My "take" on the Take/Item "Bin" : ReaBIN

[Xenakios]

edit 24th January 2017. Support and development for this thing has definitely ended.

-edit (29th February) :

The latest download link is :

https://stash.reaper.fm/802/ReaBIN_0_0_9c.zip

If you are completely baffled what the heck this is, here's a little explanation : This is an application to store and manage Reaper Items/Takes. Like a multiple item clipboard...To use, launch Reaper, click "Find REAPERs" in ReaBIN. Then, in Reaper select items in tracks you want to store to ReaBIN and press WindowsKey+C. When you've stored multiple items you can press WindowsKey+V, a pop-up menu comes up showing the same list as ReaBIN and you can select a single item to paste back to Reaper. WindowsKey+A toggles ReaBIN visible/minimized to tray. In ReaBIN there are other options for pasting to Reaper. For example, if you've selected multiple items from the ReaBIN list, you can press Enter or press the "Paste To REAPER"-button to paste single or multiple items. (At the Reaper edit cursor position, at the active track.) Some other craziness is also available, look into the GUI, you'll probably discover it.

This whole thing doesn't work NEARLY as well as I would LIKE it to. There are bugs. It can mess up your Reaper project. (But Reaper's Undo is available to correct.) It's given as a public BETA as a sort of "proof-of-concept" that "Bins" would be very useful with Reaper, if implemented properly. (And with some "creative twists" as an icing to the cake...)

--Here starts my original opening post for this thread--

As months have passed, it has started to seem that Justin/Christophe might not have that much interest in an item/take manager in Reaper. That's ok, of course. But since I sure need it myself I've slowly tried to develop a utility app on my own along those lines. Here's a gif-animation showing what it can currently do :

https://stash.reaper.fm/750/ReaBinDemotus2.gif

(Note : all the items/takes appearing in the ReaBin list are data in RAM, not new audio files on the hard disk. This is the one crucial aspect of the whole thing for me.)

If anyone is interested to test drive, I'd be happy to release a "pre-alpha preview prototype" to the public within a few days. The app currently has all kinds of limitations and I am not sure if all those limitations can be overcome by my own coding efforts.

[suicide king]

Wow!

Mighty nice...

i'd be interested in a test drive

[airon]

A great idea. I'll gladly testdrive it.

I've written about a similar idea, which is almost complete but I wanted to present it to Justin when he has time to address it. Perhaps you can find use for it in your design. https://stash.reaper.fm/oldsb/76519/Reaper-BINs-06.pdf

You can find me on the IRC channel a lot if you'd like to discuss the BIN stuff. Lots of users want this too.

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by airon

A great idea. I'll gladly testdrive it.

I've written about a similar idea, which is almost complete but I wanted to present it to Justin when he has time to address it. Perhaps you can find use for it in your design. https://stash.reaper.fm/oldsb/76519/Reaper-BINs-06.pdf

You can find me on the IRC channel a lot if you'd like to discuss the BIN stuff. Lots of users want this too.

Wow, your proposal seems pretty complete! I'd gladly take all of that implemented by Justin instead of my own hacked-up solution...

I'd like to spend more time at the Reaper IRC-channel as I'm on IRC all the time anyway but I haven't found out a convenient way to do so... (My regular IRC channels are on a different IRC-network and I like to use the Irssi-IRC-client from a remote shell via Putty...I guess I could run two Putty instances but it gets a bit messy...I'll have to figure something out.)

[Tallisman]

I am game to give it a run.
I am very impressed by what you have done here


very cool

.tallis

[larrygates]

Originally Posted by Xenakios

As months have passed, it has started to seem that Justin/Christophe might not have that much interest in an item/take manager in Reaper. That's ok, of course. But since I sure need it myself I've slowly tried to develop a utility app on my own along those lines. Here's a gif-animation showing what it can currently do :

https://stash.reaper.fm/750/ReaBinDemotus2.gif

(Note : all the items/takes appearing in the ReaBin list are data in RAM, not new audio files on the hard disk. This is the one crucial aspect of the whole thing for me.)

If anyone is interested to test drive, I'd be happy to release a "pre-alpha preview prototype" to the public within a few days. The app currently has all kinds of limitations and I am not sure if all those limitations can be overcome by my own coding efforts.

