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How reliable is REAPER for MIDI work?

Thanks everyone for your insights! I've meanwhile hunted down the cause of the slow opening MIDI editor which seems to be related to Reaticulate, because after terminating and re-running the script things are back to normal. Since that takes less than a second to do it's not a big problem at all.

So the biggest concern remains the slowing down of the GUI in big projects, but I think I'm willing to take that risk for now, because all the power you gain in other areas seems worth it to me. Hopefully they'll consider adding some sort of GPU acceleration in the future.

Thanks again!
 
Orlu said:
Thanks everyone for your insights! I've meanwhile hunted down the cause of the slow opening MIDI editor which seems to be related to Reaticulate, because after terminating and re-running the script things are back to normal. Since that takes less than a second to do it's not a big problem at all.
Click to expand...
Sounds like something @tack might want to know about.



My hunch would have been that it has to do with anticipative fx processing and the midi editor forcing fx processing of certain tracks to be shuffled around between different cpu cores and switching between realtime and anticipative processing.


EvilDragon said:
You can do this with the event filter.
Click to expand...

You can also right-click-drag a selection box in the velocity lane (which I'm sure you already know, just stating it for the others).
 
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IIRC that last checkbox I show here (Preferences->Audio->Buffering) is disabled by default. Which makes MIDI previews really fast, but if you have a deep tree of foldered tracks with lots of sends (like you might have in an orchestral template), this will shove ALL those tracks onto a single realtime thread, tanking performance. So, my solution here is to reduce the render-ahead time from the default 200 ms (100 ms is still plenty to take advantage of all the juice your CPU has!) and enable anticipative processing on tracks that have MIDI editors open, which should help with GUI lag too I think.

Try it.
 
stalponydroom said:
A thing i really miss while working on midi in Cubase is a way to select notes based on velocity (like the lowest velocities in a part).
I guess you just have to really try it and see if you can live with it, that's the only way to find out!
Click to expand...
@stalponydroom
I don't know if I understood correctly, did you mean you couldn't select notes based on velocity in REAPER instead of Cubase?

In REAPER when using the MIDI editor, there is a filter icon on the top toolbar which brings up a MIDI note selection popup where you can select notes by a variety of criteria inc. velocity range as per the screenshot below:

PS I didn't see ED had already suggested the event filter....
 

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The only actual problem I've had with MIDI in Reaper is the timing when outputting clock or notes to hardware synths. That's when it gets really shaky and unreliable.
 
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Jerner said:
The only actual problem I've had with MIDI in Reaper is the timing when outputting clock or notes to hardware synths. That's when it gets really shaky and unreliable.
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I agree. Used various midi hardware configs and it never seemed to work well. I think that might be the only aspect of Reaper MIDI I would call “unreliable.” The other stuff probably more falls into the realm of potentially inefficient depending on a user’s preferences and style.
 
rudi said:
@stalponydroom
I don't know if I understood correctly, did you mean you couldn't select notes based on velocity in REAPER instead of Cubase?

In REAPER when using the MIDI editor, there is a filter icon on the top toolbar which brings up a MIDI note selection popup where you can select notes by a variety of criteria inc. velocity range as per the screenshot below:

PS I didn't see ED had already suggested the event filter....
Click to expand...
No i meant I'm missing this in Cubase.

In Reaper i can marquee select in the velocity bar and it will select the notes with the velocities within the selection. This is how i often quickly select notes based on what velocity they have (without having to open the event filter dialog)

As far as i've experienced, in Cubase marquee selecting velocities will select all notes, no matter what. I think I would need the logical editor to do the same thing, but there could be a filter function somewhere too that i don't know about yet.
 
stalponydroom said:
No i meant I'm missing this in Cubase.

In Reaper i can marquee select in the velocity bar and it will select the notes with the velocities within the selection. This is how i often quickly select notes based on what velocity they have (without having to open the event filter dialog)

As far as i've experienced, in Cubase marquee selecting velocities will select all notes, no matter what. I think I would need the logical editor to do the same thing, but there could be a filter function somewhere too that i don't know about yet.
Click to expand...
Ah, I get you! Thanks for the claritification :thumbsup:
 
Don't listen to the naysayers. I use Reaper almost exclusively for MIDI and it works great. Better than great. Never had an issue that couldn't be as easily solved as it is in any other DAW. But LIKE any other DAW you have to learn it. You can't step in thinking it's going to work exactly the same as Pro Tools or Logic or Cubase.
 
Orlu said:
I've meanwhile hunted down the cause of the slow opening MIDI editor which seems to be related to Reaticulate, because after terminating and re-running the script things are back to normal.
Click to expand...
Have you been able to reproduce this again? If you can work out a recipe for how I might be able to, I'd appreciate it. Also interested to know which OS you use. Suffice it to say I don't notice this behavior myself, and I agree that'd be pretty intolerable.
 
tack said:
Have you been able to reproduce this again? If you can work out a recipe for how I might be able to, I'd appreciate it. Also interested to know which OS you use. Suffice it to say I don't notice this behavior myself, and I agree that'd be pretty intolerable.
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Yes, it's basically happening each session (on a W11 machine) and pretty much follows the same pattern each time: it starts out normal and gets progressively worse the longer I work (biggest I got up to were like 4-5 seconds for testing purposes, then I really couldn't tolerate it anymore lol). As soon as I terminate and restart Reaticulate, it's back to normal.

FWIW 99% of what I'm doing right now is setting up a ton of track templates and with that creating and editing a lot of articulation maps. I wonder if it is related to that? If anything changes once I'm done with all the groundwork and actually start making music, I'll report back here.
 
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