Reaper is our favorite digital audio workstation (DAW) for tight budgets. It packs a real punch, with live audio and virtual instrument recording, a full mixing console, accurate notation editing, and support for scoring video. Unlike competing DAWs, Reaper lets you build your menus, toolbars, and macros, and change the look and color scheme of the interface. It's a complex program requiring study—perhaps the opposite of something like Apple's GarageBand. But put in the time, load it up with some free (or paid) third-party plug-ins, and Reaper pays real dividends in power and flexibility. It covers nearly all the bases of a Pro Tools or Cubase-equipped workstation at a fraction of the price.
How Much Does Cockos Reaper Cost?
Personal, school, and small business licenses for Reaper all cost $60. If you plan to use it for commercial music purposes and gross more than $20,000 per year from your audio work, it's $225. Reaper is available in both PC and Mac versions, and a Linux version is currently in beta. The program is a paltry 15MB download for Windows, 25MB on the Mac, and 11MB for Linux. You can even run it from a portable or network drive, Cockos says. Reaper is free of copy protection, and you can download the 440-page manual in PDF format from the company website.
For our latest review, I tested Reaper 7.11 on a MacBook Pro 16-inch (2021, M1 Pro) with 16GB RAM, a 1TB SSD, a Focusrite Scarlett 6i6 (2nd Gen) audio interface, a Nektar Impact GX61 MIDI controller, and a pair of PreSonus Eris E8 XT studio monitors. The PC and Mac versions have feature parity, and the Mac version was rock-solid in testing. When you first start, you must go to Options > Preferences to set up your audio interface and MIDI controller. I had no problem getting my audio interface and MIDI controller up and running for this review.
Cockos offers a 60-day unlimited trial version, and if you buy it, you get free updates through the next full-point version. Say you buy 7.11 today; you get free updates through 8.99, which should keep you current for several years. Reaper also has a seriously dedicated online community, and it seems the developers are always hard at work providing updates, bug fixes, and notes (click for a current list). All of this is very consumer-friendly.
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Reaper's Interface
The first time you open Reaper, you're greeted with…not much. The opening screen indicates what is arguably the biggest roadblock to getting started with this program; it's essentially a blank slate. The left side shows your track list, and the main arranging window is to the right. Along the bottom is the mixer, with the transport sitting above it and to the left; so far, so good. But a large part of the window is empty.
Creating tracks is simple; you can just double-click the left side or press CTRL-T (Command-T on Macs), though you'll need to hit the Track menu to make virtual instrument tracks. The dated feel extends further as you start digging into the menus and customization options; you're faced with dialog box after dialog box, all containing system-font-like text, plenty of sliders, and extraneous white space. All tracks you create are record-armed by default, which makes quite a racket if you set up multiple virtual instruments and forget to turn off the extra red recording lights. You can adjust to these things, but it can be a lot to get your head around at first.
The stock plug-ins, like the compressor and EQ, look like Settings dialogs instead of tools you use to shape sound. Naturally, the tiny installation size means no room for fancy graphics. But if looks matter to you or help boost your creativity, you can enhance the UI with skins and layouts. Reaper includes plenty of layout examples in the program, and you can download free themes from the company site. To Install a new theme, you just download a file and drag it into an active Reaper project. It doesn't affect the dreary built-in plug-ins, but it thoroughly changes the main UI. Some themes make Reaper look like analog mixing consoles, and some come as close as possible to duplicating the UIs of popular DAWs like Pro Tools, Cubase, and Logic. The Theme Adjuster lets you modify the default UI theme to include in-channel metering, the size of the track names, and different icon layouts, but not for any third-party themes.
Recording and Editing in Reaper
Eventually, as you spend more time with Reaper, the fog begins to clear, and you'll find you can get real work done. For audio or a virtual instrument, you make a track, click the red button on the left to arm it for recording, and press the master Record button to begin. You can set up monitoring effects, such as if you want to hear reverb in your headphones while recording a vocal. Unlike FL Studio, Reaper is suited for recording multiple audio channels of live instruments simultaneously and from numerous interface inputs; recording a five-piece band is no problem with Reaper if you've got enough microphones and preamps on your audio interface.
