Reaper Reviews

Summary: It's great!

Positive: Best DAW ever! It's easy to use, has so many features that you will never use, has a great design, active support and very cheap! 10/10!

Negative: I don't want to say anything bad about this DAW. But I will say, that it's not popular enough. It's underrated yo!

Summary: Reaper is one of the best and most affordable DAWs out there, with the same feature set as its competitors at a fraction of the price.

Positive: - makes creating multi-tracj music recordings easy
- vast digital instruments and cat, MIDI support
- simple UI that is laid out similar to competitors
- custom audio routing available
- low CPU and memory usage compared to competitors
- very generous free trial and very affordable one time purchase price

Negative: - not as sleek looking as some competitors
- no live performance mode, like Ableton Live

Summary: Reaper is the best DAW out there in terms of stability, CPU use, flexibility in routing and ability to accept every format of fx and virtual instrument.
It is also the most customizable daw, both GUI and actions. It offers the most independent outputs of any DAW which makes it the best for some 3D sound formats, such as ambisonics.
It is efficiently coded and constantly updated. There are far too many unique features to mention in one review. The ability to control reaper with your phone and for band members when recording to control their own monitor mix via their phones is one example.
Reaper is the best value I have had from any purchase I have made - ever.

Positive: Reaper in comparison to Cubase is very stable and CPU efficient. The total download installation for windows 10 64 bit is 14Mb, which is indicative of it's efficient coding and also reflects that reaper doesn't come with sample libraries.
What it does come with, is a set of mixing, mastering and creative effects that can do those jobs well, eg multiband compressor, limiter, compressor, delay, impulse response reverb, eq. These effects are nearly on a par with fab filter in terms of features and tweakability but lack the sophisticated gui.
There is also a large library of user designed effects all of which are freely available.
Reaper is unique in it's ability to let the user write custom actions that carry out many different steps and to loop them. This makes some jobs much quicker on Reaper than other DAWs.
Reaper is also unique in its use of tracks - there is only one type of track - and anything audio/midi/video can be placed on the same track. It also has unique routing flexibility, any track can be routed to any other.
As well as setting up busses via routing, there is a folder system which does something very similar with much fewer mouse clicks.
Reaper will run just about any kind of effect including legacy 32 bit, with efficient and stable automatic bridging. I am amazed at other DAWs, that won't accept several different fx formats.
Reaper is great value, £60 gets you a full licence with frequent updates, before that, they offer the full version for trial, with no limitations other than a short nag screen.
It frustrates me that some commentators think this low price is indicative of a DAW inferior to more expensive ones. This not the case. It simply represents the best value for money out any purchase I have ever made.

Negative: Reaper does not come laden with sample libraries and VSTi's. Reaper's fx are fully functional but lack sophisticated GUI's. MIDI editing is fully and comprehensively supported, but other DAW's have better looking MIDI editors.
Beat detection is not as straight forward as some other DAW's