Software

Reaper is renowned as one of the best-performing DAWs available today. But that does not mean that you will never have any issues with it. It is highly complex audio software, and therefore subject to the same performance issues as any other similar application. There are always steps you can take to improve Reaper’s performance,…

There are many excellent commercial DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) software applications available today. Reaper is a DAW that sometimes gets a bit of a bad press, and is thought of by some as inferior to the other DAWs on the market. Reaper is an excellent DAW, being well known for reliability, stability and efficiency. It…

I’ve often recorded a vocal part where the performance was great, apart from just a couple of notes that are not quite in tune. In this situation, using an autotune tool to correct those wavering notes would seem like a perfectly reasonable thing to do. So why do so many people consider autotune to be…

I have used many different plugins, both third-party and stock, in my DAW projects over the years. This includes songs that I have commercially released. There are certain third-party plugins that I do tend to use over the stock ones provided by my DAW, but that does not mean that the third-party varieties are necessarily…

I use many free software applications in my home recording studio. That includes the excellent free audio editor and recording application Audacity, which I have been using for almost 20 years. Back then I found it easy to learn as a complete novice, but is Audacity still good for beginners? As a general rule, Audacity…

I use amp sims for all the electric guitar parts I record in my home studio these days, and have done for many years. My amp sims are all used as plugins inside Reaper, my DAW of choice. Do I rely on 3rd party plugins, or does Reaper have amp sims built-in? Reaper comes with…

Autotune or pitch correction software is something I use in my music productions in quite a subtle way, hopefully without it being too noticeable. But for many people, their use of autotune produces that very robotic, artificial sound we are all familiar with. Why does autotune software produce that robotic sound? Autotune sounds robotic because…

When recording in my home studio, I almost never use hardware effects. This is because there is almost always a VST plugin that can do the job in software. I also use plugins for their other main purpose; as software virtual instruments, often called VSTi’s. The difference between VST and VSTi is that the original…

In my years using Reaper as my DAW, I have imported mp3 files into it many times. There are actually several different ways to import mp3’s into Reaper, ranging from simple drag-and-drop to full media file management using the Media Explorer. To import an MP3 file into Reaper, locate the file in your computer’s file…