Top 5 SWS Extension Features

in this video i'm going to take you through my top five favorite features of the sws extension for reaper [Music] i've actually done a video recently on how to install the sws extension and all the other extensions for reaper so i'm not going to cover that in this video but it will be linked in the description below and before we get into it this video is sponsored by skillshare i'll talk about them a little bit later on once you have the sws extension installed you get this new extensions menu in the main menu bar and you get a ton of new features we're going to start off with probably my favorite one i cannot work without this one sws auto color slash icon this is a great way to automate things that you do on a regular basis like coloring tracks or changing tracks to certain layouts or adding icons to tracks and it does it all by the name of the track or by the type of track that they are so for example if i have a track named drum it's going to use this color here and i can just choose any color here and it will apply that to my project it will apply that not just to this project but every project going forward so i've got that set up for vocal synth vox drum bass guitar keys audio and video tracks very common titles that i would have on tracks it's already assigned a color and once you get working with these sort of consistent colors it really speeds up workflow i can look at my mixer and know that this particular green is always my bass guitar tracks so you can do this with tracks with markers and regions you can not only change the color but you can assign an icon a tcp layout or an mcp layout so let me show you how you would set up this really quickly i've covered this in other videos so i'm not going to go into too much depth but i will show you just briefly how you set up one i'm going to click on add rule and it puts in an empty one at the bottom so i'm going to use the rule type for track and you can just right click to see the other options track marker and region so track and based on the name we're going to call this brass and i do have tracks in this project here under the brass folder so if the track is named brass it's going to be assigned a color you can right click in here you can go to custom gradient random none parent or ignore so we're going to go to click on set color and i'm just going to choose a color i think probably a purpley color because that's not used too much in my template already so i hit okay and that's change just the track named brass but we can drag this around and make sure that is above this other rule that i have if the track is a child track you can see different types of tracks any unnamed folder children receive master record armed vca master so if the track's named brass it gets assigned this color and any tracks underneath it if it's a folder get the same color as the parents this also works with markers and regions as i said before and so i like to use symbols to use different colors because they mean different things to me so if i use a pound sign then i've got this color my exclamation point is this blue an equal sign is this blue and the same for regions i don't use a lot of symbols and regions but sometimes i will and again once you pick a color you can easily modify that in the options in this window there is enable track coloring enable marker coloring region coloring track icon and track layout so just make sure that the ones you want to use are there so that's the auto color icon layout function love it next we're going to look at my second favorite the cycle action editor and this is taking custom actions to another level by adding in looping and steps console commands and label processor actions this really adds a lot of great functionality to reaper without getting into custom scripting and things like that really easy to start prototyping and kind of advanced workflows and uh and it's a great way to kind of bridge the gap between reapers functions uh custom scripting and whatever you need for your own workflow so here's a cycle that i set up for cycling grid sizes so basically one key will set the grid and then it will keep dividing it or it'll keep going through smaller and smaller until it gets back to the start this uses the step function and there are a ton of different types of functions in here so there's steps there's statements if if not if and if nand if not and if or if nor if xor if x or else and if loop end loop console and label these are kind of like script functions coding functions here having those available really makes this a lot more powerful looping uh just a way to repeat the actions multiple times um either by a preset amount or by asking you how many times to repeat it console is another sws function really useful for selecting tracks by name and things like that but you can use that within a cycle action and label is for the sws label processor which is item names so you can kind of automate the process of naming items a certain way so once you have a cycle action made it then ends up in the action list so i can actually launch the action list from here and i'll search for cycle grid i actually haven't assigned this to anything so i'll just assign this to shift six and so i press shift six and it is changing the grid size i'll just zoom in here even further pretty cool so let's make another one that let's uh repeat x amount of times so uh i'm gonna just right click anywhere on the left side go to add cycle action it's going to make a new one and we give it a name i like to add in the word cycle if it's a cycle action these appear in the action list as whatever you name them so just kind of to show that this is a custom function rather than a built-in function so let's call this cycle duplicate item x times all right and opening the action list here and we're going to look for the duplicate item with this selected we right click in the right side of the cycle action editor and choose add selected items in the action window i'm going to add in some other things like loop with the loop function you put in the amount of times you want this part to loop so loop x will actually bring up a window and ask me how many times but you can put in something like loop 25 and we'll duplicate that item 25 times so let's do loop x and make sure that the start of the loop is at the top or whatever part you want to actually loop all right so we'll just save this by hitting apply and we'll go to the action list i'm going to select an item here so we can run this i've got an item selected i'm going to search for cycle duplicate duplicate item x times there's my action i've got an item selected i'm going to run it and it asks me number of times to repeat so let's do 23 times so a total of 24 items and it's going to repeat this end to end and there we go if i select all these double click it's going to show that 24 items are selected so that's a pretty simple example of what you can do with this there are actions that do that already but it kind of just goes to show how simple it is to have an idea execute it with a cycle action editor here's one for working on films that i created copy selected area to track named sfx gonna split the item at the time selection it's gonna copy that item it's going to take the original item and color it a specific color it's going to go to the start of the time selection and run a console command console sfx1 which means it's going to look for a track named sfx1 then it will paste that item on that track so it's going to take an item from this track paste it into an item on this other track so let me just show you what that actually looks like i've got this selection of an item here i've got a track named fx1 the s in sfx1 here is actually s for select only this track lowercase s would keep the track selection you already have so if a track is named fx1 it will find it and then continue the action so we can actually run cycle actions from the within the editor we don't have to go to the action list um but if you do go to the action list you can assign it to toolbar buttons keep our shortcuts those sorts of things i'm just going to run it from