ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. This is Rob for Gearwire and we are taking a look at the digital audio workstation program REAPER under Windows. This tutorial video screencast is going to show an interesting feature that REAPER has. REAPER is very compact. When it installs on your machine’s hard drive, the entirety of the install does not take up very much space and in fact it’s not spread out around the entire machine. It doesn’t make any changes to your registry entries. And all the files that are necessary to actually get REAPER to run are located in a single directory. That means that it is now easy to take an entire running environment, a REAPER running environment, and put it on a say for example a USB jump drive. And you could take it with you to be able to run right off of that jump drive onto any hardware that you happen to encounter in your travels. And there is a utility included in REAPER to actually do this. So we’re going to use that utility right about now. Let’s stop REAPER and get to the utility.

I mean what do I have to say?

Now the utility that we’re going to use -- actually I’ll just show you real quick. Right now I have a removable disc already connected to this machine and that is just a 2-GB jump drive that I’ve got on the, connected into one of the USB ports here. But in order to actually get the REAPER environment onto that drive, what I do is I go to the Start menu and select All Programs and then go to the REAPER option. And then under REAPER, we see a whole bunch of options here. But we can see that there is an option to install REAPER to a USB key or a removable media. So we just select that, and up comes a DOS batch file that asks for a drive letter to actually put the installation upon. So we see that the drive, the target drive should be E so we enter E and hit Enter. Oops. I’m going to hit E: And off it goes.

There is a way to actually reduce the time it takes to complete this operation. You’ll notice that the Color Themes are being copied over right now and if you removed the Color Themes from the C Program Files REAPER sub-directory then all of these copying will just be skipped right over. But we can let it go.

It’s interesting that the majority of the copying that’s going on seems to be related to the Color Themes that the program supports. Of course you could skin REAPER in any one of many, many dozens of possible ways, and of course people are making new skins all the time. And these are the files that make up the skins.

Now, we’re beginning to see some data having to do with some effects and filters.

MIDI control, rather MIDI parameters.

There are the DLL’s that comprise the plugins. And now here it’s finished. REAPER is now installed on your USB drive in the REAPER folder. Just launch reaper.exe from your USB drive to use it and have fun. Just test it out. See if that actually works.

REAPER, here it is. Reaper.exe.

And up it comes. Absolutely having no problems and if you’re in for all the world to be running right off of a hard drive.

Well, that’s REAPER for you. Keep it on Gearwire.Com in the future for more tutorial screen casts on this and other digital audio workstation programs. Thanks for keeping it on Gearwire.