[Rwp] general observations while learning reaper

[Chris Belle]

I've been giving reaper 4.77 a good workout with some spoken word content.

Pretending like this is for real, and using the fake automation and 
split items stuff, and the item processing functions available like 
normalizing items to common gain and normalizing items separately.

And dynamic splitting of items.

I haven't got the seting quite right yet, but I can see why folks who do 
podcasts and lots of spoken work content where audio might be all over 
the place might like reaper to quickly get things under control without 
having to smash everything down with a compressor.

This is one of my students reading a story with lots of dynamics and
she yells and whispers and one of these things that compression alone 
won't fix, the best is only achieved by lots of hand sewn automation,
but we all know that takes lots of time.
I've thrown several tools at it to compare,
the gold standard is sonar with the type of automation I love,
but that took a lot of time, but I can imagine getting close to the same 
results with good settings of the dynamic split function,
the one I just did had something like 5000 splits,
but even if I had to breeze through and do some splits by hand, 
normalizing sections would still be quicker than going through and hand 
setting gvolumes for each take.

Also,
there seems to be two controls for setting volume on an item or take.

I found one which I assigned to a hot key
which goes a lot further than the one that's currently assigned to shift 
page up and down.
Because there was such a wide variation in the reading,
some of the soft parts I needed to gain up 20 db, and ran out of 
headroom with the current key bound volume so anyway, making progress here,
and doing it with osara.