here and so that's split the item given it a unique color then um pasted it on another track so this was a really helpful thing for organizing a film so that's it for the cycle action editor i love this thing and i highly encourage you to check this out because it's so damn powerful and now we're going to take a break from our lesson and talk about our sponsor skillshare skillshare is an online learning community for creatives with thousands of classes on art design productivity and more it's one of my favorite places to go when i want to learn something new i like to learn through video and their project based classes really helped me some of my favorite classes are make creativity your career six exercises to create a successful side project from andy j pizza and thomas frank's real productivity how to build habits that last both of these classes have had a big impact in my life first 500 people to click the link in the description will get two free months of skillshare premium access you get access to every single class on skillshare site plus offline access and more if you want to continue your membership for a full year it's about 10 a month really affordable really great quality if you are constantly learning like i am i'm sure that you will find a good place for skillshare in your learning journey thank you to skillshare for sponsoring this video the next sws function that i want to show you is reposition selected items this is a pretty simple one should be pretty quick to demo this i've got some items here that are chopped up there's spaces in between imagine this is source sounds for a sample library reposition selected items action allows you to specify the length of time between each item so with the item selected we want to run this action and we can set either item start or item end to a specific time interval so let's do item end and 0 and that's going to remove all the gaps between these items just like that run this again and set the item starts to be two seconds so from the left edge of each item it's two seconds before the start of the next item run this again item end of two seconds and now from the ends of the items it's going to be two seconds this is a super helpful action for many things primarily i see it used for sample library creation because well it does this and that's something that would be incredibly time consuming and boring to do manually my number four favorite function is the sws loudness analysis so i still have those items selected from before i found loudness from the extensions menu and in here i can analyze the selected items it takes a few seconds to process i can see that integrated loudness is like -26 um true peak is at minus 3.6 on a lot of these but it does vary between about a db so this is really helpful if you have a bunch of tracks that you've mastered you want to just double check everything or even with tracks that you've been sent to mix you want to figure out what the levels are to begin with and how much gain to apply so loudness analysis is a great kind of quality control check and or just you know just some extra information so that's how i use the loudness analysis but there are other options here if you click on the options button so you can analyze items or tracks and so if you analyze tracks it's going to take in into account the processing on the track and give you an integrated reading of all of the items the overall over time the length of the entire track so not only is there loudness analysis which is super helpful but there's also normalizing so we can normalize things to a standard of -23 lufs or to 0lu or any other number we want so let's say normalize loudness of selected items or tracks do i have those items selected yes i do so i'm going to run this and it's going to ask me normalize items to whatever l ufs so they were close to minus 26 before so let's normalize them to minus 16 at the ufs it's going to take a few minutes second it's going to take a little while to run this on so many items but there we go we've got all of those um normalized to the same amount and you do have to be careful when your loudness normalizing because it's going to change the peak level as well so just keep that in mind you might also need to run a limiter after that or normalize to a lower level we go to the extensions menu and then sws options we can enable marker actions this is the last thing on my list marker actions are pretty cool i don't use them a ton but you can create some interesting workflows with this so i'm going to put in a marker at this position that will stop the project so as it plays once it hits that marker the project stops i'm going to look in the action list for that action to stop that's transport stop and this one right here right click the action copy selected action command id and this will work with any action doesn't have to be this one anything you want anything you can come up with i'm going to put in a marker at this position i'm going to do exclamation point and that command id if we want to name it something here as well so it's a little visually distinguished we can just type in stop so we know what's going to happen if i play back this project it's going to hit this marker point and stop [Music] and it stops we can also do things like uh go to next marker right here go to next marker or project end we can right click that and uh copy command id and we'll just edit this so it's going to exclamation point paste the action id and then uh go to next all right so when playback hits this point it's going to jump to the next marker which is right there it's not going to make sense musically but in a project that was arranged to a grid it would so here we go and so you can kind of rearrange your project in that way at least audition things i like to use this when i'm reamping so i'm recording out uh with loud guitars through an amp and i might want to leave the room for that but i want it to like record and stop and i don't want to run in here and you know pay attention to it i can just kind of sequence things up so that they stop at a certain point and you can do you can put in a custom action so it's it records to that certain point it stops it goes to the next track arms it disarms any other tracks and then and starts recording again on the next track you can do things like that with marker actions i've seen people using the mix snapshots function along with action markers it wasn't in the context of music it was like sound design stuff and so they had different kind of effects and settings for things and they could easily audition things one thing to keep in mind with the action markers is that they don't affect rendering so this is only during recording and playback that these make a difference uh when you're rendering your project any sorts of special functions you want to do here aren't going to work regardless i find them really helpful and uh and something that is kind of overlooked a lot of times so there are my five favorite functions for the sjos extension i consider this stuff to be essential i cannot mix without this stuff i'm using it practically every day and every project in some way and i love it so much you should have it at two it's free after all thank you so much for watching thanks to our sponsor skillshare for sponsoring this video uh please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already follow me on facebook and twitter support the reaper blogs or patreon and visit reaperblog.net for a lot more tutorials [Music] you

Channel: The REAPER Blog

Views: 22,588

Keywords: sws extensions reaper 6, sws extension, reaper tutorial, sws extensions reaper, sws extensions tutorial, reaperdaw, cockos reaper, reaper daw, reaper daw tutorial, reaper (software), the reaper blog, reaperblog, reaper blog, jon tidey

Id: ZxnT86iZgkI

Length: 19min 6sec (1146 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 14 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/RominRonin]

Just wanted to say I like your videos.

[u/NotChistianRudder]

These are super cool but I’m really confused how marker commands are useful. Can someone explain how they could be used practically?