# REAPER for sample management?



## Kent (Aug 9, 2017)

I've recorded a multi-mic sampling session in Pro Tools.

I hear that Reaper can be really efficient (read: far more than Pro Tools) in chopping and tagging samples, but I am very new to Reaper and don't know where to begin.

So, for those of you who use Reaper for this purpose, are there any resources I should look at or scripts I should download? 

Or am I just barking up the wrong tree to begin with?


----------



## Rasmus Hartvig (Aug 9, 2017)

It's definitely the right tool for the job. I've done chopping of massive amounts of files with very high efficiency, and I don't imagine that any other DAW can quite compete with Reaper in this regard. I don't know of any guides or tutorials as such, but in general you want to these things:

- Get your mic recordings synced up across a number of tracks (if you name the tracks "close", "mid" etc. you'll be able to append those labels to the exported files - or have each mic rendered into a correspondingly named folder)

- Chop the audio items up. Depending on the material Reaper's "tab to transient" and "move to previous zero-crossing" can be helpful. If you end up repeating the same two or three functions in a row, you can create a custom action and bind it to a hotkey to greatly speed things up.

- Apply (minuscule) fade-outs at the end of each audio item. This can be done by selecting all the items and entering a fade out duration in the Item Properties window.

- Do whatever additional processing you need.

- Name the items and create regions for exporting. Here the SWS extension is a great time saver. It has a "Label processor" that allows you to apply name and numbering to items. If the lengths of items are equal across different mics, you can do this on one track only. When all items on a track is named the way you like, you can run an action that creates a region around every selected item and derives the name from the item.

- Set up a render. In the render window, choose to render Regions. There's a bunch of wildcards you can use in the filename, so if you for instance enter someting like $region_$trackname you get a file with the regions name and the name of the rendered track. Like "Guitar_C3_up_rr1_close.wav". Use the Region Render Matrix to select that you want to render every track separately.

This is mostly a general roadmap written without Reaper in front of me, but I hope it helps!


----------

