ReaperDAW Guide for making Mashups (& YTPMVs)

To meme-machines curious about Reaper.

This is a guide for all of you to get familiar with Reaper, a simple but powerful program. This guide was made for learning Reaper's tools that allow you to make mashups faster, so I won't go over every single aspect of Reaper. I made this guide with mashup creation in mind, but think it could be helpful for YTPMV makers too.

I hope this guide will let some of us progress who have been having troubles using their current DAW, and be more focused on getting your creativity from your mind to reality.

Why Reaper?

• Reaper is a very easy to use and straightforward DAW full of features that make your workflow faster all packed in a very small size.
• It has a 60-day trial. And if you want to buy it afterwards, it's only $60, that's a steal compared to other DAWs. Or, ya know... keep using it without paying. It’s a bit like winrar except they insist it isn’t.
• It's very flexible and customizable.
• If you use Audacity, Reaper has so much more to offer, for starters it has a BPM grid (woohoo!), a ton of plug-ins, NON-DESTRUCTIVE EDITING and most importantly: more room for customizability and using it how you want to.
• If you use FL Studio, you'll appreciate how much easier it is in Reaper to work with audio files. While FL Studio has its strengths in producing EDM and midi editing, Reaper is better with chopping sounds and throwing things around.
• If you use Vegas Pro, you'll probably figure out how Reaper works the fastest of all. The two are very similar, but Reaper has some features that Vegas doesn't have that are made for music production like midi-editing, being able to use VSTi’s, stretch markers, transient detection, and more. If you are convinced or curious to see more, read on as we set up and explore Reaper :DDD.

Table of Contents

Downloading and setting up Reaper

• Go to Reaper's download page.
• Choose the correct download for your type of OS.
• Now run the file and press I agree.
• Choose destination folder. You can optionally make a portable install that you can move over to a USB drive.
• Choose next and check the boxes you'd like to install, or just leave it as is and click on Install.
• After it has installed, run Reaper.