[RWP] Reaper question

[Chris Belle]

I'm not the most advanced reaper person here, but I've taken it for a pretty 
good spin, and have
been a sonar user from day one so maybe I can speak relatively unbiassed to 
the situation.

With sonar you have already got lots of free content, and two major 
packages, well, three if you count the work done with nvda recently to make 
sonar 8.5.3 work better, and a much larger blind user base and a ready to go 
option to do just about anything, all third party work for plugs and such 
has mostly been done with sonar already.

Sonar cons, it's a hungry hog, likes lotsw of power, costs more, and we've 
taken a step backwards in accessibility with x1 x2 though they've 
implemented ui so some basic navigation is back, but it's always down to 
advanced screen-reader skills and such to do certain things and your mileage 
may vary.

Who knows when anything official for access will get done by companies like 
dancing dots, or when a interested programmer will do some work, of course 
you always have the option to pay a programmer to help make things better, 
this is a good option these days, and one that's worked pretty well for me 
nothing encourages a hungry programmer like cash encouragements, you know 
the old saying money talks and bs walks.

Ok, reaper, and others chime in here, because I admit I don't know reaper as 
well as sonar, but you have a fleet, and extremely configurable little 
package which can be augmented with sws extensions, but reaaccess
has been halted for a couple years now and reaper's later versions get more 
and more broken and that's the access package most are using.

With reaper, you'll have to buy most of the quality third party plugs or use 
free ones, and any access work that's been done with plugs used with sonar 
won't necessarily port over to reaper easily, so your back at square one.

Both reaper and sonar have a generic show me automated parameters facility 
the inspector and synth rack assignable parameters in sonar, and the generic 
plug-in interface with reaper, but that won't solve all the problems.

Our good buddy steve has done some work with  plugs, to work with reaper, 
but considering there probably won't be as big a paying market over here, 
not yet anyway, reaper development in the blind world hasn't gone much past 
talk.

Also if your in to midi, then sonar will be king probably, though they've 
improved midi in the later versions of reaper.


I only know a couple of people making money with reaper with real projects, 
I'd like to hear them come out of the wood work and be counted,
if there are more, but I'm getting the feeling most are and in the 
exploring, stage, also there is work being done with ahk one of my favorite 
tools, which is non-screen-reader specific unlike hsc and work is being done 
for third party plugs for reaper.
but again, very early days.

But if you mostly work with audio,
and you want something which is kinder to leaner hardware, and you want an 
entry level which is only like 50 bucks or so I think sonar cost 300, and if 
your willing to forge your own pathway, and not have much hand holding, then 
reaper and reaaccess is a good choice.

It has a training mode, and lots of good functionallity, and works with the
major screen-readers,
jaws, window-eyes nvda and system access.
But it works best with reaper 3.78

Most reaper users seem to be using nvda, I really like that screen-reader,
it's free and doesn't have some of the bells and whistles the big guys do, 
but it's a beautiful little piece of software which right now almost meets 
all my needs.

Even allows me to do most common tasks in sonar.

And with reaper it has the least problems, there are conflicts 
withwindow-eyes and reaper that are hardwired in to the reaaccess code,
but we don't have access to the source code so can't fix it.

Nothing is 100 percent in this arena you know that.

You really need everything to have it all.

Reaper lacks things like easy automation but those sws extensions are hugely 
powerful and if you can get your head around reapers crazy way of doing 
routing, then you can do about anything with it.

Sonar is more straight ahead traditional
ie studio folks will readily see how things are laid out, you have key 
bindings and there is the old cakewalk cal programming language, but that's 
been pretty much abandoned.

Still, cakewalk has been our horse to ride forever,
and
the closest you'll get to a I just wanna get about my work and not a lot of 
fuss and bother, relatively speaking because as we know with this whole 
audio gig it's always fuss and bother.

I like reaper easiness of quickly changing tempo and pitch, though elastique 
isn't quite as powerful or artifact free as radius in sonar, but sonar makes 
it more a pain in the butt to use.

There are a bunch of other things I could mention, but hopefully this will 
give you some idea,
and this is from an admittedly biassed sonar user who sees reaper as a 
potential new option that just hasn't quite grown up yet, like I said I know 
many folks using sonar for production, I only know two who are getting 
paided using reaper right now, I do know in the sighted world, and in my 
favorite podcast the home recording show one of the main guys there dumped 
protools in favor of reaper, but that's on the mac, and he's sighted.

Sighted people can use any old thing because most of these daws do all the 
same stuff, but for us it's down to accessibility and useability and the 
crazy work arounds we have to go through.

Even sonar as long as we've had people working on it isn't 100 percent 
accessible.

So for what it's worth, there you have it.

Right
From: "Christian" <christian08 at runbox.com>
To: <rwp at reaaccess.com>
Sent: Tuesday, May 21, 2013 4:19 PM
Subject: [RWP] Reaper question


> Hi all on the list,
> Now those of you who have been using Reaper for some time, I have a few 
> questions.
> I am still with Sonar and thinking about having a look at Reaper again and 
> my questions are
> Have you been able to do the same things that you did with Sonar with the 
> same success?
> The thing is that I still want to have access to the same quality effects 
> that I have in Sonar and softsynths.
> Many thanks for any comments,
> Christian
>
>
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