What program did you use to make the gif movie?

I have to make some tutorial videos of me mixing in Reaper, I need to do audio and video, but that GIF movie will make the video very small, which I need also.

Great idea also, I can't understand since the video is so long.

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by larrygates

What program did you use to make the gif movie?

I have to make some tutorial videos of me mixing in Reaper, I need to do audio and video, but that GIF movie will make the video very small, which I need also.

Great idea also, I can't understand since the video is so long.

The Gif-animation was made in Camtasia. It's not possible to have sound with those. But Camtasia of course also makes Flash-videos which can have sound. (But they can be substantially bigger in file size...) Camtasia has a demo available for the latest version and there's also a free download of an older version somewhere on their site. There are also other programs, even completely free, capable to capture the screen activity and sound but I reckon Camtasia is "The Shit" (ie, best) in this field...

You could think of ReaBin as an extension to the Clipboard that can store and manage many clipboard items at once, independent of Reaper. In fact, ReaBin currently is totally dependent on the Windows clipboard and Reaper's Copy and Paste commands. This is not totally ideal for various reasons but I have been asking Justin to make some additions to Reaper making the communication between Reaper and ReaBin somewhat less messy...

[beatbybit]

W-O-W, Xenakios!

[DuX]

Now this is something that would be utterly useful to have .

Great idea! +1

Cheers!

[Xenakios]

Thanks, all, for the comments!

Today I've implemented rudimentary saving and loading of the item database to hard disk. This is obviously a big one. And it must be as bug-free as possible, so I will keep testing this myself for some time, I guess...

So what currently works and to what extent?

-Only one Reaper instance works with ReaBin. (Multiple Reaper instances could result in non-determined behaviour.) Even worse, if that one Reaper instance is quitted or crashes, ReaBin won't connect to Reaper properly when Reaper is restarted. This is utterly stupid (and lazy of me) and I should do something about this ASAP.

-Only items consisting of audio takes will work correctly. This is a big downer for MIDI-people and this hopefully can be solved.

-Selected items in Reaper are sent to ReaBin by pressing WinKey+C. I'll make this customizable as there are probably people who don't even have the Windows-key on their keyboards etc...

-If a newly added take has the same name as a previously existing item in ReaBin, a numeric incrementing suffix is added to it. Eg, if there already is Snare.wav in the bin, adding a Reaper item with the same name will result the ReaBin lists showing Snare.wav (01) etc...

-Speaking of take names, their parsing is quite broken at the moment. For items that contain multiple takes, ReaBin only manages to parse the last take's name, regardless of the last take being selected or not...This is completely lame and must be fixed, but is not completely trivial.

-If duplicate items (that is items only differing by their time position in the Reaper timeline) are sent to ReaBin, it simply stores them all. This should be fixed (or made optional).

-Items can be pasted to Reaper by selecting in the list of the ReaBin window and double clicking (or pressing the Paste To Reaper-button, obviously.) The other, quite handy way, is to press WinKey+V. A popup-list of the same items that appear in the ReaBin window appears and an item can be selected and it will be inserted at the Reaper edit cursor position. (A testament to my limited abilities as a Windows programmer is that the popup list currently can't be closed without pasting something into Reaper unless the ReaBin window is clicked.)

-Only one item can be pasted at a time. I'm hoping to fix this.

-Items that appear in the ReaBin list and the Winkey+V paste list can be filtered. There is a quick "spotlight" type filtering where typing immediately searches all the items that contain the typed text. The other filter filters items based on their properties, such as Length and Pitch adjust. Eg, find items whose Pitch Adjust is not equal to 0.0 or whose Length is less than 2.3 seconds, etc...

-The ReaBin window can me minimized to the Windows Tray by pressing WinKey+A. (And also brought back the same way.)

-The GUI is quite ugly, I know. I'm hoping I can do something about this but it is not high priority at the moment.

[jens]

sounds fantastic! I'd love to give it a go!

[griz lee]

wow. That looks like something from my dreams. So useful.

happy to beta too.

[MikeLacey]

Wow Xenakios... I'd be happy to beta that

[MikeLacey]

And "Wow" to airon as well...

