ROB WARMOWSKI: One set of features that makes REAPER very different from other digital audio workstations is that it gives you control over a variety of parameters that other stations don’t give you, and here is a good example: Playback Resample Mode. This is a mode that basically tells REAPER at what strength or power it should be running its playback resampling. The reason that’s important is because REAPER was designed to run on a very wide variety of audio quality -- of hardware of a very wide range of audio quality. Cheaper hardware is going to typically have audio hardware in it that is integrated with the motherboard as opposed to a sound card or an interface that you spend money on and purchase and add to your system. The difference between REAPER in this regard and other workstations is that you can tell REAPER to handle its resample mode up on playback and actually pick the resampled rate at which it actually will play back its audio. And the reason that’s important is because REAPER is very lightweight and you -- it allows you, say for example, just to put the running program on a jump drive and just move from computer to computer sort of like a vagrant but the -- What this allows is it tells REAPER that in this project, we’re going to use a playback resampling that is going to match the capabilities of the audio interface that REAPER is running on at that time. So, your cheaper interfaces or no interface, that is to say an integrated interface, is probably going to run fairly well at a good mode but your higher rates of resampling are available here as well. So, this allows you to pick the good balance between getting any playback at all and getting playback that has clicks in it and finding the correct balance between the two.

The resampling mode in rendering is another set of parameters that you can pick from, and this basically controls the mode that REAPER uses to actually render mixed tracks when you’re actually bouncing down or rendering an entire mix into a single file. This parameter helps you match the processor power that you have available to the speed at which you want the rendering to occur. So, in other words, you can basically tell the rendering engine to work with extremely, well, weak hardware, and it will actually run as opposed to just sort of attempt to run and then puke. So, that’s one nice thing about REAPER as well.

The other switch here that we see in this project settings, audio settings properties sheet is that we use recording format for open, copy, and apply effects and save as with trim. Basically what this means is is that you can use the recording format itself, in this case WAV, to store performance information, copying and applying effects information right in the audio format itself. This is a bit of flexibility that basically grants you a greater mobility with your projects and you have the ability to apply basically audio effects playback data inside the actual WAV file itself as opposed to just having the source audio in the WAV file. Recording format choices include WAV, AIFF, FLAC, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, and Wave Pack, and of course you can pick your bit depth.

The entirety of these project settings, here are some more: BPM, signature as you can see, time base. What is the actual time base for your envelopes and for your markers? It can go by beats or it can go by raw time. Frame rates for display because REAPER of course does handle sync with a variety of video formats. Default pitch shifting and time stretching mode: This will give you the chance to, again, more closely match the capabilities of the hardware that you’re running on, and then the advanced settings here: limiting a project length, allowing feedback and routing. This is pretty wisely left unchecked by default, and muting the master output if the volume exceeds certain dB threshold, also useable for when you know a little bit more about your environment than just starting at jump street.

So, that is the entirety of the new project feature in REAPER. Watch Gearwire.Com in the future for more screencasts, exploring the features of the Cockos REAPER DAW. Thanks a lot. I’m Rob for Gearwire.