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Comment by SwellJoe | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, Justin Frankel continues to produce great software. He founded Cockos Incorporated, which produces REAPER; I think it's pretty widely accepted in the audio recording community that REAPER is the best value in the multitrack recording DAW market, and among the best overall tools for the purpose.

He's obviously wealthy enough to never need to work again. It's clear Frankel just loves music, and wants to make meaningful contributions in the field. So, I think that's pretty cool. (I've also been a very happy REAPER user/customer for many years.)

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Also, don't forget Licecap, one of the easiest to use and most consistent cross-platform gif-screen-capture tools:

http://www.cockos.com/licecap/

I said a very audible "holy shit, this is that guy?" when the link to jesussonic took me to Cockos.

Wow I didn't know he made licecap as well. As far as gif recordings go, it really whips the llamas ass!

Licecap definitely changed how I worked. If you want the rest of your frontend development team to think you're a god, include licecap or other gifs of features/bugfixes on code reviews. It's a thing most developers don't even think of doing (at least most didn't in my experience). Makes it easy for stake holders (if they're allowed near your code reviews/tickets/whatever), devs, qa, to easily see how functionality has changed.

I first learned of it from a young QA at a company I previously worked at, and I am so grateful I met him and was able to learn from him.

I'd like to give an honorable mention to Debugmode Wink [0] which for a long time was my go-to freeware application for recording and presenting screen-activity on Windows.

[0] http://www.debugmode.com/wink/

At one point licecap stopped working for me (MPB, using an external screen). The Giphy capture tool is also a good one. I wholeheartedly agree that including screenshots are a great way to show things :)

Yeah, I had a periodic issue with new installs (or would see colleagues have this problem): you'd record something but the gif would be all black. I think there was a fix but I've long forgotten :)

If you want the rest of your frontend development team to think you're a god, include licecap or other gifs of features/bugfixes on code reviews

But if you do, for the love of God make it as short as possible. When I'm browsing through the tickets using some stock web browser, and the anigif runs for five minutes before reaching the point, it is such a pain to have to grab the gif and either dig out a tool than can track through an anigif, or have to cast it into some other format and then track through that. Then, I'm stuck either doing that every time, or attaching another file to the ticket; the same animation, but in a format that we can track through so I don't have to watch the entire five minutes.

Is there a Licecap equivalent for Android mobile?

cinst licecap

I agree, REAPER is very highly regarded in music production circles.

Anecdotically, I have been producing electronic music as a hobby for many years now, and while I own much more expensive programs (e.g. Ableton Live Suite which cost a staggering AU $999) I find REAPER to be an extremely enjoyable piece of software and I have found myself using it often.

I wouldn't really consider it a competitor to Ableton Live, though there's some overlap. But, as a competitor to Pro Tools, it's hard for me to think of anything even in the same ball park as REAPER (and REAPER costs a fraction of what Pro Tools costs, as well). I use FL Studio or Renoise for the stuff that people use Ableton for; but, REAPER blows them all away for recording live musicians and then mixing the resulting tracks.

The term "DAW" has too many uses, and it can be confusing. REAPER is a Pro Tools competitor (and a good one). Ableton can be used for multitrack recording of live musicians, but I don't know of any studios that use it for that, unless their focus is on electronic production with some live music added on top. And, REAPER can be used for electronic productions and loop-based composition and live performance (and there's even a UI for REAPER that makes it act more like Ableton), but it's not its raison d'être.

If you're composing and performing predominantly electronic music in-the-box, then Ableton or others might be a better choice. But, if you're recording live musicians, REAPER is amazing. There can be some useful interoperation between them, as well. Live can plug into REAPER, so you can sync up your Live performance with your REAPER tracks, and produce a hybrid work. REAPER may be stronger for mastering, as well, depending on how you like to work.

Traditional recording engineers, who learned in a studio with tape and hardware mixers and patch bays, will be quickly comfortable with REAPER. The same can not be said of Ableton Live (or FL Studio, etc.). But, musicians who grew up on synths, sequencers and beat machines with sequencers (like 303, 808, etc.), may find the Ableton approach more intuitive. Both are high quality tools doing a very good job in their niche. REAPER just happens to be so good at such a low price that it stands out as exceptional and worth praise, IMHO.

