ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. This is Rob for Gearwire, and let’s take a look at REAPER again. REAPER of course is the fabulous digital audio workstation produced by Justin Frankel of the Cockos corporation. We’re going to be taking a long look at REAPER’s various features in the future and this is the next in the series of feature examinations. We’re going to take a look at the track naming features in Reaper. There are some differences between what this software does in terms of track naming and what other competing digital audio workstations do. Some of it is -- Some of the other digital audio workstations tend to be kind of confusing about how track names and project names and default settings in recording projects affect the naming of tracks but REAPER doesn’t make any of those mistakes and is extremely straightforward and intuitive, so let’s see exactly what that means.

The first thing that you would do is you would create a name for a track before you start recording. To actually throw a track in, you insert a media file and -- excuse me. That’s actually not true. You add a new track or Ctrl-T. And the first thing that you want to do is you want to give this track a name. Let’s say “keyboard”, “keyboard 1”. What this does is is this creates a situation where keyboard 1 is a string that is included in the file names that are produced by this track as you actually create recordings with this track under reaper. So, after the -- After you name the track, the next step that you would do is you would go to options, preferences, and recording settings. Whoops.

There is recording, and you can see here that under options, preferences, and recording settings, the actual default values for what the actual -- what happens when recording is undertaken is here right -- here in this property sheet. You can see that you can scroll the track view while you’re recording if it’s enabled, you can show a preview of recording items if they’re recorded, and you can also build each of the recorded files on the fly after recording or manually.

Let’s get down here to always to prevent -- let’s see here. Included in file name for new recordings, you can tell it to put in the track index, the track name, or the time stamp, and in fact we have all three turned on here, and this will result in a file name that is useable that has all of these pieces of information imbedded into the file name.

So, before recording, the first thing that you would do is you would arm the track, and here’s the arm button right here, and then you would assign it’s input, okay, and right now is it is listening to the left channel. You can tell it to record practically anything that comes in and out of the computer because REAPER is fully aware of the routing capabilities of the audio hardware that is sitting on top of, so all of the possible input options are right here.

Next thing you would do would be to check level and then you would select any non-default recording format. If you wanted to do that, you can do that from here, and then you could conceivably turn input monitoring on as well, and that would be from using this button right here. And that is how you basically do track naming in REAPER. When you are beginning to build a project, you should treat your tracks as something that needs to be exhaustibly named, using the preferences that are present to embed a series of information in the actual track names. This makes things very easy or comparatively easy later on you later on when you are trying to rebuild a project from its constituent tracks and files. Without lots of information embedded into the track names, it’s far too easy to lose tracks or to have them in the wrong place.

So, thanks a lot for watching. This has been a Gearwire screencast and my name is Rob. Keep it here on Gearwire.Com.