I’ll take bare bones as long as reaper flys.Reaper is a beast.
My mate is currently developing a custom workflow for Reaper that aims to be a cross between the nice stuff about itself, cubase and protools. It’ll be featuring a custom built control surface, a complete redesign of every gui aspect along with various custom templates to integrate with the concept etc etc. Can’t wait…
That’s cool, but the fact that those things have to be made at all means Reaper itself isn’t the complete solution. In the future I’ll take a third look.
I’ve had Reaper since the beginning of version 4, but never really worked with it until recently… I really want it to be a viable alternative, but I keep hitting a wall with “ReaInsert”, the plugin you use to interface your hardware fx with Reaper tracks!
Every time I try to use it, the latency becomes a challenge to chase down! I’m always having to reset the ASIO driver when just switching between different outboard devices on the same track! Big showstopper for me… and from what I’ve been reading, this has been on-going for several iterations, and has been thoroughly acknowledged by other users for YEARS!
So… as much as I want it to be true… Reaper just ain’t ready yet, but there is a lot to like also!
It’s a joy to work on as far as its speed, no doubt about that. It leaves Cubase in the dust with responsiveness and CPU efficiency. But I much prefer Cubase’s GUI overall (although it has many, many significant issues that need fixing and unifying, IMO), and there are some major features for composing to picture in Cubase that Reaper simply doesn’t have.
More than a few other DAWs (three in in my personal experience) also use far less CPU than Cubase, so it’s not only Reaper who has a handle on the situation.
Cubase definitely has the nicest GUI and feature set of all the DAWs I use. I think we have more than enough features now, it’s time for optimized performance and a fast GUI.
Honestly there’s no reason why Cubase has to be the only daw that has unstable CPU/ASIO performance. Even Pro Tools, the slow dinosaur of lore, has steady performance meters now at the lowest latency settings. To get that out of Cubase I need to double the sample buffer, and that doesn’t even fix the CPU usage, it just stabilizes it.
Yes, I very much agree. Cubase has, IMO, the best feature set of all the DAWs I’ve used. What they need to address is the implementation of some of them, modernizing/getting some of them that are already there up-to-date (i.e. automation editing, multi-lane time warp editing, etc.), the consistency of the GUI between different windows, incredibly long save times on large projects, and making it as optimized and as powerful CPU-wise as these other DAWs.
It can’t be everything to everyone with features, so they need to work on the core of it instead of always pasting on new features.
Yes, exactly the same here. I came from Pro Tools and it far exceeds Cubase with the amount of processing it can handle and the stability of that processing. On two separate huge and dense mixes of the same tracks, layouts, and plugins (I had to recreate two exact PT sessions in Cubase when I first got it, as part of the learning process and to make the projects easier for a collaboration), Pro Tools would be at, for example, around 60% or so and Cubase would be redlining at the same latency settings (both were using the exact same Apollo 8 interface). I was able to do significantly larger projects at lower latency settings in Pro Tools, and that’s one of a couple things I miss dearly that does make a difference in my work. I’ve used Reaper at times and just can’t get into it as a DAW, but it’s very significantly better with CPU than Cubase is, and that was using the exact same VSTs as Cubase does on my computer.
Pro Tools made literal leaps and bounds with its CPU-handling when they re-coded it. I’m afraid Cubase probably needs to do the same (and they might already be working on that- who knows!).
see below
Because the Reaper guys actually care about Reaper’s performance.