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Old 01-02-2018, 10:27 AM   #115
Jason Lyon
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: May 2016
Posts: 720
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A lot of the time, complaints about REAPER come from people who seem to have forgotten how long it took them to learn another DAW. They've forgotten how frustrating it was trying to get OTHERDAW to do things they now regard as basic. Nothing is ever truly intuitive straight out of the box in any piece of software.

It's a common problem - people assume REAPER can't do X because the Xifier isn't where they're used to finding it.

Migration between software packages is inevitably clouded with pre-existing expectations and always takes a bit of effort. I had to put in some time to switch from Quark to InDesign, Photoshop to GIMP, Cubase to PT then to REAPER, C to Lua, etc, but like the Borg, I adapted. I saw the potential, stuck with it and put in the time.

Investigating new software out of curiosity is fine, but of course REAPER isn't going to work quite the same way as OTHERDAW. It's not supposed to - if it did, what would be the point of it existing?

All good software has a clearly defined purpose and DAWs are a great example - at the end of the day, they're really just ways of lining up loads of audio clips and playing them back together. The rest is efficiency and methodology. I know a few people who produce pretty decent sounding work in Audacity. (Actually I use Audacity myself for quick simple one-shot tasks from time to time - when I just need a hammer and a screwdriver, not the full toolbox.)

I'd also add that the ability to trial fully-functional REAPER for as you long as like for free is pretty much unique among heavy-hitting audio software - and it therefore leaves itself open to this kind of complaining. Yes, there's a learning curve, but the community on here is probably the friendliest you'll find anywhere.You can ask the noobiest of things and someone will pop up and patiently walk you through it - you rarely just get RTFMed as can happen elsewhere.

Maybe you've found a few things in your first couple of weeks of playing around that experienced users will admit is a grumble of their own. That's fair enough and helps to highlight concerns for the devs to consider. But it's rare, and usually occurs only when people are plainly already relatively expert users of OTHERDAW. So again, you can't help but wonder "what did you come to REAPER to find?"

But of course if the basis of your criticism is that "I can do it like this in OTHERDAW and I can't in REAPER so it sucks and I'm going back" you can hardly be surprised if people are going to say "okay then, bye". A bit of invariably polite sarcasm is to be expected. That's not being defensive or partisan or "hating".

And I agree with Dragon - the OP's post wasn't really very constructive. One particular riposte was downright petulant. Also, most of the concerns could have been addressed if the OP hadn't been such a shy flower and just got on here and asked.

You can use a wrench as a spanner, but don't come complaining if you chew up the nice decorative nut.

Last edited by Jason Lyon; 01-02-2018 at 10:36 AM.
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