Little things that make you go "WTF!!!"

[cerendir]

OK, I love REAPER, no question about that, and I'm slowly getting used to its way of doing things. However... I'm finding a lot of speed bumps along the road and I figured I should list them here. Please note that some or all of this might be covered in other topics, and if so, sorry. It might also be that some of these "issues" can be easily remedied in the preferences. So bear with me and feel free to point out if I've simply missed something.

The meddlesome edit cursor. I position the edit cursor at the beginning of a section. Then I double click a part in this section to open the midi editor. The edit cursor jumps to where I clicked, and I have to place it at the beginning again. One would think that setting Seek playback to Top ruler only would help, but no. AFAICT that setting does absolutely nothing.

Not possible to resume playback. Sometimes I want to resume playback at the exact point where I stopped. REAPER will only let me listen to the same thing from the beginning again.

Deleting notes in the piano roll. I'm used to Cubase and it's eraser tool. I.e., I would right click, move the pointer slightly to select the eraser, then just erase notes to my heart's content. In REAPER I have to select a note, the press Del (or use the right click menu), select the next note, press Del and so on. Tedious.

Tiny scroll bar grippers. At high magnification the grippers on the main window scroll bars are a pain to hit, most often I end up dragging the left or right handles instead.

Crude panning. The pan controls could use a higher "resolution", or whatever the correct term might be. Right now you can only pan in increments of 5%, which IMO does not give you fine enough control.

Sorting tracks in the performance monitor. It would be nice if you could click on for example "CPU use" in the performance monitor list and have the tracks sorted, ascending or descending, after their CPU load.

No auto-arm. I want to be able to move between tracks with my keyboard and start playing immediately. I do not want to select the track, then arm it, then start playing. Major disruption of my workflow, as I often record one part, stop, switch tracks and record the next part without ever touching the mouse.

That's all I can think of now, but I might add more things eventually

[Billoon]

Originally Posted by cerendir

The meddlesome edit cursor. I position the edit cursor at the beginning of a section. Then I double click a part in this section to open the midi editor. The edit cursor jumps to where I clicked, and I have to place it at the beginning again. One would think that setting Seek playback to Top ruler only would help, but no. AFAICT that setting does absolutely nothing.

In Editing Behaviour...untick "Move edit cursor when clicking media items".

Originally Posted by cerendir

Not possible to resume playback. Sometimes I want to resume playback at the exact point where I stopped. REAPER will only let me listen to the same thing from the beginning again.

You can make a macro that will "move edit cursor to play cursor" then "stop" for this...but id love an option to allow stopping where the play cursor is(like pause) and then pressing stop again would return the cursor to last played from position.

Originally Posted by cerendir

Deleting notes in the piano roll. I'm used to Cubase and it's eraser tool. I.e., I would right click, move the pointer slightly to select the eraser, then just erase notes to my heart's content. In REAPER I have to select a note, the press Del (or use the right click menu), select the next note, press Del and so on. Tedious.

In options in the midi editor...you can set single click to insert/delete.

Originally Posted by cerendir

Tiny scroll bar grippers. At high magnification the grippers on the main window scroll bars are a pain to hit, most often I end up dragging the left or right handles instead.

The cursor changes when youve got the handle under it...to be sure, to be sure.

Originally Posted by cerendir

Crude panning. The pan controls could use a higher "resolution", or whatever the correct term might be. Right now you can only pan in increments of 5%, which IMO does not give you fine enough control.

Hold control key when draging panner(works for volume as well).

Originally Posted by cerendir

No auto-arm. I want to be able to move between tracks with my keyboard and start playing immediately. I do not want to select the track, then arm it, then start playing. Major disruption of my workflow, as I often record one part, stop, switch tracks and record the next part without ever touching the mouse.

Agreed...an option for "Arm only selected track(s)" or "Arming follows track selection" or something would be nice.

[cerendir]

Hehe, thanks for clearing things up Billoon, seems like I have indeed overlooked some options.

As for single click to insert/delete in the midi editor, that's even more awkward as I would have to access the options menu all the time to switch this behavior on and off (to select notes, for example). Or maybe I have misunderstood how this is supposed to work.

Also, "The cursor changes when youve got the handle under it". Um... yes? That does not make it any easier hitting the tiny gripper at the center. All that happens is that my cursor flips back and forth between pointer and resize all the time when I go for the scroll bar.

[Justin]

you can always delete notes in the midi editor by doubleclicking the items, as well...

[billybk1]

Originally Posted by cerendir

Not possible to resume playback. Sometimes I want to resume playback at the exact point where I stopped. REAPER will only let me listen to the same thing from the beginning again.

The Enter key is the default for pausing & resuming playback. You can use REAPER's keyboard shortcuts and assign that action to a different key of your choice, as well. Also, you can always start/stop playback using the Ctrl + Spacebar key combo if you are working in a window that does not have focus to the timeline (Media Explorer, Undo History, Routing Matrix, etc..even while you are working in the Preferences screen).


Cheers,

Billy Buck

[norbury brook]

I think what is wanted is a cubendo style of stop start. when hitting 'enter' in Reaper it does indeed pause at the cursor position but the edit cursor jumps to that position as well which means you cant go back to the same start point.It would be great if pause didnt bring the edit cursor with it so it stayed where it was.


MC

[chip mcdonald]

Originally Posted by cerendir

Crude panning. The pan controls could use a higher "resolution", or whatever the correct term might be. Right now you can only pan in increments of 5%, which IMO does not give you fine enough control.

Yeah, I complained about that a long while ago. The "throw" of the pan and volume faders needs to be a lot longer to allow a more easy fine control. There's no reason screen movement should have to correspond 1:1 with mouse movement/resolution.

It would be really, really faster to do things in Reaper if you didn't have to slow down and be so micro-careful about moving the mouse in little increments. There's no need for that, IMO... It's like mixing with those little trimmer pots that are on circuit boards instead of full-throw faders: the faders should expand out and give you maybe 3x the travel length when you touch them...

[manning1]

my nit is the disappearing master as one scrolls down
the traks.
pretty please...put it on the transport.

[xpander]

Originally Posted by chip mcdonald

The "throw" of the pan and volume faders needs to be a lot longer to allow a more easy fine control. There's no reason screen movement should have to correspond 1:1 with mouse movement/resolution.

For finer adjustments, I've used Ctrl+Pan and Ctrl+Vol, certainly enough resolution for me...almost too slow and accurate sometimes.