I'd argue that REAPER is the Vim or Emacs of DAWs. There's a steep learning curve, getting the best out of it requires a lot of memorisation and customisation, but nothing matches its speed and power in the hands of an expert.

I disagree with that assessment, as well. It's extremely easy to use, if you've worked in a physical recording studio, or if you've used Pro Tools (or any other traditional multitrack recording DAWs). You don't need to know the hotkeys, but if you do, you'll work faster. You don't need to customize it, but it's very customizable.

But, it isn't obscure. The GUI is clear and simple and well-documented. And, I didn't find the learning curve steep at all; it was almost instant. I mean, I literally don't remember a period of "learning to use REAPER", I only remember starting to use it, and having it Just Work. I went to school for audio recording, and have worked off and on professionally as an engineer, so I suppose that may have shortened the learning process. Which is why I say it's a tool for engineers who want to work with a traditional recording studio environment. REAPER is exactly that. If REAPER has a learning curve, it is merely the process of learning how to record in a multitrack studio workflow.

I agree with this assessment as well. REAPER totally has the power of vim or emacs, but when I started out and knew almost nothing about multitrack recording, I stuck with REAPER because its defaults were so easy and I didn't feel handicapped. The UI is so logically laid out and it really helped me understand routing and signal path in a way I didn't before, when I was trying to use other DAW's with less success.

The REAPER user guide runs to 468 pages and barely scratches the surface. REAPER shines because it's massively customisable through ReaScript, JSFX and custom actions. A lot of essential functionality isn't developed by Cockos, but is part of external extensions - you'll need SWS installed for bread-and-butter stuff like r128 normalization, track notes and groove quantize.

REAPER is much more limited than Pro Tools or Nuendo out of the box, but it's vastly more powerful overall. You can use REAPER without learning it, but you'll miss out on most of what it has to offer.

That may speak more to what you're doing with it. I've never needed extensive customization or extensions to do what I needed to do in REAPER, and I've been using it for many years (maybe since the beginning...I bought it very early on, and while I kept alternatives around for a few years, it rapidly rose to the top).

But, again, I use other tools for my MIDI sequencing and composition tasks. The MIDI and sequencing and loop-based composition side of REAPER is weak. But, the multitrack recording capability is quite strong, IMHO, and very easy to use. Maybe with extensions and going deep on scripting and such you can make it work well for those other tasks, and perhaps that's where our communication is breaking down. For me, REAPER is a super reliable, super fast and efficient, multitrack recording DAW that works exactly the way I expect a multitrack to work. I rarely need docs, I rarely need to fumble around looking for what I want to do.

I did note, in the distant past, that REAPER wasn't really competitive with Pro Tools for broadcast and film production work. While it had SMPTE sync, it was missing some other stuff...that I can't remember now. I guess R128 fits into that category of film/broadcast stuff that REAPER doesn't do well. It's cool that there's a set of extensions that covers some of that. But, by the time you're doing advanced stuff like that, it's always gonna require scaling a learning curve, right? I mean, Pro Tools isn't easy to use for advanced stuff (or for any stuff, really...I find Pro Tools somewhat unintuitive, when I haven't used it in a few years and sit down to poke at it again).

But, the comparison to vim or emacs only seems apt once you're doing hard things with it. I stand by my assertion that for the simple stuff, REAPER is very easy to use.

Thanks for bringing SMS to my attention! Looks cool.

Yes, I agree that REAPER and Ableton are very different types of DAWs. In fact, that's the very reason why I use REAPER (it complements Live) while at the same time I don't use, for example, Bitwig (although I would like to give it a shot in the future).

I was just stating that REAPER's software quality, as I perceive it, is as high as much more expensive DAWs; I mentioned Live Suite as a comparison, purely because is the most expensive piece of music software that I own.

He was a regular in #c on IRC back in the 90s. Pleasant, fun guy. I kind of miss those days.

Me too, back then, programming was more about having fun and less about striking it rich building walled garden commercial software that tricks more people into clicking on ads.

He used to come on #winprog - I think Winamp was his first windows app, he was always asking about GUI elements how he was planning on making it skinnable. Everyone was trading mp3's and I couldn't figure out why you would want to spend 15 minutes downloading a song...

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