I never understood this whole reaper is not intuitive thing. No daw I’ve ever used is all that intuitive. Sonar was impossible to figure anything out with no previous experience and not a lot of available tutorials at the time. Reaper has a massive user base and tons of tutorials, videos, and a forum to help me figure shit out. I just got studio one and tried working on it but can’t intuitively figure out where anything is. With the amount of videos and tutorials available for all of these softwares these days, I just don’t see intuitive as a thing that matters.

I use it on an original Microsoft Surface Pro (which is what, 5 or 6 years old by this point?) and it runs perfectly fine for me

bingo

Just get it done Clipless.

And please add +1 to the "Reaper is unintuitive af" vote count.

yeah same here. i tried to use logic at a friends joint. man what a freakin' misnomer. nothing is where i'd look for it- but i spent two three days with it.. so natch it's unintuitive. i'm sure a 747 in unintuitive too.

reaper is basically just like an analog console, which is why i like it. everything's laid out in the mixer pretty much just like any console i've used, just no eq. but no major crazies, and once you figure out your menus for envelopes and gridding and routing.. pfft. shits intuitive as hell if you've ever sat behind a mackie 1604.

it takes a while to figure out any DAW though- cause the functionality of any audio program is such that it can do a SHIT TON of stuff.. so there's an inevitable learning curve. i remember sitting down in front of reaper fourteen years ago and about crying 'cause all i'd ever done is use ADATs and consoles. a week later, pfft. no big- and i was bogglin' my mind 'cause seemingly anything was possible.

Yeah, for real!

I'm mainly saying that every thing is fucking unintuitive if you've never fucking used it before LOL. Once you learn what you need, it no longer seems that way.

yes but no. There are things software designers can do to not fuck over their users. Like not have a zillion flyaway menus. Not have tiny little buttons. Not require five mouse clicks to do a simple procedure. Reaper violates all of these.

edit: but it's free. And it works. So quit agonizing and install it already. Or something else.

Well put Wayne. Everything has a learning curve; sure. Reaper obscures tools, invents different names for procedures/tasks that are named "correctly" in other DAW software, does all sorts of just "on purpose design f**kery" that for me only ever causes confusion.

I've got 15 minutes of recording time but instead of recording; I have to spend that 15 minutes researching what these morons decided to call "cut and paste" and figure out what ham-fisted hotkey combo actually does the desired task versus simple mouse selection methods used by everything else since the dawn of time

I'm always hyperbolic about reaper because every. d@mn. time. I go to do something that should be simple with it; this process happens. Every time.




I promised myself I wasn't going to take Pablo's bait but I couldn't resist


I hope you have pulled the free trigger by now CB

Also; if anyone is looking for a USB interface; hit me up I've got a Behringer UMC404HD that's going on the block. I think.

I'm currently learning how to use Fusion360. Now that is unintuitive. Hell, it's even vastly different from previous Autodesk CAD software and that was at least vaguely similar to SolidWorks...

I haven’t experienced any of these weird problems you guys are talking about with reaper lol.

Me neither. These guys are a bunch of DAW drama queens.

Get a grip.

Don't make me respond to the firefox mobile thread!

Truth.


DAWs as a whole are probably the easiest UIs of any creative software, IMO. Try making video games. Unity had a crazy hard learning curve for me when I got into it. Worse yet, try learning Swift in XCode.


The "hardest to learn" DAW is still equipped with an automatic transmission and power windows.


OP, Suck it up and download a free title and make some clips already.

Yeah this is way overthinking things lol. Pick one, download it, and start. If you don’t like it, try another. It’s a daw, not rocket science. I struggled with sonar 8, everyone recommended reaper, and I’ve been using it for over 10 years now. Never saw a need to switch because of difficult to find tools or misnamed tasks or unintuitive interface. I double click to add a track, arm the track, hit record. Big fx button to add fx. Dragging midi files into a track makes drums easy.

Maybe he's busy recording his first single instead of responding to this thread...?

this is why i like it as well.

Another vote for Reaper. It can do just about anything and is light on resources.

You're right, but we're talking about Clipless. Let's see what happens.

But that’s kinda what I’m getting at. With no experience, it doesn’t matter where you start. It’s going to take time regardless of which he chooses.

exactly my experience. I had it figured out once, but then forgot. Even watched a few "how to reaper" clips on YouTube.

Even something as simple as setting sound input and output devices is dumb. Options --> Preferences --> look at menu on left, under the Audio part click Device. It's pretty much the first thing that anyone needs to do, yet not at all intuitive. Audacity has those settings at the top of the screen in dropdown menus. You can also get to them via Edit --> Preferences --> no third step.

I’ve heard good things about Reaper for 10 years. I’m such a lazy old piece of shit that I’m still using GarageBand on my iMac i bought in 2008........ And I have never updated the operating system!! Yup, still using 2008 version of GarageBand. It’s been good enough for what I do. I think the only thing that I wanted to do in a recording that I couldn’t was have tempo changes.

I need to upgrade my whole computer before I go with a new DAW at this point though. Reaper is still a top contender, but I also might be fine with the current version of GarageBand too. I mean I’m not recording albums or anything like that.

y'all cry too much- set your shit up once properly, and you never look at that stuff again. i can pull together a 16 track session in like 30 minutes, and then i toggle tracks on and off. push the big red button.

This. I don’t even understand why this is a problem lol. Reaper automatically detected my audient first time I plugged it in. Went in and set up the outputs and inputs. Never had to set them up again...so who cares lol. I don’t want these options on the screen taking up space for other useful shit lol.