[Xenakios]

Thanks again for the interest!

ReaBin now has the ability to find all running Reaper instances and the one that will act as the copy/paste source/destination can be selected from a dropdown menu. This is not totally ideal, of course. I have to investigate if it is possible to get this working more automatically.

There are some things I have to add, check and optimize before I dare to make a public release.

[BaronStinky]

Looks great. Sign me up for a test drive. My super power is making programs crash. I'm kind of a one-trick pony for a superhero.

[robotich]

AWESOME! I really like this idea and appreciate your effort. Sign me up for a test drive too. =)

[Xenakios]

Good news for MIDI-people! Items/takes containing MIDI-data seem to work already, also when the items have mixed MIDI/audio takes. This didn't even require any changes to the ReaBIN code. Of course I'm a bit suspicious if this really really works OK, so more testing is still needed...

Some more improvements :

-The ReaBin database can be saved a with a user-defined name
-Take name visible on the lists is now parsed from the item based on it's selected status (wasn't as difficult as I stupidly predicted)

Be patient, the BETA is almost ready for release!

[plamuk]

man, that's so great

[MikeLacey]

Ok *grin* I'm officially impatient now...

[jens]

Same here!

[Xenakios]

Ok, for the brave souls out there :

This link is no longer valid, newer version available!

https://stash.reaper.fm/758/ReaBIN_0_0_5.zip

No install is necessary. Just unzip the folder wherever convenient. There's a folder included with 2 empty Reaper projects and 2 example ReaBIN files. The included Bins won't work directly with anything else than the included wav-files and from the included Reaper projects. (Because of the media item locations stored in the Bin items. This is not handled very smartly at the moment but I'm hoping some improvements can be made...) Best is to start your own test projects and send new items to ReaBIN from them...

Currently the shortcut keys are hard-wired and they are :

WinKEY+A to toggle ReaBIN to the Windows Tray and back.

WinKEY+C to send selected item(s) from Reaper to ReaBIN.

WinKEY+V to open the popup paste menu. The popup menu has some issues, I'll probably fix the whole thing by making my own customized popup window for this...

It may be best to have Reaper NOT close the audio device when not active and NOT put media items offline when Reaper is not active. These options can be found in the Reaper preferences. The issue here is that ReaBIN is a separate application from Reaper and there can be lot's of switching from Reaper and back when heavily using ReaBIN. This might not always be very smooth. However, on my own machine everything works pretty Ok even when Reaper closes the audio device and puts the media items offline when not the active application. Your mileage may vary!

I must remind everybody that since this is an early beta etc, there may be all kinds of issues, even data loss!. These losses should however be only limited to ReaBIN itself, to the best of my knowledge. It may even be that the whole thing doesn't work at all...ReaBIN has only currently been tested on my own machine that runs Win XP SP2 with Admin privileges. Possible issues with Win98 (LoL), Vista, WINE, non-Admin accounts etc will be difficult to debug/fix for me, but I can try.

[pjs]

Wow! Played with this very briefly but it seems to work well so far. Very impressive. This is certainly going to be very useful!

[MikeLacey]

Woo hoo! :-) Thx

[griz lee]

very usefull. Thank you for making this: i've been wanting something like this in reaper for a while.

[Xenakios]

Thanks for the encouraging comments!

Any bugs or annoying behavior? Feature requests?

The source code is frankly a horrible mess right now, as I put it lot's of it together as fast as possible just to make a sort of "proof-of-concept". As I've played around with ReaBIN myself, I guess I can safely say that the concept has been proven! This is going to be super-useful when I get back to composing my own sound "things" (hopefully THAT's gonna happen soon enough)...

[Xenakios]

New stuff definitely coming for the next beta, if anyone is interested :

-Recently saved/opened ReaBin-files appear in a drop-down list and can be quickly recalled. (Currently it loads them from hard disk and then recreates all the internal data structures, so for large BINs recall might not happen "instantaneously".)

-Rename selected takes (This will rename both the visible name in the ReaBin list and the Reaper take itself that is pasteable to Reaper.)

Support for pasting multiple items (with different arranging options) is high in my agenda...Won't probably appear in the next public beta, though.

