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I remember Reaper v2 being like a 4.7mb download at a time when nuendo/cubase/cakewalk/protools etc were >1GB plus samples. With a nicer summing engine and more stable, lower latency vst host than any of them. And the only one with a decent, revenue-dependent tiered license. What a legend.
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Linux version of Reaper is 13mb today, if anything the contrast is more stark these days
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REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.

I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.

You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.

You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.

You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.

You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.

In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.

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It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.
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I always figured JSFX was javascript :) I've used reaper and plenty of jsfx plugins for a long time, just never bothered to look under the hood.
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Whoa TIL. Jsfx feels way cooler now. Fwiw jsfx is easy fodder for llm’s if you need a quick utility. Mine was a midi channel filter
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I seem to recall he was also working on some software that allowed musicians to jam together over the internet, it somehow took advantage of inherent latency instead of just trying to minimize it.

Edit: found it: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

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I've never used it, but it's a fascinating idea. The quirk is that no two participants, assuming they're each actually playing and not just listening, will hear the same thing. The following things happen simultaneously:

* Alice will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Bob) played X measures ago

* Bob will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Alice) played X measures ago

So for the measures mentioned above, Alice might conclude that things went very well, and Bob might conclude that things didn't jibe, and even if these were each true objective facts, they could both be correct as they are not discussing the same thing. There can be no retrospective discussion of a shared experience, only of individual experiences.

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I used to use ninjam many years ago, I don't remember the delay being a deal breaker for me, it was just a fun way to practice with other players. If you found a good drummer you could just jam along and have fun with it.
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Oh cool. I used to use Reaper to edit my podcast. Great program. Very easy to use even for a noob.
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Glad to see a shout-out for Reaper in the first comments, its my favorite DAW and I've used them all.
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And Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design.
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> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design

Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for the actual production.

Unless you're talking about some specific genre here, either music- or game-wise?

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From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone not using Reaper for sound design. Some use Pro Tools or Cubase, but they aren’t as common as Reaper. It really has no competition due to how easy it is to prepare dozens of assets with a single render (all with correct naming and loudness) as well as extensions that add features no other DAW has (e.g. Global Sampler, stuff by LKC Tools, etc.).

It’s not very good for music, though, so here, the situation is a bit more diverse. So yes, I’m talking concretely about sound design.

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I think now it seems clear you're talking about "sound effect design" specifically maybe, rather than sound design? Particularly because you say it's not good for music production, but plenty of us do sound design together with music product, but I've also never done sound effect design, which it does sound like you're talking about.
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Harmonix uses REAPER for authoring Rock Band and Fortnite Festival charts and syncing them to the stems
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