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Thinking about making the jump to Reaper

tothemax

tothemax

Nov 1, 2013
1,462
1,697
Annapolis Area
#1
With Cakewalk going through some product licensing and new ownership issues, I'm thinking about going to something affordable and stable. I have downloaded Reaper but haven't installed it yet. Been watching a few videos, even one from someone that has moved from Cakewalk and imported a cakewalk theme. With a third party product that supports importing Cakewalk projects as well. Looking at the interface in YouTube it does look like there will be a pretty good learning curve. I've gotten pretty comfortable with Cakewalk, but am wondering when the support will end and have to go to the new subscription model product...

Anyone else dealing with this...
 
#2
I don't know anything about Reaper, but I'd certainly suggest installing it and kicking the tires.

First thing I would do is to see if Reaper has built-in mapping of Cakewalk keyboard shortcuts for equivalent tasks. That and/or custom mapping that would allow you to take advantage of your familiarity with Cakewalk.

If you can immediately jump in using familiar keyboard shortcuts, you'll have a much easier time.
 
#3
tothemax said:
With Cakewalk going through some product licensing and new ownership issues, I'm thinking about going to something affordable and stable.

Anyone else dealing with this...
Click to expand...
What's up with Cakewalk, did Bandlab abandon it now? My free version was still working perfectly a few days ago.
 
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#4
I've been using Reaper for 5+ years and would recommend it without hesitation. There's going to be a learning curve with any DAW, and I'm still learning new features in Reaper as I need them. I installed but never really used the Bandlab version of Cakewalk, but I did use their previous DAW, SONAR for a few years and it had some features that Reaper lacks, like global "un doing" of track solos or mutes.

Another nice thing about Reaper is the large community of users, there are tons of how to videos on YouTube. Kenny Goia (love his NY accent) rebranded his YT channel as "Reaper Mania" and he's got lots of videos. I used on of his videos to set up Korg 'micro control' control surface to remotely operate Reaper from inside my vocal/recording booth.
 
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#5
Passinwind said:
What's up with Cakewalk, did Bandlab abandon it now? My free version was still working perfectly a few days ago.
Click to expand...
Mine is also still working, but lately it seems that I have to re-activate whenever I haven't used it for a week or so which is the reason for my concerns. I really like Cakewalk, but hate to keep wondering if it will keep working (and not be resold again or priced out). I started with Cubase, and found Cakewalk to be such a breath of fresh air that I really hate to be in limbo. This is an older video but is helpful.

​
 
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#6
srosenthal13 said:
I don't know anything about Reaper, but I'd certainly suggest installing it and kicking the tires.

First thing I would do is to see if Reaper has built-in mapping of Cakewalk keyboard shortcuts for equivalent tasks. That and/or custom mapping that would allow you to take advantage of your familiarity with Cakewalk.

If you can immediately jump in using familiar keyboard shortcuts, you'll have a much easier time.
Click to expand...
The video below goes over additions to add a Cakewalk Theme to Reaper and import cakewalk projects. So there is a path forward. Reaper is a mature product and has a large user base which is why I'm looking in that direction. Also I have been having volume issues with exports from Cakewalk lately and it would be nice to resolve the issue.

​
 
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#7
tothemax said:
Mine is also still working, but lately it seems that I have to re-activate whenever I haven't used it for a week or so which is the reason for my concerns. I really like Cakewalk, but hate to keep wondering if it will keep working (and not be resold again or priced out). I started with Cubase, and found Cakewalk to be such a breath of fresh air that I really hate to be in limbo. This is an older video but is helpful.

​
Click to expand...

Thank you for that. Cakewalk has never been my primary (I just like a few of their proprietary plugins), so I don't really care either way that much, but I feel your pain. Nothing stays free forever though!

