“How do you know someone's a Reaper user?” the joke goes. “Don’t worry, they'll tell you.” For most people in music or audio production, the closest they’ve come to the DAW is interacting with an impassioned - some may say rabid - Reaper user extolling its virtues unasked in a message board or comments section.
“Perhaps that all Reaper users are extremely evangelical about it?” answers Justin Frankel, the founder of Cockos, the company behind the DAW, when asked what people might be getting wrong about his software. “Yes, there are plenty of Reaper users who go post about how great it is online but the vast majority are quietly using (it) to make their content.”
Counted amongst this vast majority is a growing number of professionals working across a variety of music and audio production professions. One of them is Eyal Levi, CEO of the metal-angled music production school URM Academy and guitarist in the metal band, Dååth. “I used to think that Reaper was a joke,” he says in a recent YouTube video. “If I saw someone using it, I would assume immediately that they're not serious. I changed my mind because I kept on running into situations where ignoring Reaper no longer made sense.”
More and more people are having similar experiences and becoming Reaper converts, despite the complete lack of advertising done by Cockos. It’s all word of mouth. So what’s happening? Why is Reaper winning so many over?
“One of the big things that I appreciate about Reaper is that when you start using it, you have very few decisions to make,” says Justin, who is not only the developer but also a user.
“You open it up, create a track, then if you want to record audio you arm it and select an audio input. If you want to do some virtual instrument stuff, you click the ‘FX’ button and add that to the track. A lot of other DAW software, before you even get started there's a half dozen decisions to make.”
Reaper does a lot of things in unique ways, with functionality that gets out of your way so that you can get on with doing what you need to do. As mentioned by Justin above, tracks are typeless. “You can use any track for audio, MIDI, or both,” he explains. “You can send audio and MIDI from track to track, meaning you can have tracks that function as buses.” You can also mix sample rates - a simple thing, but an extremely helpful one, especially if you’re working with different types of media.
Reaper also lets you work with project tabs, like a browser. Says Justin: “You can have multiple projects open at once, and optionally synchronise them, or send audio and/or MIDI from tab to tab via loopback devices.”
The user interface is also dynamic, supporting editing and other processes during playback. “You can even record audio in one tab and edit the audio file in another tab,” he says.
Then there’s functionality unique to Reaper, like the Region Render Matrix, which lets you export multiple sections of a project as separate audio files simultaneously.
If the DAW doesn’t have a feature that you want or need, you can customise it yourself. “Reaper invites customisation and has a culture built around it,” says Eyal in his video.
If you don’t like the way that it looks (a common complaint) you can change it. And more than just cosmetically; there are skins available that can make Reaper not only look like other DAWs but behave like them too.
“Customisation plays a very important role that might be easy to miss,” explains Eyal. “Most people don't avoid switching DAWs because they're afraid of learning new features. They avoid switching because they don't want to relearn how to work. With some set up, you can make (Reaper) behave close enough to what you already know (so) that your instincts still apply.”
X-Raym is an independent developer who codes scripts for Reaper. He sees not only skins but also workflow customisation as big pluses for someone coming over from another DAW.
“As a pro, you may already have an ideal workflow in mind but be limited by the lack of automation features offered by your (current) software,” he says. “With Reaper, you could have dedicated tools to handle all the boring and repetitive stuff for you.”
For example, Eyal relates a story of being impressed by mastering engineer Mike Kalajian’s workflow in Reaper, particularly when it comes to project management. “The moment a client books a session, scripts kick off automatically, files download, Reaper opens, and everything is laid out exactly where it needs to be before he even sits down,” says Eyal. “By the time Mike starts working, there's no manual setup at all.”
For mixing and mastering engineer Wytse Gerichhausen of White Sea Studio, Reaper customisation is at the heart of his workflow. “One of the things I'm really proud of is the way I can do my hardware input and output routing directly from my Stream Deck,” he explains.
Wytse is now a fully committed Reaper user. After hitting a roadblock working with Pro Tools, he settled on this ‘underdog’ DAW because he thought it would give him a lot of options for a better working process. “I use so many workflow tweaks that I could only have dreamt of back in my Pro Tools days,” he says. “Things like the Region Render Matrix, Subprojects, and (track) auto-colouring are great.”
