Welcome to the forum
Quote:
Originally Posted by jbesser
Hi all - I'm wondering if Reaper is right for what I want to do.
I am a musician, not a techie, and I want to do 2 things:
- record my own tunes - single tracking AND overdubbing so I can play with myself, using my Mac
- Take WAV or MP3 files created by bandmates, upload them to my Mac, record my own parts while playing theirs and listening on headphones.
I have good condenser and dynamic mics, and plan to purchase a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface to use with my Mac Mini.
I also hope to rip tunes from YouTube videos to learn them; currently, I use Audacity to do that, with the IShowYou audio capture app installed on my Mac.
Is this all doable with Reaper? Is it more user friendly than Audacity, which I find sort of impenetrable? Anything else I should know?
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More userfriendly not necessarily. It's a powerful tool and a lot of power also means, that things can become much more complicated than Audactiy.
But, it's quite easy to outgrow the things Audacity offers, so if you need a DAW that gives you enough space to grow and explore, Reaper is the right thing to do.
Some things I would suggest:
- Watch the Youtube-videos by Kenny Gioia, who made tons of real good and short videos on how to use Reaper. That's the best ressource for Reaper available, together with the unofficial Reaper Blog.
- Choose a good theme. The default ones can be really overwhelming for new users, so it's a good idea to browse through the stash
https://stash.reaper.fm/ and look for a theme, that looks and feels as least intimidating to you as possible.
You can change later, if you need more things later on, even customizing it yourself if needed..
If you don't know where to start, ask in the theme-subforum here:
https://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=26
so they can suggest you some themes that you can try. Just post the things you want to do in Reaper, as you did in this thread, so people know, where your current neccessities are.
- Try, fail, ask questions in a nice way(this community tries to help whenever they can) and succeed in using Reaper. The learning curve can be high for beginners, the payoff in the long run very rewarding.
- And if in the end you come to the conclusion, that Reaper isn't the software of your choice, you can always revert to Audacity.