ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. Welcome to another Gearwire screencast. I’m Rob and we’re going to check out REAPER yet again. This time we’re going to be looking at the Windows digital audio workstation’s plugin environment. This is an environment that’s highly customizable. You are used I’m sure, if you are a user of DAWs, with digital audio workstations, you are used to running VST or DX plugins, and REAPER is no exception. It does this but it does a lot more and it also gives you a much finer degree of control over how these plugins are run, how they appear, how you use them, and how you interact with them. So, let’s take a look at where these settings are.

Specifically, we’re going to open up the preferences window, and we’re going to take a look at the section for plugins. Now, you’ll notice that there are some specific sections that the general section here contains settings for automatically resizing the configuration windows where you can even -- you can make them larger or smaller depending on what their original size is. You can set the foreground to floating windows if it’s selected. This is a fix for in the kind of, difficult to grab handle for the VST window problem that you encounter a lot with other DAWs. You can auto-float or auto-dock chain windows, that is to say where you define actual effect chains. They have their own window and you can float them or dock them.

They only allow one effects chain window open at a time. It’s pretty self-explanatory but it has some sub-options here where you can open that effects window on a track selection change. So, in other words, it can make the DAW a little more responsive if you select a different track, up comes its chain window.

Reduce to normalization from plugins: You’ll notice that they say it is recommended. Basically, denormalization is an artifact of audio processing and in the plugin world, denormalization is how a lot of -- Well, denormalization might be thought of as an abusive processing approach to digital audio but it does result in some kind of glorious messy results.

REAPER can be told specifically reduce this to normalization because of what -- If you find that you’re in a situation that is there’s a problem created by excessive and continual denormalization that you can hear -- either hear or see through analysis, then REAPER does give you this switch to address that problem. It also has ReWire mixer support, so it can act as a ReWire mixer, it can show ReWire devices in the plugin browser, and you can auto-open these panels. You can also run effects on stop. You can run effects on this, on stop when the ReWire devices are active. So, this is important for situations where you have a delay, for example, and/or perhaps REAPER is just one source in an entire performance matrix, the effects don’t necessarily have to stop when REAPER stops, and that can be important for certain effects or certain moments in your production.

You can also have a check for the ReWire device on startup. It automatically enters slave mode if it’s present. In other words, REAPER can act as a master or a slave for ReWire.

Well, that is our basic plugin environment. Check back at Gearwire.Com for more REAPER educational tutorial videos. My name is Rob and thanks for keeping it on Gearwire.