Rumor mill: John Mayer plugin coming soon?

[paisleywookiee]

Skin it like winamp
You can also customise everything. I’d pretty much be lost on a stock reaper setup because of every mouse click, middle click and everything I’ve setup to work the way I want it to

Folders, audio tracks, bus tracks and midi tracks all being interchangeable without the need to define them is all super handy as well.
Not getting extorted with upgrade pricing is also the cherry on top.

All daws have some kind of pro imo but if you don’t know why you’re about to shell out for Cubase pro and you’re just doing it cause you feel the need to, reaper is the better path at that point. I’d only use a premium tier daw if there was a burning reason to (industry standard, advanced composition features etc etc)

I’ll never use Reaper, and you can’t make me.

 

[ian_dissonance]

I’ll never use Reaper, and you can’t make me.

Reaper is like Logic if Logic actually applied its own name to its functionality. And if you don’t like how an action is initiated you can just make it whatever you want without having to program a keyboard translation layer. I definitely get the “whatever workflow works for you”, but with every other piece of DAW software it was always more “whatever works best for this programmer and now you learn the dumb shit”. Is it really just the visual aesthetic?

Anyways, back on topic, has anyone graphed out the amps to make sure they’re accurate?

 

[Ipkz]

I’ll never use Reaper, and you can’t make me.

I always get frustrated with menu diving in Reaper. As Nathan and others have said, you can customize everything to make your workflow extremely fast and optimized.

But every time I test-drive it, I’m instantly reminded of why it’s not a DAW I’d personally choose. Windows popping up everywhere, the constant need to search for actions and remappings, SWS extensions, theming… it’s a long road, and honestly not one I enjoy. Which is a shame, because it’s one of the most feature-rich DAWs out there, especially at its price point.

I recently started using Bitwig 6 Beta and completely fell in love with its navigation and zoom system. The UI is easier on the eyes. The plugin/fx strip makes everything tidy and accessible. That said, I already miss Reaper’s video support and some of its arrangement features (like regions), not to mention the playback rate control, which is perfect for studying songs.

My dream DAW would be a mashup of Bitwig’s interface and workflow, Reaper’s video support, regions, arrangement tools and playback rate, plus Ableton’s MIDI comping system.

But in the end, no DAW is perfect. You just have to pick the one that best fits your preferences and needs...

 

[holoholo]

 

[Dom Mcsweeney]

That John Mayer post on Facebook is gold.
Probably the first time a guitarist has ever posted about a plugin and received such comments:

 

[Whizzinby]

Update: I turned the gain on my interface down to zero.

What a difference. Now it sounds like what I expected.

 

[Orvillain]

Reaper is a hideous turd that I’m convinced is only popular because it’s free.

It's more that it is so powerful. But yes.... fugly.

I'd encourage anyone to try out Studio One or Cubase. Once they click, nothing else compares.

Pro Tools if you hate civilization.

 

[MirrorProfiles]

Pro Tools if you hate civilization

The rational choice.

I always get frustrated with menu diving in Reaper. As Nathan and others have said, you can customize everything to make your workflow extremely fast and optimized.

But every time I test-drive it, I’m instantly reminded of why it’s not a DAW I’d personally choose. Windows popping up everywhere, the constant need to search for actions and remappings, SWS extensions, theming… it’s a long road, and honestly not one I enjoy. Which is a shame, because it’s one of the most feature-rich DAWs out there, especially at its price point.

All of this. I think a lot of Reaper’s biggest qualities are also its biggest achilles heel. Out of all the DAW’s I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time in, Reaper is the last one I’d want to use. If avoiding spending money is important, I think it’s got a lot of positives. If someone is very technically minded and likes the way the menus and popup windows are laid out, and having long lists of options, then maybe it’ll click. Other DAW’s tend to be more contextual and have more layers to where you find stuff which makes them more intuitive. If all DAW’s cost the exact same amount of money, I’m not sure how many current Reaper users would opt to use it. Reaper is great if you have very specific processes or workflows to do, but the kind of customisation you likely need to do makes the whole system extremely bespoke for your own setup. With all other DAW's they essentially behave the same for everyone, and even if someone customises things, it would still be familiar to someone else who uses that software.

It’s really just about trying a few to see what you connect with. None are particularly lacking these days, although Logics audio editing is a long way off all of the others (and the ARA implementation is awful). It has its own pro’s too and there are plenty of pro’s doing great work in logic despite where it falls short.

 

[Orvillain]

The rational choice.

DAW BOOMER!

 

[Sascha Franck]

I think a lot of Reaper’s biggest qualities are also its biggest achilles heel.

This.
Every time I see some Reaper videos, I'm absolutely fascinated. There's been a guy explaining how to load a truckload of samples, crossfade and loop them, then he imports the entire shebang and ends up with perfectly trimmed samples including perfect loop points, ready to be loaded into your sampler of choice. That really triggered "I want that too!", so I had a brief look, only to discover that to actually have it that way, I'd have to configure a gazillion of parameters and macros and what not. Sure, you possibly only need do that once, but still.

