Creating a project in REAPER

Introduction to Music Production - Week 2 Assignment

Introduction
Hi, my name is Jess Rodrguez. I'm from Madrid, Spain; and this week I'll try to explain how to setup a project in the REAPER DAW. REAPER is a powerful DAW, which may lack some advanced tools or effects (not that much) present on more known (industry standard) DAWs, but its reasonable licensing/pricing policy makes it perfect for the home studio.

Reviewing the Project Preparation Checklist

Let's review the checklist suggested in the course material:
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Proper project name and location Digital Audio Preferences Recording File Type Hardware Settings Buffer Size

Now we'll find how to properly accomplish this five points using REAPER as our DAW.

Proper project name and location

Choosing a proper name for the project is easy: name it as the song is to be named. I find this approach to be the most intuitive. If you produce for yourself, this name scheme will be enough. If you produce for a diverse range of artists, you may have a directory structure for each artist, or name your projects as "Artist - Album - Song Name".

If you can, it's better to have a hard drive alone for your projects. If not, a different partition to the one the operating system is installed on, is recommended. And if you follow the "one project by folder" rule, keeping all the material from a project in an isolated folder, all is going to be fine.

Proper project name and location (II)

As you can see, REAPER facilitates the task of maintaining your projects tidy...

Digital Audio Preferences and Hardware Settings

In REAPER, you can always see what are your digital audio settings, because they are displayed in the upper-right corner of the main DAW screen. Clicking on it opens a dialog to configure them, this dialog can also be accessed by pressing the "CTRL+P" keyboard shortcut. As you can see, from this dialog you can access almost all of the digital audio configuration parameters. From here you can set/change:
Audio System (ASIO is a must in Windows environments) Enable/Disable inputs/outputs of your Audio Interface. Sample Rate. Buffer Size (Block Size in REAPER)

Sampling Rate and Buffer Size

Pressing the opened. button, the ASIO Driver configuration panel is It's here where you set the Buffer Size, because not all drivers understands the REAPER option to request a Buffer/Block Size

Don't Set This!!! Setting this is safe, set it to 48000Hz, as is explained in the lectures. Set This

Recording File Type

Hitting the keyboard shortcut "ALT+ENTER" opens the Project Settings dialog. You can also get to this dialog selecting File->Project Settings from the top menu bar. On the "Media" tab you can select the file type, as well as the bit depth. As you see in the figure, i have selected 24 bit WAV with BWF as is recommended in the course.

More Project Settings

Other important tab of the previous dialog is the "Project Settings" tab, in which you can configure the project sample rate, the Beats Per Minute (tempo), the time signature and many more. The "project sample rate" normally is has the same value to the previously configured recording sample rate, but it doesn't have to. The setting in this tab is the playback sample rate, the setting in the "audio device settings" (see slide 6) is the recording sample rate.

Reflection, excuses and Links

What is covered here is the basics of setting up a project in REAPER, there is much more, as REAPER is highly customizable and has many options to be studied in deep. I've learnt different ways to accomplish the same task, which shows REAPER flexibility and user friendliness, as well as reinforce previous knowledge about this excellent DAW. I must excuse beforehand for the possible grammar and/or syntax errors in this slides, because English is not my mother tongue, but i sincerely hope there aren't too many of them. Thank you for reading this stuff. I expect it to be useful for someone. Links: Reaper homepage: http://www.reaper.fm Reaper Manual: http://www.reaper.fm/userguide.php