Musicians on a budget rejoice! New and powerful recording software is available for both Windows and Mac users that is creating a stir in the recording industry. The best part of the deal is that it is free! The Windows version is on its third release and the Mac version is still in Beta.

Being a studio owner for 23 years, you make it your job to keep up with the latest technology. Since The Music Office opened its doors in 1984, we have probably been through at least twenty recording platforms running the gamut of tape-based systems to Pro Tools and Nuendo. With each new generation of technology, the price drops. What would cost six figures in the 80s you can pick up for under $1,000 today and there are prosumer products available for much less.

The bottom line is still that you will have to shell out between $100-1,000 for a reliable computer based multi-track recording system. If you already own the computer, those days are over. Now don’t get me wrong - I’m not talking about a top of the line multi-thousand dollar Pro Tools HD system but a servicable system accessable to the average working musician.

I was talking to another writer/producer, Rand McCullough, in Austin the other day and he asked me if I had heard of Reaper yet. When I responded that I hadn’t, he told me I owed it to myself to check it out at www.reaper.fm. The next morning I decided to download the software onto one of my non-studio computers to take a look at it.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the size of the download.- only 3.1 MG. In comparison to other applications – such as video editors, audio software has always been smaller but this takes the cake. You can install the program on a USB memory stick! I suspected the software would be anemic at best – a freebie app for newbies. I was wrong.

Within the hour I had it installed on my audio PC in the studio. I have set up the Windows computers with three different users, myself as administrator, another user for Pro Tools with all its configurations and another user account for Nuendo and Cubase. I installed Reaper on the administrator account in less than 30 seconds. Within 10 minutes I was tracking through either the Pro Tools hardware (MBox) or the Nuendo hardware (Lexicon Omega). Reaper detected every audio hardware input and output along with all the plugins to all my VST and DirectX applications. Along with the impressive stock list of effects that come with Reaper, I can use the effects from all my other Windows applications.

Reaper is multi-track recording software. Like all other PC-based recordings systems you are limited in track count and plugins by the memory and muscle of your machine. Reaper and its plugins are some of the tightest code I’ve ever seen; it is amazing what comes in such a small package. Reaper can record at any bit rate you can support with your hardware, You can mix audio files of different sampling rates and file extensions. In a world where it takes at least six months to get a great depth of Pro Tools and it takes about an hour in Reaper.

The user interface is completely intuitive and it is easy to get started. In the Setup tab you select your audio devices and inputs and assign them to input busses. This takes about 15 seconds. You plug an audio source such as a microphone or instrument into your computer, record enable a new track and you are on the way to your next chartbuster.

Any of the screen components can be dragged around and resized, you create your workspace the way you like it rather than being chained to the stock interface that comes with other audio recording software. All the finer touches are included. For example it would seem intuitive to me to be able to click on a channel fader and then use the scroll wheel of my mouse to move it up and down in small one-click increments. This obvious feature is in Reaper but you have to map the mouse wheel to the faders in Pro Tools (after about an hour with the manual) to enable such an obvious features. Reaper has a large forum group to help you with any questions and some components of the software are Open Source so other audio coding ninjas can make their contribution to the application. New updates and versions are frequent and also free. Reaper is becoming a collaborative effort of expert audio codeheads.

As I mentioned earlier, Reaper detects not only hardware but software plugins – all of my Windows ones at least. Digidesign being the proprietary babies they are doesn’t share any plugins with anything but Pro Tools so any of your RTAS plugins won’t work. Not to worry though, Reaper comes with a good arsenal that includes all the basics including reverbs, delays, compressors and EQs to get you started.

Another very cool feature of Reaper is being able to set automation and plugin information onto the wave file itself, creating the automation with more accuracy than a slider. Other platforms do this but you can put multiple tic lines on each .WAV file – each color coded. It is easy to set up.

You can see how easy it is to make volume changes as in the example below.

This is another arena in which Reaper rocks. I absolutely hate it when Pro Tools demands real time to bounce a song to disk. It is just a calculation and other audio applications can render files in a fraction of the Pro Tools method. Reaper is very fast. If I want to bounce a 3-minute song to disk at the tweakhead resolution in Pro Tools – it will take well over three minutes. In Reaper it takes about thirty seconds – a six-fold increase. If time is money, when you go to rendering your final mixes you just saved 80% of your machine rendering time. Also MP3 output is an option in Pro Tools 7.3LE, what were they thinking? Reaper lets you output decent MP3s as a standard feature. To me MP3 is the audio inferior bastard son that should be used for promotion only – so Reaper covers this aspect nicely. If you really like an artist or band, you will LOVE them when you hear their CD instead of an MP3. I love it when someone tells me, "I have 10,000 MP3s!" All it tells me is that in their quest for music, they have 10,000 crappy copies of audio files. The difference between an MP3 and a store-bought CD is similar to the difference between the fidelity of a cassette versus CD. The MP3 really is inferior so don’t brag too loudly to the sonically hip about your massive MP3 library. Reaper ouputs .WAV, .AIF, FLAC, and other formats too.

As you can see from the illustration you have a number of file formats to render your final masterpiece to. I haven’t tried using Reaper for any mastering work – I still use my old hardware and software standbys; Sound Forge, WaveLab, and my Finalizer only because I probably haven’t figured out how to do it in Reaper yet.

You can’t beat this deal for multi-track audio software. You can download it free and quickly on even a pokey dialup connection. The single user registration only costs $50 and you can pay using PayPal. If you don’t register you will have to endure a nag screen on startup but all the features still work in the unregistered version – nothing is disabled. Recording money cannot be better spent. Applications like this will drive down the price of other platforms and spur fresh and new innovation, so I recommend supporting this effort. After trying Reaper, I suspect you will too.