Understanding REAPER DAW Interface
Hello Noobster, welcome to tutorial of audio editing basics with Reaper. On the last tutorial we just imported our first audio clip in to Reaper, and then this is the point from where I will take it today. if you haven't done it already open your copy of Reaper and import an audio file. Let's remember two ways to do this. First, if your regular file is in your desktop that way to do it is by drag and drop, you see my audio file in repair. if your file is in a different folder like music, downloads, etc go to insert media file and navigate until you find the folder where your file is and click open, you'll have the same result.
Now let's have a look at the different parts of the screen, this light gray area is the arange area where audio clip will all there and is also where most of the editing work will be done. This controls on the right and bottom of it allow you to move it arround and zoom in and out to better see what you are working on at every moment .
When you press PLAY you will see a gray vertical line move to the right, this gray line indicates that position the cursor is this order it vertically which marks the beginning of the play back, if I click play back again it starts at the same point as before. Now above to arrange area there is the timeline an horizontal bar that serves as a guides in normal type notatiton , there is minutes, seconds and miliseconds-a musical notation. if I navigate the work to the beginning and zoom in, you see here that little numbers below indicate the seconds : 0 seconds, 2 seconds, 3 seconds, etc. And tangled above indicates the bars and beats where the music is place. That is first bar for Speed, second bar for speed, if I zoom in again now I can see first beat, second beat, third beat and fourth beat.
Above the timeline is the mini bar with minutes. Give you access to a lot of options and properties I advise you to have a look but don't take it too seriously, we'll learn this step by step. You see there's too many options to care right now about it, you will learn some of them when at the time.
And the top right corner at the end of menu bar you see some info of the current state of your audio device. This is also important, if you click there it will give you access to the full menu for Reaper configuration. Maybe you open this on the previous tutorial to change some settings for your audio system or input and output device. If everything is working properly don't change any value, if you have some problems with the playback or audio general sometimes you can fix them there.
At the left of the timeline, below the menu bar there is the main tool bar. If I call for quick accsess to the most usual features, just go with your mouse over each one of them, and a little message will pop out to tell you what in those. The most important ones are new project, open project and save project. Also there is to Undo and Redo, and the metronom, I will explain again some of this feature later.
Below the main toolbar there is a dark area, the track cotrol panel. Audio files are plays in rows, called tracks. And for each tracks there is track header which is displays control that will apply to all the audio clips in the tracks. I will aslo explain all these controls in detail later. For now the most importants are the value- just double click to reset to default value, mute and solo. Mute will disable the playback on the track and solo will disable the tracks on the rest of track, making the track as solo. There is the right and left pan.
At the bottom of your screen, you may have a dark area like this one, this is called the mixer and it is used later on the audio creation process so we don't need it for now, to make it disappear or appear again just press CTRL-M or Command-M if you are in a Mac computer, or go to View > Mixer. I think that's all for now, feel free to explore more deeply the Reaper Interface and basic options, I hope you will join me in next tutorial.
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Uncle Noobee
Uncle Noobee - Editor of Noobsquare.com , loves science and technology specially internet. Sees internet as the largest university with millions of students. Every students have rights to learn their own subject and to master it.
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