ROB WARMOWSKI: Hey everybody. This is Rob for Gearwire. Let’s take a look at REAPER, the DAW application, digital audio workstation application from the Cockos company.

REAPER is a very unique DAW in that it is very lightweight and very straightforward. It has a lot of amazing features, and we’re going to be doing a long series of screencasts exploring REAPER. Today, we’re looking at specifically the feature of audio setup. Now, setting up audio in your digital audio workstation is something that you just got to do no matter what program you choose. Your software doesn’t know what input/output system it is running under. It doesn’t know what external gear you have. It doesn’t know how sound is going to come into itself and onto the disc and then back off the disc and out the output. You have to tell it these things. The very basic audio setup with REAPER is what we’re going to be covering here.

If you click Ctrl-P, or rather type Ctrl-P, or click under Options and Preferences, you can come up with REAPER’s main preference menu. And right here we can see that the audio device property is lit up. What we are doing here is we are going to tell REAPER to be using the wave out audio subsystem. We have choices here. There’s WDM kernel streaming, there’s Directsound, there’s wave out, and ASIO. These four choices basically map to the presence of drivers that you have or don’t have on your particular system. If you in fact have ASIO drivers for example, which you would have or should be using if your input/output system is a USB system or a PCI card, you would be better off using the ASIO drivers that either came with the device that you purchased or you can go to ASIO4ALL.com and get those drivers. And we will look at ASIO setup in a different video screen cast about REAPER. Right now, we’re going to be using the wave out audio system and the reason we’re using that is because this is a laptop, a fairly modest Toshiba laptop with integrated sound right on its motherboard. It’s not the kind of sound that you’re going want to use for major recording projects because the sound itself is, you know has some limitations. But the point is is showing that REAPER can go in any one of these four ways in terms of audio system.

Now, wave out is the native method to use on this particular Toshiba Satellite. And the input device can be picked from one of two, excuse me, input and output both have two choices. Microsoft Sound Mapper is the choice that we use right here. This basically is telling REAPER that the sound that it receives from external, if from outside itself, is going to be routed through Microsoft’s operating system. Basically Microsoft Sound Mapper is an alias or a pointer to the true, truly underlying physically existing sound system that’s on the machine. In this case that’s called Conexant AMC Audio. I find that choosing either one of these results in the same results, you get the audio into the system. And since this is a laptop with a fairly modest input stage, we’re not really that concerned with input in any case. This is a situation where we’re not going to be putting too much live sound into this laptop and so the appropriate setting would be to pick Microsoft Sound Mapper for input. You can also do the same thing for output because again we’re just going to be connecting say for example the output on the hardware output in the laptop to headphones or maybe a small set of speakers.

From this map you can also, excuse me, from this menu you can also choose the sample format for the, for REAPER by default. Right now it’s set for 16 bit. We can set that to 24 bit no problem, of course 32 bit, and this is related to the box below where it says you can allow projects to override the device sample rate so this is the sample rate for the device as REAPER sees it. But it is overrideable on a per project basis if you check the box below.

The number of input channels is selectable here. Here is a situation where two is the correct number for this again modest Toshiba laptop. We’ve got the stereo in/stereo out. We have a sample rate of 44.1.

And buffers and samples. This is a reading of how many, how many chunks of memory and how big these chunks are that are listening to audio pass in and out of the system. The number of buffers, the greater the number of buffers and the greater, the larger the number, the larger the size of the buffers, the greater the latency. Of course the latency is fairly high here. This is 185 milliseconds, and this latency rating is going to drop significantly if we were to use an audio or an input/output system that was not built into the motherboard on a modest Toshiba laptop. So you’d probably can see the relationship between that value and the environment that we are actually in.

So that is basic audio device setup under REAPER. Thanks for watching. Keep it on Gearwire.Com for more great videos.