ROB WARMOWSKI: Well, hello again everybody. This is Gearwire.Com series of education videos on the REAPER digital audio workstation. Right now, we’re going to take a look at the transport bar which is where it all happens. This is where your controls are for playback and for recording and for various other functions of the DAW. Let’s take a look at it.

The transport bar is located by the fault right here, between the lower part of the screen and the track view. There are the typical transport controls here. You got the stop, pause, rewind all the way, record, fast forward all the way, and also set up a loop mode. Loop mode is pretty simple. You simply click to play back in loop mode and go ahead and set a loop location. Hit play. Whoops, rewind.

[ROB WARMOWSKI PLAYING AND APPLYING LOOP POINTS TO A PROJECT IN COCKOS REAPER]

And there it’ll go. Always nice. The long and the short of the loop mode is it’s best used when you’re actually constructing loops in REAPER or if you want to actually focus on a specific part of the project.

There are many, many keyboard shortcuts in REAPER, and we’re going to talk about those because every function in the toolbar, and really practically any function in the entire workstation is mapped to a specific keyboard short cut which allows you to mouselessly, speedily get through lots of tasks and that’s a good thing.

We can control just about every function on the toolbar. We got the play and record controls here. We also have the rate window, or rate, playback rate value here which means that it is playing back at it’s -- 1.0 means that there is no difference in its playback speed. That playback rate change, that fader is available here. You can actually make the system playback faster of slower based on the position of that.

[ROB WARMOWSKI PLAYING A PROJECT IN COCKOS REAPER USING DIFFERENT PLAYBACK SPEEDS]

Of course, when you get a low down like that, you get artifacts. Well, it figures out what it’s going to do. I like to just enter 1, and there’s our playback. We can also set BPM. This is in the event that there are any loops in the project, they need to know what their BPM is, and the project’s current BPM is 120, and then there is a selection range here. But what we can do from the keyboard without having to mouse is we could rewind to the start of the project by hitting the W key. Here’s the W. Whoops. Let’s get out of the rate window, click somewhere else now and that will free it up, and that’s W. As you can see, it goes back to the beginning.

And then of course there’s play, which is just the spacebar, but if you hit spacebar to stop, it might not be what you expect. When you hit spacebar to stop, you do by default rewind it at the beginning of the project. So, in order to stop at the spot where you are, Ctrl-space, and that will keep the cursor at the spot where you stopped, and when you hit space again, you begin to play back from where you were.

You have the ability to go to the end of the project by hitting the end key on the keyboard. There, I want the cursor over to the right there. You can record by holding down Ctrl and hitting R, and here’s one of my favorite functions. It’s the little function. If I just want to go forward a little, I can hit Ctrl-left, that is to say left arrow, and a little bit I got forward, and the same thing on the way back, Ctrl-right, Ctrl-left. And, to be able to play with loop selection skipping, we’ll do a loop selection, set the cursor, we’ll do Alt-space. Listen to what happens.

[ROB WARMOWSKI DEMONSTRATES CONCEPT USING A PROJECT LOADED IN COCKOS REAPER]

It ignored the loop. As you can see, it ignored the right hand loop selection boundary, so Alt-space is how you get past, having to complete out the loop during play.

Well, that is the transport bar and the associated keyboard controls videos, so keep your eyes on Gearwire.Com in the future for more educational tutorials on the REAPER digital audio workstation. Thanks a lot.