REAPER vs Pro Tools, is it really better?

i'm going to get a lot of hate for this video but you know what someone needed to point these things out pro tools has been the industry standard for a long time so people ask me why i use reaper when i'm proficient with pro tools it comes down to a few key reasons it makes up for all the things that pro tools lacks and in this video i'll be talking about the most notable as well as some not as notable features make sure to hit that subscribe button as i'm trying to reach the goal of 50 000 of you wonderful people by the end of the year and make sure you leave a like if you're a fan of reaper so what's happening fam i'm miami here with jst and i remember the first time i had to open pro tools i had gotten the opportunity to go intern for kyle black who's most noted for working with bands like state champs newfound glory and paramore i sit down and he opens up a session from strung out one of my favorite bands growing up and says all right start editing i'd only been using pro tools for 48 hours prior to this as i was originally a reaper and cubase user and my first thought was how it wasn't very intuitive and had a pretty steep learning curve as well as a lot of drawbacks years later i'm still using both and my feelings haven't changed in the slightest so let's get into it one of the biggest reasons i prefer reaper is being able to open multiple sessions at once reaper gives you not one but two ways to achieve this you can either open another session by going to file project tab and opening another project or you can actually run multiple instances of reaper by going to options preferences general and unchecking check for multiple instances when launching pro tools has failed at delivering this feature although it's been requested for over a decade this is likely due to the fact that pro tools and pro tools hd are all the same code and there's no way to have dsp and io work simultaneously on two sessions this should be a no-brainer but by now we would hope that every daw has the ability to open multiple sessions at once put yourself in this scenario you're mixing a 12 song album and are using the first mix as the template for the rest of them makes sense right you realize that the kick needs to be raised one db across the board but since you can't open multiple sessions at once you have to close and open each song one by one while waiting for all of your plugins to load if you're doing this for a whole album this can take up to half an hour to change a single element in your 100 track mix that feature can be useful for referencing your own mixes switching fx chains from project to project or just bouncing back and forth between recording songs pro tools users love to talk about how serious engineers have to use their daw because of job opportunities well time is money and that brings us to our next point reason 2 price let's talk about the pricing options for both as there are different tiers depending on your needs the educational pricing is as follows reaper is a one-time fee of 60 for educational and personal use this license works on the current version as well as the one that follows without a need to upgrade to give you some perspective reaper stayed on version 5 and added updates for free for over 5 years this applies to educators students bedroom producers and studio owners that are under the 20 000 a year mark pro tools education pricing has two tiers subscription is 99 per year or 10 per month and if you would like to own it forever it's 299 that comes with one year of updates and a support plan the reason i air quoted forever is because i once owned a perpetual version of pro tools that was no longer supported with my updated operating system so i guess i had a misunderstanding of the word perpetual there is also pro tools unlimited which is 79 a month and 400 a year if you would like to own it forever it is 2 600 yeah you heard me right commercial pricing for reaper is two hundred and fifty dollars while pro tools is six hundred dollars you can also do a yearly subscription for two hundred and ninety nine dollars or twenty nine dollars a month so in summary for those starting out or in the intermediate phase of engineering reaper will cost you 60 verse 299 dollars a year for pro tools if you aren't making enough from audio to justify 300 a year it might be time to give pro tools to slip which brings us to our next point slip editing did you guys see what i did there with the whole give pro tools the slip okay whatever but this is a huge one for all you editors reaper offers the option to slip edits within a region what that means is you can split a track at two points and move the audio around in that track without affecting the regions before or after this is a huge time saver when you're editing guitar dis to the grid and don't want to stretch or warp the source it leaves the audio completely intact and unaffected while giving you the freedom to place it as you please protools has yet to add this option the closest thing it has to this is a feature called nudge which allows you to move the clip by a predetermined value of your choosing it feels rather clunky in comparison to reaper's freeform slip style and reaper i found it most useful when drum editing when trying to make sure the crashes feel on time which brings us to reason 4 crashing instability out of all the time i have used reaper it has only ever crashed on me one time it doesn't matter how many instances of bus glue or howard benson vocals i had opened it was always able to recover pro tool is so famous for crashing that one of the first things you're taught when you install it is to change how often it auto saves to one minute intervals there have been countless times i've had a session crash on me in pro tools with a client sitting right there while we wait for the session to reload and when clients are paying by the hour they aren't a big fan of that i will admit that pro tools has gotten better about this over the years but it still happens i don't know what those reaper programmers were doing when they came up with this daw but it works flawlessly even when pushed to its limits speaking of limits let's get into number 5 limitations reaper has an unlimited amount of effects that you can add to attract pro tools maxes out at 10. now i'm not saying you should need more than 10 effects on a single track to get it sounding right but why should you be forced to limit your creativity reaper has an unlimited track count for each session while pro tools standard offers you 128. if you've ever worked on extremely large and dense sessions you know how quickly the track count can add up but don't worry because if you upgrade to pro tools ultimate for an extra hundred dollars a year or two thousand dollars extra up front they will graciously allow you to use up to 256 tracks i always found this really interesting considering they don't really have to put in any extra effort to give you the extra track count so let's go through these once again one multiple instances and or multiple sessions at once two pricing three slip editing four stability five limitations and if that wasn't enough here are a few more things to give reaper the edge over pro tools installer size reaper is 12 megabytes while pro tools is 15 gigs how how in the world do they make a daw installer less data than the song that actually goes inside of it reaper uses less computer resources to function reaper loads and opens in seconds and you can customize the way that reaper looks any way you want by the use of skins you can even make it look and function like pro tools minus pro tools beat detective function what are your favorite features of reaper did i miss any big ones make sure to let me know in the comments below if i inspired you to write something hit the like button don't forget to subscribe you only have to do it one time and tap that bell for notification so when a video drops you know the location until next time i'm out of here mic drop except as engineers we know i wouldn't do that because it'd get really expensive even if it is a piece of shirt later

Channel: Joey Sturgis Tones

Views: 43,364

Keywords: home recording, audio production, mixing tutorials, REAPER, Pro Tools

Id: lX6txoWwTp0

Length: 7min 45sec (465 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 12 2021