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Old 01-01-2015, 02:56 PM   #11
clepsydrae
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(ninja'd by Richie and hopi, but anyway, my post: )

Quote:
Originally Posted by famous beagle View Post
Many of these books will be like this; i.e., they'll have a bunch (50 or 100 or 150, etc.) of short examples.
Yeah, this issue of projects that involve lots of sub projects is one of the final frontiers of DAW workflow, IMO. I take it that a lot of video game sound effect designers use Reaper because it has some handy features to enable this kind of thing. I run in to it whenever I record a live show and need to mix each song a bit differently but it's overall a single project with some commonality. Reaper isn't perfect: you've found an example where it would be great to have better batch functions (although with a tiny bit of scripting knowledge you could do exactly what you want) but AFAIK Reaper is better than other DAWs at this stuff (anyone know a DAW that has fancier batch operations with the same basic level of DAW features?). This is one reason why people want (a supported version of) PiP -- project in project. Make one master project with references to all your sub projects and render that.

For your needs, I would use a single project with a separate set of tracks for each sub project, grouping any in folders when/if it makes sense to have common processing across several. This will create many instances of plugins, which may bog down your computer. As Hopi said, freezing is the thing to do in that case. (I'd be surprised if Reaper had any trouble with that: once frozen, Reaper is just playing back vanilla audio for that track. Remembering the past states is just on disk for whenever it's needed.)

(I was all ready to suggest the clever way around the CPU issue by using automation to mute the tracks when they aren't being used. Assuming that in Preferences the option "Audio -> Do not process muted tracks" is enabled, the muted tracks should not use any CPU. However, this doesn't work: apparently the "automation mute" just lowers the volume to zero, as opposed to properly muting the track, and it doesn't result in any CPU savings, which is disappointing.)

Anyway, then establish regions around the audio and use the region matrix to indicate which should be rendered.

Let's return to scripting, though: assuming you're on windows, the script route might not be so hard for you: you'd just create a regular text file called "myscript.bat" containing lines like these (assuming a 64bit install):

Code:
"C:\Program Files\REAPER (x64)\reaper.exe" -renderproject "c:\Documents and Settings\clepsydrae\Desktop\example\examplefile1.RPP"
"C:\Program Files\REAPER (x64)\reaper.exe" -renderproject "c:\Documents and Settings\clepsydrae\Desktop\example\examplefile2.RPP"
"C:\Program Files\REAPER (x64)\reaper.exe" -renderproject "c:\Documents and Settings\clepsydrae\Desktop\example\examplefile3.RPP"
...etc for all the RPP's.

That's for a 64-bit install on windows. You just have to confirm what path your Reaper lives in, and know the path to your projects.

Then just double-click on the .bat file and it will get to work executing all those commands.

Note that it will render with whatever the last render settings were for each individual project. If you want to set that, open each project, choose File->Render, adjust the settings, including the output destination (and learn to use the wildcards in the File name field, it will save time), but then click "Save changes and close" which won't actually render. Then save the project file (or the changes won't be remembered.) When you run the script file, it will render using those settings. It's a pain to set up, but you only have to do it once. It'd be nice if Reaper let you specify render settings somehow for the batch, but no. (That's another reason "one big project" has its advantages.)

Note also that it will overwrite without confirmation any files with whatever it is rendering, if they have the same name, so use caution.

Given the work done recently (last year or so) on this batch rendering stuff, I have a suspicion that some new features may be on the way in v5? We'll see.
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