[griz lee]

your beta is very functional, and extremely welcome. Hasn't crashed on me.

future? well,

-drag 'n drop?
-playback from the bin?
(if you can do this now, how ? sorry for being ignorant).

that's about it really for me. this is great already -- thank you very much for making it. It has made my slice 'n dice much faster already.

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by griz lee

your beta is very functional, and extremely welcome. Hasn't crashed on me.

future? well,

-drag 'n drop?
-playback from the bin?
(if you can do this now, how ? sorry for being ignorant).

that's about it really for me. this is great already -- thank you very much for making it. It has made my slice 'n dice much faster already.

Wonderful to know someone gets some use out of ReaBIN!

Drag and drop of item data is not possible into Reaper... I asked Justin for this but so far no go...What would be probably possible is to create a Windows Explorer file drag-object in ReaBIN which Reaper should be able to accept...But this will of course work only for whole audio files, not portions of them or with item settings etc...

Audio preview of Bin items should be within possibilities in two ways :

1) Have an "audio preview" instance of Reaper always open and using clever command and data sending into it to achieve preview of items with all the processing that Reaper can do with timestretch, take-fx etc...This would be complicated to implement properly, I would guess.

2) Simply playback the portion of the source media file set in the take data within ReaBIN. No fancy processing would be possible this way...This should be easier to implement. But would "litter" the ReaBin install folder with 2 additional DLL's, would that be too bad?

[Xenakios]

ReaBIN 0.0.6b Beta available!

https://stash.reaper.fm/761/ReaBIN_0_0_6b.zip

Changes :

-GUI slightly clearer
-WinKey+V pop-up list has the option to cancel paste.
-Recent Bins drop down list (beware, recall happens instantly, it won't ask to save changes to the current bin etc...)
-Rename selected takes in the Bin
-Paste of multiple takes, one after the another or at the edit cursor on multiple tracks. (This is available only from the ReaBIN GUI, not from the WinKey+V pop-up list.)

Changes for 0.0.6b :

-Fixed display bug in the WinKey+V menu
-Added a Paste Random Takes function. See if you can find it... edit : Oooops, this can't be cancelled, it will paste one random take...Will fix later...

[Xenakios]

Some crazy stuff I've been thinking about :



Maybe this would be too much for 99% of people to handle, but that's why they are called the "Guru" options...

[Tallisman]

ok. I have been watching this thread with mucho interest!
I have now downloaded this ReaBin thing...it looks too cool
to not join in the testing fun!
thanks for a killer effort here. I'll let you know what I find.

.t

[Xenakios]

Coming in 0.0.7 Beta :

-Pressing Enter in the ReaBin list pastes to REAPER.
-ReaBin list has a context (right-click) menu, now with 2 operations :
*Copy Bin take names to REAPER takes. (I.e. the takes that will be pasted to Reaper timeline. Handy if you end up with "Dog Bark (001)"-style names in the ReaBIN and want to have those same names appear in the pasted REAPER takes.)
*Replace take selected in REAPER with selected take of ReaBIN. This may exhibit "exploding" behaviour as it sends several REAPER command messages at one go. I'd be interested if it works as advertised...Won't work with multiple takes yet.

Also if all goes well : "Replace take selected in ReaBIN with take selected in REAPER"

[Xenakios]

0.0.7 here :

https://stash.reaper.fm/766/ReaBIN_0_0_7.zip

"Replace take selected in ReaBIN with take selected in REAPER" was not yet done...

Fixed stupid assumption that the recentlyused.ini-file exists. If it didn't, resulted in an access violation error and a memory leak.

[Xenakios]

Should be in ReaBIN 0.0.8 Beta :

-Replace selected take(S) in REAPER with take selected in ReaBIN. Aaaargh! This was a "BITCH" to implement so that it takes into account if the takes in REAPER are spread on separate tracks, but would seem to work most of the time now.

-Direct import of WAV-audio into ReaBIN. You can choose one or several files using the normal Windows File Open-dialog. Possible to drag-and-drop WAV-files from applications supporting standard file drag'n'drop-behavior. Windows Explorer and Zabkat Xplorer^2 LITE tested to work. Locate32 didn't work. Currently this audio file import function uses too much memory, I should probably do something about that. (It creates full internal Reapermedia objects for each added file, while it really wouldn't need those until the Paste To REAPER is about to happen.)

