Prefabs in Reaper

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Prefabs is a name for the feature that I took from the Unity game engine.

They could be called aliases, pooled objects, globals, or whatever.

The feature simply suggests that such ability exists within a Reaper project, that allows a user to save and create linked clones of an item or track or plugin preset, to aid and accelerate production, by saving time and compartmentalize the way a project's logic is organized for the user.

A nice video showcasing the functionality in it's full extend can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibmdm_PoyMA

A quick description of the idea.

The major parts of Reaper's workflow: media items, tracks and plugin presets, should be able to be saved as a pooled or alias version, in a true object-oriented philosophy of information handling.

It's almost the same thing as having what Reaper calls "pooled MIDI items".

If you watch the video link above you will understand exactly what I'm saying here.

That way, we could have items that we use throughout the project and then, when we change one of those, all the rest that are aliased, change together.

That way we could easily create primary, secondary and tertiary design elements in sound effects design workflows for sfx libraries or games or of course sampled instruments content design.

Furthermore, it would enhance the workflow of music production. Being able to save a music track prefab for the tracks that have the most priority in the song and then change one track, changes the rest of those too.

This is already happening in many media authoring environments.
- Unity calls them prefabs.
- Fmod Studio calls them Preset Effect Chains (Fmod only uses this in effect presets)
- Affinity Designer calls the Symbols
- Scrivener calls them Placeholder Tags
enroe (thanks!) from the forums also noted:
- Cubase calls them Shared Parts
- Apple Logic calls them Aliases - of Midis, Audios and Folders
- Reaper calls them Pooled Items - but only for single Midi-Items

And many more.

Many Reaper user's ask for pooled audio items functionality. This feature here would be able to provide that and much-much more.

Stretching the idea, having parent-child relationships with those items, can create intricate projects that would accelerate production a lot.

After all, information architecture and computer interfaces can give as audio producers so much more that the old recorder-mixer setups that we all know. Adding that kind of information structure and linking within the DNA of Reaper's audio authoring environment would be really great. Imagine the possibilities when we add the scripting, actions, awesome routing and organization capabilities that Reaper already offers, together with the ability to create data models and control them en mass.

In Affinity Designer for example, if you duplicate a symbol and go on the 2nd symbol and change the angle to +10° and then press duplicate again, the 3rd symbol will be +20° from the 1st one. This is used to make sprite-sheets. Same methods could work miracles when designing the sound items for a sampled instrument. Duplicating a prefab (that's how I call them now in my head :-P) and moving the 2nd prefab's fade-out -300ms and then duplicating this again, would create a 3rd one with -600ms fade-out from the 1st one. Here's how this works in Affinity Designer, the feature is called "Power Duplicate": https://vimeo.com/110124748

Here's how this data linking works in Affinity designer: https://affinity.help/designer/en-US...?title=Symbols

As a sound designer, this would give me great agility when create spell effects, synthesized weapons and other similarly styled sounds.

I write this idea here, and I'm sure that, as always the awesome community in those forums will have very interesting things to add.

Again, watch the video link above, as it really shows the whole idea within 7 minutes or less.

Thanks for reading this, thanks for your time!