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Old 07-24-2017, 04:42 PM   #1
Zair
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Default Working with absurd amounts of tracks (transitioning from Audacity)

>> TL;DR: Basically I'm missing the "disable overdub" (tracks playing back during recording of a new one) and "align tracks: end to end" features.


I need an audio recording program for recording many takes of one sentence, then another, and so on (in a simple, keypress-mouseless machinegun-work fashion). I have managed that so far, to some effect, with Audacity - which did work perfectly well, except... for how it kept running out of memory and/or crashed-and-burned. The simplicity of mouse-free work, though, was great - press R to record, then space to end, then R again for the next take/sentence. In reaper I just have to additionally press CTRL to do that, and that by itself would not be a problem, but... there seems to be a few serious pieces of functionality missing from Reaper (or they may be hidden just well enough to fool my inquisitive attempts), in comparison to Audacity. To quickly go through my points of interest:



(1) the audacity-called "disable overdub" option - that basically prevents the other tracks from playing while recording a new track. While I keep recording new tracks conveyor-style, churning out one after another, I need to be able to have that playback turned off by default, instead of somehow clicking on a solo button each and every single time. (Muting sound will not do, since playback of hundred(s) of tracks could overload the program/memory and is something I particularly want to avoid).

(2) [EDIT: I was stupid enough to always stop recording by pressing CTRL+R again instead of hitting the spacebar, which makes this second issue non-existent. I am a massive derp (but a slowly reforming one).]

(3) the apparent inability to align tracks with a simple command. In Audacity there is a set of "align" commands, one being "align tracks: end to end", which, visually, puts them into a nice and sleek staircase layout, ready to be merged into one long track with another simple command. In Reaper, on the other hand, I seemingly have to snap the beginning of each track to the time-point of the end of the previous one manually, by hand - which works very nicely indeed, unless one is presented with, say, 100+ tracks to align that way.



Reaper seems to be, at least in theory, more multi-track memory-friendly, as it comes with a special option "do not process muted tracks" - since Audacity kept running out of memory (and crashing) exactly at that very point, when I tried to just solo-play separate tracks after recording all the material. That option makes me have faith in the stability of the program, but the issues I have with it that I've pointed out above make it, at the present moment, unusable for me. (And while I have attempted to make use of the multiple "takes" feature of Reaper, it just did not seem to work out satisfyingly for me.)

I would be extremely grateful for either opening my blind eyes to the location of these missing features listed above, or... for any pointers as to what other editing program I should try in search for this kind of functionality.
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Last edited by Zair; 07-24-2017 at 04:59 PM.
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Old 07-24-2017, 07:58 PM   #2
foxAsteria
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Open the Actions List and you can combine any number of actions into one click Custom Actions which you can assign to any key or mouse press you like.

If you also enable the option "alternate keyboard section when recording" in keyboard/multitouch prefs. Then you can have the same key (say, R) solo the selected track and start recording, while stopping recording and unsoloing when pressed the next time. There is a dropdown top right of the Actions List to change which mode you make custom action for.

You might have to get creative for aligning items end to end. Off the top of my head, I'd say, select your first item and then create a custom action like:
move cursor to end of items
unselect all items
move position of item under mouse to edit cursor

It's not just one click, but assign that new action to some key and you just point your mouse and shoot each item into position. Best I can do right now. Then if you need them all on the same track, you just run the action 'implode items to one track'

Now you know how to start customizing your workflow with Custom Actions. Which makes you all-powerful. Like a flipping wizard.

P.S. welcome to the forums and go install SWS extensions, to enable a vastly expanded feature set.
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Last edited by foxAsteria; 07-24-2017 at 08:24 PM.
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Old 07-26-2017, 03:40 AM   #3
Zair
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This seems to have fixed all my problems except for the aligning part, but I'll try and see if I can wiggle my way through that. Having to manually snap-align the tracks in the end editing stage doesn't actually sound like such a huge deal necessarily, so... yes, now I need to properly stress-test this program and see if it ends up complaining about memory or not. I think I will be literally jumping with joy if it ends up proving stable and not minding having 100+ tracks in the list.

I kinda love how nicely programmable the actions are. In Audacity I had to literally resort to external macro programs in order to try to achieve this level of simplicity, and even then they refused to work correctly with it most of the time.

Big Thanks for your help!
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Old 07-26-2017, 04:44 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Zair View Post
Big Thanks for your help!
I'm more than happy to point anyone toward the ways of Reaper's customization. Not everyone can appreciate such things.
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Old 09-26-2017, 06:58 AM   #5
emarsk
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Zair, could you explain your use-case a bit more? I would think that there must be a better workflow than having 100 separate tracks to record takes that will end up being aligned in a single track anyway. Why can't you just record them sequentially in a single track? You could then use ripple editing to get rid of any excess junk between the good takes.

Another possibility is to use what in REAPER are call "takes" to record, well, takes. You can then explode them sequentially on the same track. Bear in mind that REAPER works with takes in a rather peculiar way that - to me - is far from intuitive and rather awkward, you'll probably have to experiment a bit with them.

Also, keep in mind that the REAPER keyboard shortcuts are fully configurable, you don't need to stick with Ctrl-R if R is better for your workflow.
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