[RWP] I need all of your input, please. Abandoning Reaper vs. ProTools, should I stay or go?

[Scott Chesworth]

Late to the party as usual, but here's a few thoughts below each of
the 6. I'll be briefer than some, but this is coming from the
experience of using both DAWs daily, so hope these are still useful to
you Jes.

1. ProTools is accessible right out of the box, Reaper is not.
If the most recent version of Pro Tools was 100% accessible (or at the
very least a step forward in every plausible way) and avid had a
strong track record of maintaining that accessibility, then that'd be
a killer reason. As things stand, it's not, and they don't, so...

2. ProTools is the industry standard, Reaper has a long way to catch
up, if it ever does.
If you're constantly working out of different places, then consider
what's industry standard. Otherwise, consider what'll let you get
stuff done efficiently, because you're going to need efficiency on
your side at all times if you want to keep pace with a sighted guy
who's been bothered to learn his DAW beyond pointing and clicking.

3.  Reaaccess, like it or not, will one day be rendered useless.
As was Pro Tools for 3 major versions and several years. When that
happened, it was the only DAW I knew how to use and I was making the
majority of my living using it, so hopefully there won't ever be a
repeat of that situation, but to be fair, it's happened at some point
in the history of every DAW I can think of. The slight advantage
Reaper has here is its open-ness to third party developers, and
although ReaAccess is abandonware, there are already rumblings of a
couple of potential successors, and those are just the ones that've
reached my ears, there might be more.

4. I have no easy, accessible way to backup my internal hard drive on
my Windows machine.
I seem to remember there being a few Cavicasts on cloning and
restoring images, so maybe start with those. It's perhaps not quite
the same experience as maintenance on the Mac side, but I know it can
be done without sighted assistance.

5. I already have a Mac and am familiar with VoiceOver.
Here's the biggest reason that you should give it a go IMHO. For the
price of an iLok (£25-ish in the UK, or whatever that equates to in
dollars) you can authorise the demo of Pro Tools for a month and try
it on for size. I know, it sucks that you have to authorise the demo,
and you'll need to get someone sighted to help you through the iLok
authorisation too, but from knowing how different the schools of
thought are between using Reaper and using Pro Tools, you should
definitely try before you buy.

6. Windows is not made for audio work.
Agreed, but with solid hardware that'd serve you well to own no matter
which DAW you end up using, some patience and a good restoration
solution to get back to that time when it did run well, Windows can be
bullied into doing well enough with audio. On the flipside, VoiceOver
is an absolute dog nowadays, and with a lot of research and all the
patience in the world, there's nothing I've been able to do about
that. On an I7 Mac, 16 GB of RAM and a fast Samsung SSD, VO still
slows me down in Pro Tools to the point that a lot of the time I end
up flying blind as it were.

As with anything, it's swings and roundabouts whichever way you turn.
It'll probably always be this way. They say too much choice is a bad
thing, but we're dealing with too many half-baked choices which is
even worse. My advice would be to try out as much stuff as you can
justify with the time you have, find what works for you then learn it
inside out and ignore everything else until you come across something
that simply isn't possible.

Scott

On 7/13/14, Chris Belle <cb1963 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Good points.
>
> but it's very safe to say, how much hotdog hardware you can get even
> going with a premium daw vendor will be much greater than you can expect
> from apple.
> for the same price.
>
> Jim Roseberry's daws for a nice i5 tricked out with 16 megs and
> 2 drives start at just a thousand.
>
> You won't get anything like that kind of performance from anything in
> mac land at that price,
>
> On 7/12/2014 5:03 PM, Crystal Dennis wrote:
>> I've never used protools but have done a lot of research on it - I
>> also, have never been able to wrap my head around reaper other than
>> just using it for recording - everytime I try to use a plug it is very
>> um...not as streamlined?  I'd say.  Reaper has  a big learning curve
>> for me and I want to try to learn it now but when I look at Protools
>> manuals and guides it just seems like a lot simpler of an interface.
>>
>> But since you know what you're doing in regards to using both
>> interfaces I take it I'll just throw in my 2 cents:
>>
>> Will there be challenges in protools on a Mac?  Yeah, probably.  Will
>> there be challenges on windows with Reaper?  Yeah, most definitely.
>> Windows isn't a system built for audio engineering, and though as
>> Chris said you can build a custom Windows rig, it would probably cost
>> more or about the same as the Mac and Protools that will be ready to
>> use out the box.  Yes, Protools could break, but imo Reaper has more
>> of a possibility of breaking because ray access works on an older
>> version of Reaper.
>>
>> Protools is the industry standard:  If you want to be level on the
>> same playing field as our sighted peers, then idk I'd go with
>> protools.
>>
>> To be honest, I've sort of not wanted to learn Reaper because I
>> eventually want to get a Mac with protools.
>>
>> I've gone on the Mac for Protools lists and seen 2 things:  The
>> interface is easy to pick up (the protools manual has about 80 pages
>> worth of keystrokes in it) and the accessibility stays well,
>> accessible throughout updates, and if they break something in an
>> update Avid fixes it pretty quickly in the next update.
>>
>> If you want something to use out of the box and already know Voice
>> over:  Yeah, personally I'd go with Mac/Protools.  Will you have to
>> use multiple programs to work around some things?  Probably,  but
>> let's face it:  Being blind with technology, that's just par for the
>> course no matter what you use.  Honestly I'd probably have both a PC
>> and a Mac (not Mac with bootcamp, but a legit PC) just so you have
>> both options  available to you so you don't feel like you made a
>> mistake in switching.
>>
>> Hope this helped!  Like I said I don't super use either DAW, but this
>> is just from research I've done/opinions I've formed from trying to
>> use Reaper and reading up on protools with voice over.
>>
>> Crystal
>>
>> On 7/12/14, Kevin Brown <cursebuster at samobile.net> wrote:
>>> Lots of great points!,...I am one of those guys who likes to spend the
>>> time tweeking, and bolting things together...
>>> So,...Reaper works fine for me,...then again, I am not as advanced as
>>> many of you on this forum...
>>>
>>> Another point for me is, I am totally hooked on system access, and I
>>> find that reaper works very well with system access...
>>>
>>> I like some of the points you made Cris,...I may look into getting a
>>> windows machine custom built,...but, I am still going to use
>>> reaper,...I just love this DAW...
>>>
>>>
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