Audio Recording

One limitation of Reaper is that it doesn’t offer an audio editor. In some applications; audio editing is a very important task which is commonly done to accomplish the following objectives:

1.) Manual and destructive editing to the audio waveform meant to permanently apply a change.

2.) Detailed wave manipulations meant to enhance the quality of the audio waveform such as removing noise, correcting pitch, correcting timing/out of sync issues etc.

3.) Doing detailed analysis of waveform such as measuring the average RMS level, performing frequency analysis, normalization, etc.

In addition, this post would cover the best practices of doing a mix down in Reaper. This will ensure that the mix down to be submitted to the mastering engineer is in correct format for optimum quality.

Steps to Add an External Audio Editor in Reaper

1.) First you need to install audio editing software in your PC. You can use Audacity which is a free audio editor or Adobe Audition if you a paid solution with complete editing features. There are other great audio editors like Sony Sound Forge; etc.

However some of these great editors even cost more than Reaper DAW. So it is advisable to try Audacity first to check with the needed features if available and sufficient with your audio editing needs.

Make sure the audio editing program is fully working before attempting it to be used with Reaper.

2.) Now launch Reaper, go to Options – Preferences – then select “External Editors”.

3.) Under “External Editors” click “Add”, just leave file type blank as well as the secondary editor and then in the primary editor browse to the exe file of your selected audio editor.

This is how it looks like after the path to the audio editor exe file has been added (for example Adobe Audition editor has been added):

4.) Finally click OK. Then open any project in DAW to test if the audio editor is working.

5.) To edit any waveform that is currently used by the mix, right click on any track and then go to “Open Items in Editor” and then select the editor you have added. For example, see screenshot below:

6.) Once you have clicked on it, it will now open on your preferred audio editor and you can now start editing the audio waveform.

WARNING: Take note that once you start editing your audio waveform, the changes made after saving the file would now be permanent. You cannot anymore undo these changes. If you are unsure with your changes you must do a backup of your original audio file.

7.) Once you have made the changes to the waveform, it would be automatically applied to the audio file added in the Reaper session.

Steps to do a High Quality Audio Mixdown (Master Mix)

When doing an audio mix down which would be submitted to a mastering engineer; it is very important to provide the highest resolution possible.

Follow the steps below on how to do a mix down on Reaper:

1.) Launch Reaper, open the project, mix and apply effects on it as desired.
2.) When the mix sounds perfect and you decided to do a mix down; you need to select which section in your session you would like to be rendered. To do this, move your mouse cursor somewhere over the timeline and then hold left click to select regions. It would be highlighted as shown in the screenshot below (gray white):

3.) Once you have selected a region in your session, go to File – Render.
4.) Ensure that you have the following:
a.) Render: Master Mix
b.) Render Bounds – Time selection
c.) Assign a file name of the mix down (exclude the file extension) as well as the output directory. This is where you could find the file after mix down/render.
d.) Sample rate – (the same as the sample rate of your Reaper session); if you use 48 KHz as your sample rate during tracking/recording then use this sample rate during mix down.
e.) Channels – stereo / Full Speed offline
f.) Leave Resample mode at its default settings as well as multi-channel, dither and noise shaping.
g.) Set output format to WAV.
h.) WAV bit depth – 24 bits
i.) Check Write BWF and “Allow Large files to use Wave64”.

This is a sample screenshot:

3.) Finally click “Render 1 file”, do not do anything as Reaper would render the mix. After completion, you can open the file saved in its specified output directory.