ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. Welcome to this next in the series of educational videos covering the REAPER digital audio workstation from Cockos Corporation. Right now, we’re going to take a look at some of the things that we need to, or that we can keep track of and change when we open projects in REAPER.

We can take a look at the preferences menu in Reaper by clicking Ctrl-P or by grabbing the preferences option under options. We have the general settings screen here, and what we can do is we can specify globally where the render path will be for any project, new project open in REAPER. The render path is another way to think of scratch disk. If you’re familiar with Photoshop or if you’re not familiar with other digital production tools, basically it’s a scratch area where the program does it’s final mixing and assembling work, and this it is very useful to be able to take the scratch area and say, for example, point it to a partition or to a drive that is specified for the purpose. It is different from the operating system drive, so having that flexibility here is nice.

You can also set the undo settings for projects. The maximum undo memory has -- uses up 30 MB and basically you can set this threshold and get more if you add more than 30 MB. You can get greater levels of undo. You can create undo points for an item retract selection and for loop selection and that’s enabled by default. So, exactly what points exist for your undo operations or where you want to set a point that you want to redic -- you can return to easily once you pass a particular -- make a wrong turn with your mix, you can set the exact positions here. When you’re approaching the full undo memory, keep the newest undo states, basically what this says by default is that it won’t keep the -- by default it won’t keep the newest. It will keep the oldest undo states. You can click specifically here to change that, and this is a common kind of -- REAPER offers a lots of features that are, well, kind of niche or detailed features like those. They become very useful when you are tailoring REAPER to a specific workstation, and perhaps a very modest workstation with not so much RAM and not so much disk space but yet you can convert a very modest machine into a very useable digital audio workstation, using REAPER by telling it to do special things like managing its undo memory in specific.

We can also save the undo history. We can allow loading of an undo history. We can store multiple redo paths when possible which can end up burning up a lot of RAM. They do warn you here. Experiment with these at your leisure. But know that when you are clicking a box such as this one, you should expect to see earlier performance decline as you max out the RAM usage on the machine.

The recent project list refers to the open recent in recent projects drop down here under the file menu, and the number of projects is set at a maximum of 50 by default. You can clear it. You can set a maximum of 100 or less if you like. I think this feature is great and I like to make sure that I don’t have to remember where the projects are. Reaper can remember it for me.

You can also set the default behavior to load less projects on startup or automatically check for newer versions of Reaper on startup, and there are many of these. I would suggest using/leaving this on if you are going to be running an internet connected machine, and then there’s also the option to show the splash screen on startup.

So, that is the new projects in REAPER, parameters and settings that you should know about. So, thanks for watching this video. Watch for more videos on Gearwire in the near future.