Hi everyone,
This is my 10 000th post here on the forum! A bit more of 10 years to get there, wouhou! 🎉🎈
So someone told me “make it big”. Not sure what is expected from a 10 000th posts announcement, and how big I can make it… maybe some kind of summary of my work, some feature requests highlights, or a call to fundraising. Let’s make a bit of all that. 😁
Over the years, I used REAPER in many types of project, I can without too much doubt claim it’s the most versatile DAW out there. I have worked on musical projects, audio-fiction, on podcasts, on video post-production, on sound design, on sample library creation, also explored a bit game audio, virtual instrument creation, subtitling, video editing and recently, even light animation . The fact it can be extended by so many ways (custom JSFX, actions, windows, web interfaces etc) is quite unique, and extremely powerful! 💪
And all this is possible while staying affordable. Thanks to a non-limited evaluation period and fair pricing model, I was able to initiate lots of closed ones to digital audio, some having not a single dollar to invest in software (student etc). Most other DAW, as good as they can be (and I am sometimes quite impressed by some of their features or ergonomics), often have a deal-breaking constrain for beginners : maybe it is platform specific, maybe it is a steep entry price to pay, or a subscription based model, or maybe the software is too specific to one kind of project (beat based music for eg). With REAPER, you can basically do it all.
Of course the downside of such flexibility is that REAPER does require, maybe more than other DAW, some initial guidance / training to be able to customize it to anyone particular needs. There is room for improvements on the defaults, and some action would need be built-in to not have beginners getting lost in the settings. The learning curve is steep, and that might be too much for some, but to be fair, every major DAW need an initial training, digital audio relying on complex concept.
I saw REAPER improved a lot, from v4.5+ to the current v7.18, in terms of performance, features, UI etc. Ant it still continue to be enhanced at an impressive rate, while keeping its original ethical statement (being affordable) which is awesome, thanks Cockos Team for that! 👍
It is mostly on the REAPER ecosystem that my contribution on the forum had an impact. I created the first all-purpose free ReaScript repository, taking advantage of the new (at that time) Lua language integration. This repo, my interactive API doc page, and my YouTube ReaScripts series contributed to encourage other users to start scripting and sharing tons of scripts as well. Soon after, cfillion to created a resource downloader extension (ReaPack) which changed REAPER game, mostly by making scripts accessible to people without having to dig into long discussion threads and download scripts individually. ReaPack has now more than 650 000 downloads, so that is quite a success, and my repo is one of the few being default. So that is a lot of users using my scripts, all this for free!✌
I also joined my force to other scripters to maintain collaborative repositories under the ReaTeam group initiated by mpl. ReaTeam ReaScript repository is now the biggest public ReaScripts repository with more than 700 scripts (my own being second). This lead me to hang online with some really nice and talented contributors, sharing to each others tips and tricks about best scripting practice. I recently created a website, ReaLinks.net, to promote others inspiring works as well.
All my various contributions, including my free ReaScripts, my REAPER 5 article, ReaComics, my REAPER theme, my tutorials and almost daily assistance here and other platform, leads me to being interviewed for the REAPER Legends video series, which is quite an achievement! 😎
Yet, time are changing, and with current inflations and the rise of IA for coding (harvesting my code and my documentation page without any consideration), my professional activity, mainly based on custom scripting, is in extra-low phase, and I’m at a pivoting point where I need to consider how to have regular sustainable income. Despite almost daily work on free related REAPER stuffs, donation is anecdotal (2 or 3 per year).
So, if you want to take advantage of this celebration week to help me back, It would greatly help if you could consider buying of my premium scripts packs 🥰.
As part of this celebration day, and for the future or REAPER, I would like to highlight some feature requests and long standing bugs I still faced (not all can be solved by scripting!). I compiled those I created and those I supported, leaving apart some general ones (like UI/feature improvements for ReaPlugs), and some way too specific ones, and some maybe too unreasonable (like being able to have more UI elements colorizable for nice Dark Theme support, or have video processor storing rebuild). I also excluded things which not related to REAPER itself, like forum enhancements and features (though, this would be a major subject as well).
This left us with a big list of around 100 open feature requests, rated from 1-6, 1 being “I surely only needed that in a particular context but I can leave without it”, to 5 being “This would be really good to have”, with an extra 6th level being “this would be game changer, I wish this every day”.
The list also contains 30 opened bug I have reported, rated from level 1 “this is an edge case scenario” to 5 “bug still present, making the software looks broken or breaking some workflow wishes”.
This took quite some time to collect and sort, so I hope it will be helpful somehow! 😆
Thanks everyone in the REAPER community for your friendly support, for helping make REAPER better and by providing assistance to others, and thanks to Cockos for their amazing software (and as a bonus, for their consideration for the feature requests listed just before, hehe 😉).
Don’t hesitate to leave me a word below!
Now I can answer threads I bookmarked but couldn’t answer until this post was made. 🤭
See you around! 🖖
PS: Still there? Well, if you want help to celebrate this 10 000th post achievement with me, here is a 10% discount on my scripts store, valid for the next 10days: 10000THX. Enjoy!✨