MusicRadar

One of the best new features is the pitch envelope.

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• Review

It used to be that you had to pay big bucks for a 'proper' DAW with all the features required to record, edit and mix in the manner to which professionals are accustomed, but the rise of Reaper over the past few years has presented a genuine alternative.

Reaper doesn't come rammed with flashy virtual instruments and sample libraries, but when it comes to core features, it's comparable to the big name DAWs, and even shows them a thing or two in some areas.

It has a very generous trial system and is just $65 for a license for non-commercial use, with a commercial license costing $225.

Dedicated Reaper users are kept in the loop with public betas and an active forum, so they saw this update coming a while ago, and many of them will likely have been using it for some time now.

Newbies and curiosity seekers may be surprised by just how far Reaper has come since we reviewed v3, even if most of the changes aren't the sort of whizz-bang additions often favoured by competing developers. And what changes there are!

The list of new features would eat up our entire review, so we'll focus on the most impressive of the bunch. For feature-philes, though, there's a full list over on Reaper's site.

Pitcher perfect

One of the niftiest new features is the pitch envelope. This can be applied (via a right-click) to any media item and used to alter, correct or totally mangle your audio. It's dead easy to use and can be applied without affecting the item's timing. The range is set to only three semitones by default, but you can set your own.

We imagine that the more adventurous producer will find plenty of inspiration in diving down to microscopic editing levels to create all manner of crazy effects.

You can now set listeners' heads spinning with the combo of multichannel track metering and the ReaSurround plug-in. The effect is fully automatable. Diffuse, transform and rotate the position of sound sources, and even move the (virtual) speakers.

Quad, octophonic, 5.1, 7.1, 9.1 and user setups are available. Cinematic sound designers will eat it up.

Sound designers will also be pleased with Reaper's batch rendering "wildcards", which can be used to, for example, convert selected track items to MP3, while automatically labelling them according to time signature, track number, note value… Well, the list goes on. There are plenty of prefab wildcard settings, and you can mix and match them at will.

Batch conversion is a useful utility not shared by all DAWs, and few of them handle it this well. The Project Bay is another handy feature. This floating/tabbed window enables you to see and access all of the stuff used in a project.

All of your Media Items are displayed here: audio and MIDI clips, along with FX, Item Groups, presets, assigned tracks, Take Comps and more. MIDI editing is improved, with user-definable scales and chords available when drawing or editing notes.

There's a new MIDI Contents menu to facilitate switching between MIDI items when editing. Plus, there are lots of new mouse modifier behaviours to enable easy painting of notes and chords, tweaking arpeggios, etc.

Take lanes and comping have been given minor tweaks (recordings get their own take lanes, even if they run over existing items), as has envelope editing (you can copy envelope points with the mouse, for instance).

Such minor touches might not seem like a big deal, but they do make a difference in the heat of a session.