REAPER DAW (Steinberg listen to us)

Cubase
1

Dear Steinberg,
I am not an engineer in the sense that I can understand all complex nuances of DAW design, integration and underlying features. I use three DAWS (Nuendo, Pro Tools and Reaper). My comments below relate to some rugged and integral features that REAPER users take for granted, but we, Steinberg users have to fuss about to get. Reaper, a DAW many of us Cubase and Nuendo fans love to hate. I was introduced to Reaper in 2014 by a friend in Leicestershire, and I loathed its interface. I later ditched it for Cubase, much to his chagrin. I came back to REAPER in 2019 using it alongside my main DAW, Cubase and my side-kick (Pro Tools).

While importing loops into REAPER you don’t need to do anything. Just import and keep working. No need to fret about tempo changes or whatever. Loops align seamlessly with your timeline, grid, and tempo. Why do we need to fiddle about with the settings in media-bay, pool window, audio menu (stretch to project tempo)or time-stretch tool ??? Why not integrate these into the engine and allow us to focus on making beats?

Why not give us a click and create tracks functionality, (PT has this too) rather than having to open a dialog box, or right click each time you want to create a new track? At least make the MIDI track the default click and create track. Or we can click and create any new tracks, and then change them to audio or midi using an accompanying side-view dialog box??? hello Steinberg.

It appears REAPER has a lot of Artificial Intelligence underlying it’s design, and behind its seemingly simplistic, befuddled interface, there’s an intelligent design focused on freeing the user to focus on creativity.

There’s a reason REAPER fans are fanatical and fundamentalist about it. It’s nimble, agile, adaptive, light-weight, loads with lightening speed, hardly ever grinds your CPU to a halt, almost never crashes, rugged, with good routing functions, a good mix-console (I love Cubase/Nuendo better).

Cubase/Nuendo is my native DAW…granted. But 5 years from now, REAPER poses significant challenge. It’s scaling already with it’s nimble and adaptive design, with a light footprint on resource consumption and that’s staggering to say the least.

I hope we can wake up before we are disrupted. I’m so massively invested in Steinberg, I’m not porting to anywhere, but consider the views above.
Thanks.

2

Yikes no thanks, sometimes I am just dragging stuff in to edit unrelated to any tempo - actually a lot… and I would - not - want auto tempo alignment. The current utilities are just fine, quick, and there’s a couple different paths you can take.

When dragging in from MediaBay, if the ‘Align to Beats’ preview playback is enabled, it will be aligned when you drag it into the project.

You can activate Musical Mode for events in the lower zone editor, and or, in the pool if needing to do multiple files. Just use the key command ‘Find Selected in Pool’ which for me I can one-hand initiate with ctrl+alt+f. It takes one second.

I - never - want my program to be doing that kind of stuff automatically… anything that changes the sound or length, or anything. NEVER. I want to do that manually only, so I understand what the original file was like before anything changed.

For me, this is what I dislike about Reaper, it is sort of scattered and inconsistent and trying to incorporate what everyone wants instead of establishing set parameters for people to work within and develop a workflow and style. It’s sort of like the complete opposite of protools in a bad way - where protools is like a universal standard that is the same for every person, thus any person can go to any protools studio and experience the same workflow, GUI, etc etc - that is an asset, and Cubase needs to be that. It is essential to build a professional community, it is like being certified to pilot a certain type of plane that is universal across multiple countries.

Don’t like the UI too much, much prefer the new Cubase UI apart from updating some of the relic windows which I’m sure is on the way.

3

Could not have said it better “lovegames”.

4

The “click to create track function” refers to the last selected track. If you selected an instrument-track or a midi track, cubase creates a midi-track, because you might want another track to control the previous selected track.
But why don’t you use keycommands to create a track, if you don’t want to work with trackpresets or mediabay?

5

No thanks . i wouldn’t like Steinberg to re-write Cubase from the ground up because other DAW’s have certain features , there’s a reason i’ve been using Steinberg products for 30 odd years and that’s consistency and it’s a tried and tested DAW thats worked and stayed in business that long .

If you need those features then use that DAW

6

Don’t say we or us when you mean I or me. Speak for yourself.

7

As several others, NO, sorry. And this is coming from an user of Reaper from its 4.76 to 5.99 versions. Here are the main issues I had with it, trying to work with it as efficiently as Cubase :

  • the absolute mess with all the actions and scripts : SWS/Reapack/independent developers, etc. And it’s getting worse as the time flows : presently, no less than 3000 actions from different sources without true QC process. They are all piling up in the list of actions, while being often unintuitively labelled.
  • the navigator is a joke,
  • no native track inspector,
  • no control room,
  • no Generic remote definitions : how to control Reaper with endless knobs, beside, yes, a convoluted script involving OSCII-bot, which should be launched before Reaper ?
  • no preset control in the track headers,
  • no input transformer (yes, scripts again, as more or less reliable workarounds…)
  • some persisting issues with MIDI : stuck notes, impossibility to split a MIDI item without cutting the notes underneath (unless again, using a script that should be found first…),
  • the audio and MIDI items don’t behave the same when changing project tempo : why so, as all tracks in Reaper are supposed to be universal ?
  • Why do we absolutly have to activate BOTH ‘Record’ and ‘Monitor’ controls to hear what we are playing ? A workflow killer, this one : I never truely went over it…
  • The automation display is erratic, depending on a cryptic setting : sometimes, we cannot see the full range available for a given parameter,
  • I’m still unable too use effciently the MIDI editor, and the options are cryptic also (even in the preferences),
  • too much things lacking in the transport panel : among others, a way to quickly access to markers,
  • No metter the theme involved, the use of the UI is still a PITA, especially the mixer, with all the FX parameters grouped without any sight of the actual FX involved. This, with the VSTi managed as FX : absolutly not the same things, in my opinion.
  • I’ll let the theming issues that are piling up beside : I could make a 20 items list concerning them.

To sum it all, I’m glad that I fully went back to Cubase, a little more than one year ago : Reaper is conceptually great and also a top efficient host, when considering the resources usage, but there are too much workflow and quirks to use it in an efficient way, IMO : I lost too much time with it…

8

No matter how good or how fast it is, Reaper is the only DAW that I can not stand to look at no matter which theme it has on

9

I’m a lifelong Cubase user but have tried reaper a few times. I too have tried different themes but none are great. The real deal breaker for me was the drum editor which you can’t reorder the notes. I use the drum editor all the time and the one in reaper is unusable to me.