Reaper allows coding in a few different areas. One is JSFX, Reaper’s proprietary plugin format (it’s also compatible with the usual plugins).
“These are fully programmable plugins which can be used for all kinds of things: simple effects, loop samplers, sequencers, everything,” says Justin. “And you can program them on the fly within Reaper.”
Another are ReaScripts, which are a little more involved. “ReaScripts can be a one-time action, or they can run continuously in the background, or even have a complex GUI,” says X-Raym. “Scripts are perfect for automating repetitive work, to satisfy a precise task, or to provide customised visualisation for almost anything you can think of.”
JSFX plugins and ReaScripts are available online at various Reaper community homes, often for free, or you can code it yourself directly within the DAW. Says X-Raym: “It’s quite satisfying to be able to create a new (script) from scratch, and even just to modify an existing one. Even very simple features can be a huge help for a project.”
Aside from its impressive performance stats (Reaper often comes out on top in James Zhan’s Apple silicon performance tests) and remarkably small footprint (“We're always keeping the installer size in mind,” says Justin), the software is especially stable. This has made it the DAW of choice for live performance for a growing number of musicians.
“Stability means something different today than it did 15 years ago,” says Eyal in his video. “In the old days, if your computer went down, maybe you lost a take, maybe a session got corrupted. Nowadays, if your computer goes down, you've got dead air in front of thousands of people.”
Electronic musician Tycho has gone on record as not only writing and recording in Reaper but using it for his live shows, where it controls plugins, mixing, and automation, using the tab features to separate songs.
“I'm aware of a number of people using it for live performances, which is cool to see,” says Justin of Cockos. “Even if it wasn't our top priority when designing the application, it is something we definitely try to make work well.”
It’s also gaining popularity with modern metal acts, who need access to not only amp sim plugins but also require track automation, pitch shifting, effects, and more.
According to Eyal, Humanity's Last Breath is one such band using Reaper on stage. “The entire show lives on a single laptop,” Eyal relates. “(Humanity's Last Breath guitarist) Buster (Odeholm) told me that he runs Reaper live because it almost never crashes. And that was a real wakeup call for me because I'd rather chew on broken glass than trust Pro Tools in a live setting.”
Because of that conversation, Eyal switched to Reaper for his own band, Dååth, to use on its European tour in 2025.
“I wanted the smallest possible rig and zero anxiety about reliability. I stuck with the default setup to keep things as stable as possible and it performed perfectly.”
From the outside, the mad evangelising of Reaper users can look alarmingly cult-like. But from the inside, it feels more like community.
“Speaking about users,” says X-Raym, “we often hear that Reaper’s best feature is its community. It’s true. Users help each other on various community spaces, the official Cockos Forum notably, no matter their levels. And so many resources (themes, effects, scripts, tutorials, translations) are made by users, most of the time for free by volunteers who just want to help. The community is very dynamic and welcoming.”
Justin notes the community aspect surrounding Reaper as well. “We have a few hundred very active users who test development builds nearly daily, which is very helpful when we're working on new features and fixing bugs,” he says.
“We get fast helpful feedback from these users. Our development builds are open to all who wish to test them; we don't have a private beta list or anything like that, it's a self selecting group of people who want to be on the bleeding edge.”
Eyal sees this groundswell of community support and word-of-mouth recommendations as leading directly to continued adoption at the professional level.
“New users expect to tweak (Reaper). They know they'll need help and they go looking for it. And that expectation creates a demand for shared knowledge. The more people who start using Reaper at a casual level, the more knowledge gets shared, created, and refined, and that in turn feeds back into why professionals can trust it for serious real world work.”
X-Raym sees it in a similar way: “The more people use Reaper, the more people will talk about it, so more people will try it. And because the experience is often positive, a lot of users stay with it. Cockos is a team of two people, without a marketing team, so their DAW reputation is really organic and based on what real users are saying about it.”
Whether Reaper turns out to be the DAW for you may depend on your tolerance for customisation.
For many, the tool is just the means to an end, not the end itself. Do you prefer to build your own PC, or would you rather buy a Mac and not think about it? If you’re the former, Reaper could be the DAW you’ve been waiting for.
And, thanks to growing industry adoption, you won’t have to hide it any more when clients come by. They may even be a fellow new Reaper convert among them…