Also, I really don't like the UI, regardless of the used skin. There's some things that just stay the same, regardless of the skin (and I really don't care about fancy colors anyway).
This is in fact one of the things that made me keep using Logic, I find the UI to be maximally un-annoying, yet flexible. It's just not getting in the way like those tons and tons of buttons and what not in Cubase (and partially Studio One as well). And that is even true after some "dis-improvements" in Logic's UI (IMO things got kinda significantly worse when LPX was introduced). Too bad these "dis-improvements" seem to now become an ongoing thing in Logic land.

 

[paisleywookiee]

It's more that it is so powerful. But yes.... fugly.

I'd encourage anyone to try out Studio One or Cubase. Once they click, nothing else compares.

Pro Tools if you hate civilization.

Yeah I quite like Studio One. That’s definitely what I’d switch to, if I did switch.

 

[Jarick]

I downloaded Reaper last night and it's got double the latency Logic, even dropping samples down to 32 at 48k. I couldn't play real time plugins through it honestly. Restarted the computer and same thing. Then fired up Logic and with samples at 64/48k there was very acceptable latency, probably about 5ms.

Logic seems like it has everything you need in a DAW and well integrated to the Apple machine. Everything else I've tried either feels like a complicated science experiment or really limited functionality. I hadn't ever tried to quantize audio before and with a tutorial video in under an hour I had fixed a really sloppy bass track pretty well for instance.

Planning to try Luna again just to see how the performance and feel is. But I would be surprised if it's better, and I remember I bailed on it because of some pretty fundamental limitations (something like using an aux bus wasn't working).

No desire to try Pro Tools. Maybe I'll try Studio One/Cubase again. And granted I'm working on a now older entry level Mac (M1 with 8GB RAM) so not pushing things to the limits, but I've been happy with the Logic experience.

 

[Sascha Franck]

I downloaded Reaper last night and it's got double the latency Logic, even dropping samples down to 32 at 48k.

I can't tell you how it's done, but there must be a setting somewhere to avoid that.
In general, all DAWs come up with the same latency numbers per OS, it's all exclusively depending on the interface and its drivers.

 

[Dom Mcsweeney]

In Reaper preferences under 'audio > device', you can either tick 'request block size' or leave it unticked and then I think your audio interface driver software handles it instead. (Or something like that).

So that and sample rate should be ticked, or else it may not do anything, like so:

 

[Dom Mcsweeney]

As for Round Trip Latency itself being double what you had in Logic, like Sascha mentioned, that's not really what happens with DAWs.
RT latency is not related to what audio software you use but is related to your audio interface, it's settings, it's driver / to a certain extent, your CPU.

What you see here is the AD (4.4) and DA (1.9) measurements (unless that's RT and Buffer Latency, I forget), which ultimately come to about 6.3ms Round Trip latency:

 

[Sascha Franck]

What you see here is the AD (4.4) and DA (1.9) measurements, which ultimately come to about 6.3ms Round Trip latency:

As a note: all the figures shown in your DAWs driver setup are only as good as the interface driver - and astonishingly enough, even today there's some drivers not communicating the device latency properly. The only way to really find out is a physical measurement, routing a cable from one output to one input. The easiest way to perform the actual measurement would then be using Oblique's RTL Utility.

 

[Dez]

Running through thew JM presets today, there are a lot of seriously amazing sounds in this thing

 

[Dom Mcsweeney]

As a note: all the figures shown in your DAWs driver setup are only as good as the interface driver - and astonishingly enough, even today there's some drivers not communicating the device latency properly. The only way to really find out is a physical measurement, routing a cable from one output to one input. The easiest way to perform the actual measurement would then be using Oblique's RTL Utility.

yep, that is unfortunately true - good shout

still, even if it's only displaying ball park details from what the driver is reporting - it definitely shouldn't be the case that it then displays double or half the actual correct figures.

 

[Jkist7]

I downloaded Reaper last night and it's got double the latency Logic, even dropping samples down to 32 at 48k. I couldn't play real time plugins through it honestly. Restarted the computer and same thing. Then fired up Logic and with samples at 64/48k there was very acceptable latency, probably about 5ms.

You are surely doing something wrong. Reaper is probably the most lightweight DAW out there.

However, I do agree about the endless customization being a hindrance at times. Its why I also own Bitwig and Ableton. Ableton is much more "closed off", and demands the user do things the way they want you to. There is a certain comfort in this, as long as the way they set it up is intuitive and makes sense.

Bitwig is kind of a nice mixture of both worlds.

On topic, I really am enjoying the JM plugin. Even the other artist presets are really good. Ariel Posen has some in there that sound killer with a Bari.

 

[Jarick]

In Reaper preferences under 'audio > device', you can either tick 'request block size' or leave it unticked and then I think your audio interface driver software handles it instead. (Or something like that).

So that and sample rate should be ticked, or else it may not do anything, like so:

View attachment 56705

Ah, that's got it. The check boxes fixed the latency issue, now it's < 5 ms. I was ballparking off feel and not numbers as I don't trust those.

Okay now it's feeling like a light and efficient DAW. Super ugly and weird to use but I'll mess around with it some more.