Frustrated with some of the shortcomings of Ableton Live, I began to look at the competition and ended up choosing Cockos Reaper. Now initially I really thought I was going to switch over but I’ve run into some issues with it which I’ll go into a bit later. But first I want to share with you all the customizing I did for Reaper.
The vast amount of things you can customize in Reaper will make any power user happy. Unfortunately it’s only almost there for being everything anyone would want. Some UI windows are locked off and the midi editor shares some elements with arrangement window. Not ideal for designing.
Fix option to show note names on notes not persisting when reopening REAPER. fix right-click and double-click behavior in inline MIDI editor fix inline editor CC lane display when also showing media item lane in normal MIDI editor only draw filled CC envelope for the active channel in the active media item. Reaper gives you the best of both worlds: by default, the MIDI grid editor, performance meter and so forth all open in new windows. However, they can also be docked at the bottom of the screen by right-clicking them and selecting the Dock option.
My first theme borrowed heavily from another theme that was mimicking same style as Bitwig Studios. A lot of work went into the icons, color, layout and learning how Walter (Reaper’s own coding language for theming.) works. The amount of files I created for this one was somewhere around 400-500 files. Kind of nuts when you think about it.
As good as this was, I was still learning Reaper itself and to me it felt a bit busy. I still wanted my theme to simplified and more like Photoshop and Ableton. This is where version 2 comes in.
Version 2 builds on 1 but has a completely new responsive TCP design. New custom fader stacks for volume, pan and width. Custom mouse cursor set. Also included in the .zip is my configuration for Reaper, it’s there just in case you want it. It mimics a lot of the same hot-keys for Ableton.
Quick rundown of some of the programs I used to make all of this.
– Graphic design, icons, splash, I used Photoshop.
– Stacked faders, I did design in Photoshop and I used JKnobMan to create the actual stack of images. JKnobMan requires Java to run FYI.
– For the cursors, again I would do design in Photoshop and then use Axialis CursorWorkshop to save the file into an .cur file format.
– Finally I used Dreamweaver (it’s just a little nicer to look at than notepad) to hand-code Walter, the theme’s backbone.
And I want to end this post with a few things that I ultimately would need to be added/fixed for me to reconsider using Reaper beyond recording vocals for it’s comping.
First, automation needs to be able to render curves as you’d expect and not add extra points when copying/duplicating items/sections.
Second, the ability to use encoder knobs. As it works right now Reaper does not send info back to the controller so the led rings won’t work.
Third, clean up the features that are already there. So many good ideas in Reaper but a lot of them aren’t fully realized. They don’t work in every scenario one would think they should. For example with cursors, there’s situations where it will use a left and a right cursor and a very similar action will use only one cursor for both sides.
Finally, let actions be focused based (sections) so you can use a hot-key for more than one thing.
That being said Reaper is always being worked on and refined. If you go to their forums, there is a pre-release forum, and you’ll see daily updates to Reaper. Maybe one of these days my requests will be fulfilled, who knows.
I hope all my customized themes and files for Reaper are useful to you. It took me months to make all this. Enjoy.
Donation link: Paypal
Author: FRXST.
Sign up to get the latest updates.
Your email address will always be kept private.
Your email address will always be kept private.
Support my work, become monstrous.
Consider donating or show your support on Patreon.
Consider donating or show your support on Patreon.
© 2020 FRXST™. All Rights Reserved.Site designed and developed by FRXST.// Version 1.5
![Reaper Theme Editor Reaper Theme Editor](http://reaperblog.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Eyssina120.png)
![Reaper Reaper](/uploads/1/2/6/2/126293246/666408119.jpg)