Leaving Protools For Reaper

[will_shred]

I have the protools student edition and have been using it as my main DAW for a little while, but I think I might actually switch back to reaper. The primary reason is that reaper is far more stable than protools, in the time I've been using reaper I don't think I've ever had random crashes or playback errors or license activation errors, which protools seems to be plagued with. I love the workflow of protools, which is of course important, but getting though recording sessions without crashing and playback errors is more important.

Other advantages of reaper over protools are that the stock plugins are arguably better, though I mostly use Slate plugins for everything. The Xpand instrument pack that comes with PT is something that I imagine will come in handy though I haven't used it yet. MY biggest gripe with reaper is that the editing workflow to me feels clunky and slow where with protools its very fast and intuitive. The other thing I really like about protools is how it automatically generates an audio files folder, and automatically scans for 3rd party plugins where with reaper you have to insert them into the program file manually. Can anyone give me some tips to make the best of my Reaper experience?

 

[faloppa]

I share your thoughts, I use Reaper as my main daw, and only use protools for drum editing, which is one of the fastest and better ways to get this type of work done, at least for me.

As for editing in reaper, in my case it was very difficult at the beginning, I had to change a lot of shortcuts in order to get the edition the way I'm used to (I started with cubase), I'd recommend you to watch some videos on YT so you can set reaper the way you want, it might take some time but in the long run it will be worth. The same goes for the audio files folder that generates automatically, I guess you can change that in preferences in reaper.

 

[Drew]

I don't know if I'd call the stock plugins "better," but they're probably going to be more transparent - I use ReaEQ and ReaComp a fair amount for equalization and compression where I just want the effect and I'm not trying to add "color" to a sound. They're pretty "boring" in the latter respect, but they're efficient and work well, and there are a ton of other options out there when you do want to color a sound a bit more.

 

[lewis]

Reaper is outstanding.
I love the look of cubase but in general reaper is amazing.

 

[will_shred]

I'm fairly quickly getting used to reapers controls. I really want to learn the stock commands before assigning new keybindings. And I've pretty much got mousewheel navigation down which is really important to me.

 

[oneblackened]

I found it to be the exact opposite, assuming your computer is up to PT. I had a lot of random unexplained errors with Reaper and I stopped using it for mastering because of that (which is my day job).