IMO and IME Reaper is OK but nothing special for my particular sporadic use cases, and I nearly bought it last year before realizing I could jump three generations of N-Track for $40. I've been an N-Track user for around two decades and for me it's just familiar and easy, and they have some killer plugs of their own by now too. It always takes me a long time to get Reaper looking the way I want it to, my geezer eyes just don't gel with most of their pre-fabbed themes. They all sound pretty much the same to me in most cases, and I typically just use Cubasis on my Pad for live captures, which is my main use for any DAW really. ;)
 
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#8
With the End of Life (EOL) of WIN10 fast approaching and a studio PC upgrade in the near future I'm trying to make a decision. The one selling point of Reaper is that it runs on Linux. My studio WIN10 PC is an i7 3.60 Ghz with 32 MB, I could add another 32 GB's of RAM and not have all that Windows 11 overhead. But not being a Linux aficionado I had held off that track. But looking at purchasing a new PC, it may be worth investigating.

Pw: I did take a look at N-Track, it looks interesting - how do you compare it to Cakewalk?
 
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#9
tothemax said:
Pw: I did take a look at N-Track, it looks interesting - how do you compare it to Cakewalk?
Click to expand...
When I got Cakewalk I wanted to use an old Peavey control surface with motorized faders that someone gave me many years ago. It was made to work with the original Sonar and hacking it to work with Bandlab Cakewalk was supposed to be pretty simple. But I never got around to that because using my Pad is just a lot easier, and I got back some footprint space in my living room by giving away the controller. I think you'd need one for the higher N-Track tiers to match Cakewalks MIDI functionality, but for for my purposes they're more or less interchangeable. I'll try anything with a decent convolution reverb or other interesting looking impulse loaders in general, you can never have too many in my book... ;)
 
#10
tothemax said:
With the End of Life (EOL) of WIN10 fast approaching and a studio PC upgrade in the near future I'm trying to make a decision. The one selling point of Reaper is that it runs on Linux. My studio WIN10 PC is an i7 3.60 Ghz with 32 MB, I could add another 32 GB's of RAM and not have all that Windows 11 overhead. But not being a Linux aficionado I had held off that track. But looking at purchasing a new PC, it may be worth investigating.

Pw: I did take a look at N-Track, it looks interesting - how do you compare it to Cakewalk?
Click to expand...
Linux is something I can definitely speak a little about. I was primarily a Windows user for "daily driver" computer use at home, but I switched to Linux Mint years ago.

If you're coming from Windows, I would absolutely recommend trying it out. You can easily create a bootable USB thumb drive and boot your existing PC into it just to test drive it. There are a lot of good videos about it. It's one of the most popular Linux distros, so it's well supported.
 
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#11
Re Reaper on Linux - it runs perfectly in itself, but if you use VSTs, then you could be in trouble, as most of these will only work with Windows or Mac. You may have some success with Wine, but in the end, I just dual boot into Windows now for Reaper. Audio Interface drivers may be an issue too. There are the generic ALSA ones but I've found some latency issues for recording - and I couldn't get the JACK/Pulse stuff to work with my distro.
 
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#13
Thanks all great stuff to think about... after being DOGE'd a year ahead of retiring it looks like I may have a bit more time on my hands to work in the studio. At this point I'm thinking of going for a refurb WIN11 I7 CPU to rebuild my existing studio PC. Though there are some better deals on WIN10 systems that are upgradeable. I do have some experience with VMware ESXi which is basically Linux, so as I will have a couple of retired DELL PC's there will be the opportunity to try Linux. I do like my plugin's so losing that option would be a downside... Always something...

Cheers
 
#16
Former Cakewalk/Sonar user from 1997 to ~2014 when I completely switched to MacOS (Hackintoshes and real Macs). At this point, Reaper was the logical choice for me. Mainly following the advices/reviews of some former Cakewalk members.

I briefly tested (and still own version 6) Studio One when I got my Quantum 2626 interface but I am now definiteky back to Reaper. Mr Justin Frankel isn’t like any other CEO and don’t really need the money from the DAW so it transpires in its vision.
 
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