One thing a can't get used to is not having Sonar's Shift+F to zoom everything to project. It may be my tidiness OCD, but in Sonar I frequently Shift+F to tidy up.  Oddly, Reaper has umpteen uselss Zoom commands, as does the RWS extensions, but nothing as simple as good old Shift+F!

 
Thanks for the comparison info.  I've accumulated many plugins over the last years, especially synths/instruments which are my main interest, so Reaper looks good if it's solid as it's being portrayed, and there isn't that much of Sonar that it can't do.
 

dubdisciple

Paul P
 
The 60$ price tag is way below the competition's regular price.  Why ?  Put another way, if Reaper is so great and so cheap, why consider Studio 1, Cubase, etc. at all ?
 
 

There are multiple reasons:

1) $60 is the price always quoted buy $250 is the price for those actually making a living with their DAW. Sure, you could lie. Hell, you could even skip the 60 if you wanted, but assuming the person is honest, crossgrades to other products with more features may be the same or less.

2) Ease of use. I heavily considered Reaper for a studio i built for kids and it was beyond frustrating for kids i tested on.

I honestly think Reaper is best deal going for someone willing to invest time and has money for plugins

One qualification in the above. You only are required to pay $250 for REAPER if you are using it commercially, *AND* grossing more than $20,000.00 per year doing it.
 
If you are using REAPER commercially and grossing $19,999.99 per year, it is 100% legal for you to buy the cheaper $60 license, and I'd bet there are a lot of project studios earning less than twenty grand per year gross, that would still qualify as a professional studio.
 
I used to have a studio with a six foot tall $10,000.00 Ampex 1" machine, and dedicated drum booth, recording local bands, and doing lots of jingles for radio.  I also played professionally three or so times a week, so my studio was not my sole source of income, and would have been eligible to buy REAPER for sixty bucks, even though I was doing commercial recording there.  This was the old studio. A roll of tape for that Ampex cost me more back in the mid 80s than REAPER would cost me today for that studio!   ;)
 

Skyline_UK
One thing a can't get used to is not having Sonar's Shift+F to zoom everything to project. It may be my tidiness OCD, but in Sonar I frequently Shift+F to tidy up.  Oddly, Reaper has umpteen uselss Zoom commands, as does the RWS extensions, but nothing as simple as good old Shift+F!

Have you seen: https://forum.cockos.com/archive/index.php/t-72891.html
 

What about:
Track: Select all tracks
Item: Select all items
SWS: Horizontal zoom to selected items
SWS: Vertical zoom to selected tracks
Item: unselect all item
Track: Unselect all tracks
 
Try to add into Sonar some functionality it does not have... Most of the time, when something does not exist in Sonar, the argumentation was "that is not needed". In Reaper, the argumentation is the same

the_user_formally_known_as_glennbo
You have gotten quite good in a very short amount of time with the concept of custom actions in REAPER!
 
When I need some custom actions for things I need, I know who I'll be calling!!! 

It will take some time till I learn the whole thing. In Sonar, there was around 1000 commands and around 100 API calls. In Reaper there there is an order more.

.

OK - I'll answer number 1, I found it up on the top right (with a little help from the Reaper forums)
 

 
I chose 24 bit WAV file to render to, but maybe I'll change that to 32 bit (I think that's what SONAR does)
 
I have a long way to go....  

jbraner
OK - I'll answer number 1, I found it up on the top right (with a little help from the Reaper forums)
 

 
I chose 24 bit WAV file to render to, but maybe I'll change that to 32 bit (I think that's what SONAR does)
 
I have a long way to go....  

Interesting John that yours reports 1.8/3.9ms when using 64 samples and 24/44.
 
Mine, using two M-Audio Delta 2496 cards reports 2.4/2.0ms using 64 samples and 24/44.
 
What audio hardware are you using, coz it obviously makes a difference even with other things set the same.
 
Edit: I would also suggest leaving the settings stock for your audio hardware at least for now. If you start making tweaks to things dealing with the audio engine, you might introduce issues that will have you chasing ghosts, rather than testing out recording, editing, and playing back.  Internally it's 64 bit float, but again I wouldn't recommend tweaking things right off the bat. I've *never* made any changes to buffers, latency, offsets, or anything whatsoever on my system, and won't be doing it later unless some actual issue were to arise.  IOW don't FIX it unless it really is BROKE!   ;)

jbraner

I would also suggest leaving the settings stock for your audio hardware at least for now. If you start making tweaks to things dealing with the audio engine, you might introduce issues that will have you chasing ghosts, rather than testing out recording, editing, and playing back.

Oh no - I'm not touching anything like that! ;-)
I just meant the settings for paths and filenames and behaviour of the MIDI editor and media imports, snap settings yada yada.
 
I *will* get in to this. I actually like tweaking and setting up something new - for a while - but then I like to just "set and forget" and get to playing ;-)
 
I'm just going to work on this a little at a time, while working on a couple of things in SONAR.
 