-ReaBIN main GUI resize improvements.

I'm clearly starting to struggle with the "hacked-up" source code I'm having now, so I guess it's time to start preparing a rewrite for the 0.1.x-series. Obvious new major features would include several BIN's open simultaneously...

[Curvespace]

Originally Posted by Xenakios

Some crazy stuff I've been thinking about :

[Picture of niceness]

Maybe this would be too much for 99% of people to handle, but that's why they are called the "Guru" options...

Dude, this looks really interesting. Really, really interesting. I'd love to see this implemented. My mind is filling with ideas. Good job

[jens]

Just came around to really try out ReaBIN and it totally works as 'advertised' (if you can talk about 'advertisement' with a freebie such as this one) - this little thing is sooo cool - and I can't believe how closely the integration with Reaper works - almost too good to be true.


Thanks a lot, Xenakios!

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by Curvespace

Dude, this looks really interesting. Really, really interesting. I'd love to see this implemented. My mind is filling with ideas. Good job

Yes, I'd love to implement this too. However, I can pretty much guess what the MIDI-people would want this to do...They wouldn't do much with just being able to mangle the item properties, they'd want to be able to change the actual MIDI-data within the item... That would require some rethinking of things inside ReaBIN, I guess, so maybe I'll leave the Guru Multiple Paste to the 0.1.x-series.

[Xenakios]

Originally Posted by jens

Just came around to really try out ReaBIN and it totally works as 'advertised' (if you can talk about 'advertisement' with a freebie such as this one) - this little thing is sooo cool - and I can't believe how closely the integration with Reaper works - almost too good to be true.


Thanks a lot, Xenakios!

Uh, you're welcome! There's still much to do...I guess this is going to be more or less "beta" forever, thou.

I'd love some even better integration into Reaper and some doors are open towards that, but it's really really too early to say much about that. I wouldn't mind too much if Justin himself suddenly came with something super-great for item/take-managing. *Hint Hint*

I just needed ReaBIN to be here now, instead of some uncertain future date, because I should get back to composing and ReaBIN is going to be something that helps me a lot with that...

[Xenakios]

ReaBIN 0.0.8 available!

Changes :

-It now supports replacing of multiple selected takes in REAPER with a single take from the BIN. This doesn't work just as nice as I wish. Main problems are a possible non-good internal state resulting in ReaBIN and that the replaced takes are not always placed in REAPER on the original tracks. The latter problem can be avoided by keeping care that the uppermost track containing the takes to be replaced has got the focus. Note : It may be a bad idea to actually CLICK the track control panel to ensure this, as REAPER will then arm itself to send the TRACK's data to the clipboard. This maybe the culprit that caused the "non-good logical condition" error that I received today while testing. Just make sure some other way the uppermost track containing the takes to be replaced has the focus... (This sucks and I should try to fix this.)

-Attempted to fix ReaBIN trying to parse TRACK-data in the clipboard. While actually it would be cool to do just this in addition to media items, time is not yet ripe for that in ReaBIN. This attempt to circumvent the parsing and storing of TRACK-data may also be the reason for the internal state mixups. (So dirty, soooo dirty code I've written... )

-Import of WAV-audio files directly to ReaBIN. New "vanilla" takes are created from the files and given the same names as the imported files. It's possible to drag and drop files to the ReaBIN take list. Windows Explorer, Zabkat Xplorer2 Lite and Reaper's Media Explorer should work. This Wav-import requires the libsndfile-1.dll to exist in the same directory as Reabin.exe.

-When hidden to tray, ReaBin makes a little visual notification when it receives and accepts takes. (With the Winkey+C method.)

-ReaBin window resize logic improved.

And finally, here's the link :

https://stash.reaper.fm/770/ReaBIN_0_0_8b.zip

0.0.8b tries to fix some problems with the ReaBin window hidden/visible status, when Reabin complains it can't handle REAPER tracks. I'm sure this same problem appears with the other dialog boxes as well. I'm really ripe to start rewriting the whole thing...