What do you like best about Reaper?
The Reaper digital audio workstation, has something that no other sequencer has, which makes a lot of difference in many sectors of the program and its user base. Ask anyone that uses Reaper and you will get a different question why they love it. But all answers have something in common.
Reaper is open-ended and engineered with love.
The team behind Reaper are not salesmen and public relations experts, to be able to create promotional material that shows what is in essence music production porn. They focus on making a program that performs the same in all major operating systems used for media creation and scientific research on sound. They focus on maintaining this program, by continuously updating the quality of their already awesome codebase. They focus on interacting on a daily basis with their community. Finally, they focus on the arts of sound themselves, so they remain true to the vision.
Engineered with love, means that Reaper not only features quality on the technical side (has the highest quality pipeline by far), but it also features "quality on use" as it is called, or perceived quality as I like to call it. Quality in use, is the holistic quality in all domains, from having smoothly calculated faders that perform intuitively for the user in any screen resolution, to behave so transparently as a program, that it's never going to stand between you and your creations.
The open-ended nature of Reaper, stands for the extensive support of programming languages and sockets for other people and the community, to create tools and interact with the program's internal functions. The publicly available effects and extensions is massive and well documented. Just check on the thousands JSFX plugins that come for free with the installation and many more that can be downloaded from open repositories (http://reaper.fm/sdk/js/js.php), and the same goes for tools and extensions that even have a community driven tool to manage them and update them called ReaPack (https://reapack.com/).
Really, to write about all the features that make Reaper a unique audio tool, I would need several volumes of text-heavy books.
To give you an idea, here are some sectors that Reaper excels: film sound, sound design, scientific measurements, multichannel and ambisonics, efficient use of system resources, skins, slot for room correction plugins that don't render, interoperability with game audio engines like Fmod and Wwise, the most advanced exporter on the market bar none, and many-many more. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Reaper?
There is nothing to dislike, I'm sorry, you won't find information here. You have to ask someone to dislike Reaper, or even better, get on their website and download Reaper which offers a completely open version for one month, so you can see for yourself if it fits your psychology.
Things that you may dislike are not because there are bugs or bad functions, Reaper is excellently engineered. It's just that not everyone likes the same things. Some people like Reaper, some Logic, some Cubase. It's the same like any other tool we use or the choices we make on our home decoration and utilities.
Give it a try, and pay a visit at the forums. You can find me too there as Joystick. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.