Then when I'm ready - I'll try a full project in Reaper.
Then if I'm happy - I'll park SONAR ;-)
That's the plan anyway...

Try recording a whole project with your settings set like they are without changing anything and see how far you get. As I've said before, I *NEVER* play with increasing buffers later in a project, or reducing them early on.
 
Every project I've recorded in the last ten years with REAPER have been done with 64 samples latency, and not once have I increased buffers or messed with any other audio engine settings to make a project play.
 
Just for example, here's a list of the stuff in one of my songs which I never froze any tracks, or bounced anything to audio, and never changed the latency, or increased any buffers, or changed anything in any way shape or form from the way all my projects are recorded in REAPER.  I had the following list of FX and softsynth instruments, all playing with no pops, no clicks, or any other artifacts in the audio.
 
FX used
------------------------------
19 EQs
16 W1 limiters
11 Compressors
8 Klanghelm MJUCjr compressors
5 Lexicon MPX reverbs
4 PSP Vintage Warmers
4 Waves DBX160 compressors
3 Multi Band Compressors
1 Delay
1 Convolution Verb
1 Arturia Mini Filter V
1 Voxengo Stereo Touch

Virtual instruments used
------------------------------
1 Superior Drummer 2 with 1.4 GB of sample data
1 Native Instruments Kontakt with trumpets, trombones, and brass ensemble
3 Native Instruments Guitar Rigs
2 Native Instruments Reaktors
1 Sforzando SF3 sample player with alto sax
1 Sforzando SF3 sample player with tenor sax
1 Sforzando SF3 sample player with baritone sax
1 Arturia Minimoog V
1 One Small Clue - Grace sampler with percussion samples

DeeringAmps
That is indeed a lot of VST & VSTi at 64 samples!
I'll throw Ozone on the 2-Buss and report back...
 
T

That song had 27 tracks, if it makes any difference. I don't have Ozone, and it may turn out that with some CPU hungry FX some alteration of stock settings might be needed. So far (knock wood), I've not had to change anything, and happily add tracks with Guitar Rig, monitoring live toward the end of some projects. I've recently switched back to using acoustic drums though, so I no longer have Superior Drummer 2 on every song I do. That should buy me back a lot of CPU headroom!   ;)
 
I only made that change in the last few months when I bought myself a Questlove Ludwig kit to keep in my studio because of the small footprint. Within a month I realized that the kit sounded great, and bought some Audio Technica mic's for overheads, and also use a Sennheiser MD421 on the kick and SM58 with the windscreen removed on snare.
 
 

jbraner

Try recording a whole project with your settings set like they are without changing anything and see how far you get.

 
While I'm still just playing, I want to see if I can get the settings *lower*.
I'd be thrilled to be able to stay at the 64/48 (5.8ms), but now is the time to see how low I can go ;-)
Like you - I'd be happy to just pick a setting and stay there, so we'll see how it goes ;-)
 

Does your audio hardware allow 32 buffers? I've seen some guys in the REAPER forum who run with 32 buffers, and something like 1.5ms latency. My ancient pair of M-Audio Delta 2496 cards, which I've had since running Cakewalk Pro Audio on Win98SE and another dedicated machine running Win98SE with GigaStudio, doesn't offer anything lower than 64 samples. My DAW machine is almost seven years old too. It's an old Asus P7P55D with a 2.66Ghz Intel i5, and 6GB DDR3.
 
For jollies, I tried setting my 2496 cards to 96Khz and while it lowered my latency to something like 1.3ms, I could not record more than a few tracks before it couldn't keep up. I don't know that I've ever really tried any in-between rates, but since I knew that 24/44 would let me record and never spend a second diagnosing my machine, I just went back to that and haven't touched it since. That was so many years ago I can't really remember when it was!

Current version is $60 with free upgrades until ver. 6.99. Does it mean another $60 when ver. 7.0 comes out (perhaps with free upgrades until ver. 8.99) ?

Afrodrum
Current version is $60 with free upgrades until ver. 6.99. Does it mean another $60 when ver. 7.0 comes out (perhaps with free upgrades until ver. 8.99) ?

 It means another $60 at v7.0, but to give you an idea of how that works. I bought v4.0 the same day it became available, which was back on August 6th of 2011. Here we are today at December 14th 2017, which is five years and four months later, and they still haven't gotten to v6.0, which is when I will have to pay another $60.
 
They just released v5.70 a day or so ago, and they keep clicking the version numbers up very slowly, so I won't at all be surprised if I get to August 2018 before I have to pay again. That would make it six years for $60, or ten bucks a year I will have spent.
 
Oh, and yes to the question about purchasing at v7.0 and getting free updates all the way through v8.99
 
I started at v2.x and got free updates all the way through v4.0 when I finally had to buy again back in 2011.