Reaper's tiny download footprint is welcome, but it belies a key limitation: The program doesn't come with any usable virtual instruments or loops, which is a bummer and adds to the complexity for novices. It's assumed you'll go out and add your own third-party plug-ins; Reaper supports VST, VST3, AU, DirectX, or JS (Cockos's Jesusonic format). There are tons of free plug-ins available on the web to stock up Reaper with sounds, and you can also buy professional-level packages like Native Instruments Komplete or IK Multimedia SampleTank if you've got the cash. Once installed on a track, the VSTs are hidden behind the FX button (even though they're instruments, too, and not just effects). Aside from that quirk, populating your project with many virtual synths is easy.
Once you've recorded some material, Reaper's tools for editing audio clips and MIDI data are powerful and flexible. The piano roll is relatively easy to use, and unlike the smart grid-style complexities you'll find in more mature DAWs like Logic Pro, Reaper's grid is simple and works just as you'd expect.
Version 7 adds some welcome feature enhancements, including support for Track Lanes with Swipe Comping, which lets you record many takes, compare sections with a single click, and then quickly comp together a finished vocal or guitar track. Tracks now support up to 128 channels each, with 128 buses available for MIDI routing.
A few other unusual interface conventions: You can't quantize MIDI data until you open the piano roll. When recording, you must tell the app to stop popping up a save dialog. You need to hear it first before you decide! Thankfully, you can now set a default to stop it from asking. On the plus side, you can now configure multiple sets of customized keyboard shortcuts in version 7, which is terrific for setting up fast workflows depending on the task (recording, editing MIDI, mixing, and so on).
Mixing and Mastering in Reaper
The mixer view seems inflexible at first, but, as with everything else in Reaper, there's a ton you can do with it. First up, hover the cursor just above the mixing board near the Mute/Record/Solo buttons, and pull the border up to see the channel inserts (where you would put the compressor, EQ, reverb, and so on). All the standard controls are there for muting, soloing, and panning tracks, and you can group tracks or track parameters anywhere in the signal chain and implement any complex routing scheme you can think of. The included Rea VST effects are surprisingly comprehensive, given the lack of bundled instruments; you even get ReaTune (for correcting vocal pitch) and ReaVerb (for realistic convolution reverb).
Reaper includes full automation capabilities for tracks and instrument and effect parameters. Version 7 supports FX Containers to build, store, and recall your favorite plug-in chains, and you can now route multiple plug-ins (or even plug-in chains) in parallel. While working, you can freeze or bounce tracks to free up memory and CPU cycles. A powerful scripting engine underneath the surface called ReaScript lets you code improvements to the program in Python, Lua, or EEL. I didn't test this last part because my programming chops are rusty, but the flexibility is welcome.
Using Reaper 7, I built a new electronic track using sounds from Native Komplete 14 Collector's Edition and Korg Collection 3—just two examples of many of the fine virtual instrument packages available if you need something to fill out Reaper with thousands of sounds quickly. Mixing is a pleasure, even using the stock plug-ins. The built-in compressor sounded good on individual tracks and across the mix bus in my testing, and I got some good levels going, thanks to the included ReaLimit. The parametric EQ also offers suitable precision and at least has a prominent visual aid.
It should go without saying these days, but just to be clear, Reaper sounds just like any other modern DAW. The microphones, mic preamps, instruments, and plug-ins matter more than any internal differences in the summing or mix bus between DAWs, especially at Reaper's 64-bit level. With this program, you can achieve entirely professional results, full stop, and it will feel fast even on older hardware.
Don't Fear the Reaper
Despite its difficult-to-grasp interface, Cockos Reaper is an excellent value. It's one of the least expensive ways to get a full-featured DAW for recording live instruments, running VSTs, and making finished recordings without limitation. Alternatives such as Apple's free GarageBand on the Mac have more sounds and clearer workflows, but they're feature-limited in a way Reaper isn't, requiring that you spend more money to get everything you need. Reaper doesn't need an upgrade path; you get the whole thing for $60. Its dedicated online community, fast speed, lack of copy protection, and low entry price make it a tempting proposition. It might be the underdog DAW, but it's hardly a sacrifice to use it.
Reaper offers nearly all the features and flexibility, if not the ease of use or visual appeal, of powerhouse digital audio workstations like Pro Tools, at a fraction of the cost.
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