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Old 08-04-2019, 01:53 PM   #1
pianogineer
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Join Date: Nov 2011
Posts: 105
Default Live Playback Loop Use Case

I've been an on-and-off studio REAPER user for probably 10 years now, and am looking at going all in, including live. Currently building up a Mainstage setup to do the following, and wondering if REAPER can be used for all of these use cases:

1. Song selection controlled via iPad App (On Song) sending MIDI PC messages to REAPER.
2. PC message queues the correct REAPER song up (leaning towards separate project per song per a reason below).
2.a. Mainly using for backing tracks, but would be nice to have VSTi flexibility if needed.
3. REAPER needs to send a PC MIDI to my keyboard to pull up the right patch there.
4. The backing track use case is usually 2-4 sections of a song, which need to be looped on demand. I have a footswitch that will send a specific CC. These CC's will be the same 4 CC's over and over, so each song needs to respond to those same CC's (e.g., CC1 = Section 1, CC2 = Section 2, etc.). This is why I'm leaning towards a separate project per song, as I can't figure out how you would make this work with a single project and a diverse set of markers/regions.
4.a. Looping would be smooth seeked. Would like "absolute" control of sections (e.g., jump from section 4 to section 2 without hitting "previous section" twice).
5. Ideally would love to have a simple config file that controls all of this. That is, 1 row per song, which would list the project file, input PC, and output PC (to keyboard).

Have done lots of reading and feels like this should all be achievable, just not sure I can wrap my mind around the best way, especially #4. I can code, so if I need to get fancy with JSFX I can.

Seems like 1, 2 and 4 should be achievable with SWS Resources and slot actions (SWS/S&M: Resources - Open project, slot N (new tab)). #3 I'm sure is possible but I'm not sure exactly how to do that. Feels like the most tricky would be #5 which is how I want to scale and manage say 100 songs. I could do it via MIDI assignment in the actions list (depending on how #3 is solved), but seems like at scale this could get bulky/tricky.

Thanks for any insight!
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