ROB WARMOWSKI: Hello again everybody. Welcome to this tutorial series of video clips showing the REAPER digital audio workstation from the Cockos corporation. Today we’re going to be taking a look at selections and loops in REAPER. Because very often, you’re going to want to work with maybe just a small part of your project for a little while.

Now the right way to do this is you stop your playback of your project at or near the point where you want your loop to begin. And you can also select with your mouse. So, you know, we have playback here and maybe we want to do a loop that encompasses the introduction. If we zoom in here we can see that I’m just going to grab from the beginning of music to the beginning of vocals, captured a little bit of the beginning of vocals. We hit Play.

Oops. Go ahead and hit Play and it will because loop playback has been selected, it will come back on its own.

There it goes.

Now when you play the project like I say, it will replay over and over again. That’s known as the Repeat function. And I also noticed that the start and finish time and duration of the selection are shown in the transport bar which is right over here. This is the start time of that selection. This is the end time and that is the duration indicating the length of the loop selection.

Now if you press the R key, that will toggle the Repeat function on and off with no visual feedback. Oh, actually that is not true. The -- pressing the R key is, is equivalent to pressing the transport button for loop playback so I could either click here or I could hit R. R will turn that off.

There’s also the option under Options/Preferences on playback page to stop playback at the end of a loop when the repeat function is disabled, which you’ll notice it didn’t do this time. If we turn off loop, it will just keep flying right past the border. But we can change that behavior by going to Options>Preferences>Playback. Where are you Playback? There you are. And stop loop, rather excuse me, turn off the repeat function. It is in here somewhere. [LAUGHING]

Stop playback at end of loop selection if repeat is disabled. Sometimes it’s just the, just the length of the senses will, will throw you off.

So you can see there that that’s a setting that you can change by simply using the Options/Preferences menu.

Now to change the region defined in your loop, simply repeat the -- to, rather to clear the loop altogether without defining a new one you could just press the Escape key. And if you right-click in the timeline, you get a menu of commands that you can apply to the timeline or your loop selection including zoom selection and remove selection. So let’s make a quick selection here, make another one.

Oops. There we go. Remove selection.

What happened here? Remove selection. I see. Remove selection does not actually do destructive edit remove selection, it actually just gets rid of the selection. It’s the same thing as pressing Escape in other words. And if I had eyes to read, I would see that right here. Sorry about that, folks.

Also you can zoom to the selection. And this will get you bracketed in tightly. Now you notice that there’s this keyboard shortcut available for any command and that shortcut is displayed on the Context menu so don’t make the same mistake I did. Take a look at the very well designed and written out menus to figure out the keyboard shortcuts for specific functions.

So keep your eyes open at Gearwire.Com for more videos in the future about REAPER and other great software. Thanks for watching.