in the default setting of
having this turned off, the audio moves but the envelope stays in the same place in time.
So no longer do these small changes in volume that you've painstakingly added affect the
audio that they originally affected. In other words, this slight downward right here and
then back up to normal affected just this part of this audio, but if you move it, there's
actually no audio above it now and this increase affects this audio there where it initially
affected this bit of audio. So, if you plan to move an audio item and
you want your envelope changes to move along with it, just click that button and when you
move your audio item, notice that the envelope points move right along with it. That can
be very handy. Okay, the next button is 'Gridlines enabled'. These gridlines here that you see
in the project correspond to the numbers at the top here. Right now, I'm gonna right mouse
click up here, and you can see these are set to beats and minutes and seconds. That's a
lot of information. If you're working with music, you might want it to, say, just be
bars and beats so you can come down and just turn this into beats. And now, according to
your project settings, 4/4 and 120 beats per minute, these will correspond to measures.
Measure two, beat one, two, three, four. Measure three, beat one, two, three, four, etcetera.
And these lines can come in handy if you're trying to align, say, a bass part to a kick
drum or something like that; you can align these to the grid and they can be very handy.
However, if you don't want the grid to show, just go ahead and click that and the grid
will go away. The next button is also one I use all the
time, it's got a picture of a magnet in it, which is appropriate. It's the snapping tool,
or 'Snap To', as graphics people often call it. What it means is that whenever you put
your cursor down, it's gonna snap to one of these gridlines that we just talked about.
And if I try to put a cursor in the middle there, it will just snap to whichever line
is closest. It also means that when you drag your audio items, these edges will snap to
the closest gridline. That can be helpful, but if you're trying to, say, move in the
edge so that you can trim that item, since that's between two gridlines it won't let
you do it. So come over here, turn that off, and then you can fine tune that to your heart's
desire. Click it back on if you wanna put it right on the line. I turn this on and off
all the time in the middle of a project, especially a music project. And the final button is,
as the picture might suggest, 'Locking'. Its default is off, but if you turn it on, it
will lock any number of parameters. Right mouse click on it to see what you can lock.
Okay, let's just use time selection as an example here. Okay. The default, with it turned
off, is that I can make a time selection just by clicking and dragging somewhere in the
project. There is a time selection. If I turn the snapping tool on, I can select
one measure, like so. Or any amount of time I want. Now, if I put my cursor somewhere
else and drag it, it will take this selection off and create a new selection. However, if
I come to the locking tool and I click time selection and say 'Enable Locking', then,
with this selection made, if I try to make another selection, it won't let me. So, it
locks it. You wanna turn that off, right mouse click on it, and unclick time selection. Of
course, you can lock any number of other things as well, according to this drop down. I'm
gonna go ahead and turn that off. And there you have it, that's what all of these buttons
in the Reaper toolbar mean.
