Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SyneRyder | Hacker News Reader

For those who might not know:

> With Nullsoft gone and Frankel spending his time building a special-effects computer for his electric guitar...

I don't know what happened to the Jesusonic he was building then, but Justin Frankel ended up creating Reaper, the cross-platform Windows/Mac/Linux digital audio workstation that is a solid Pro Tools competitor in a mere 16 MB download:

https://www.reaper.fm/

The installer for the whole DAW is smaller than most add-on VST effects. Some of my favorite albums have been recorded with Reaper, and obviously I'm a Reaper fan and use it too. Just like Winamp, you can pay for it, but if you really can't afford it, there's no time limit and it won't stop you from using it.

Showing my age here, but if you have a copy of the Walnut Creek CD-ROMs with demoscene archives, there's a demo by "Nullsoft" from pre-Winamp days hiding somewhere in there as well.

EDIT: Aww, fwirt beat me to it while I was typing! I guess I'll leave my comment here to add the Nullsoft demo mention. Found a link to his MSDOS demos here: https://www.pouet.net/groups.php?which=1618

EDIT TWO: You can run his Ademo demo on archive.org, type "ademo 1" at the C:\ prompt in the web based DOSbox to run: https://archive.org/details/demoscene_Ademo-Nullsoft

I remember Reaper v2 being like a 4.7mb download at a time when nuendo/cubase/cakewalk/protools etc were >1GB plus samples. With a nicer summing engine and more stable, lower latency vst host than any of them. And the only one with a decent, revenue-dependent tiered license. What a legend.

Linux version of Reaper is 13mb today, if anything the contrast is more stark these days

REAPER is awesome! It has been my DAW of choice for 15 years now. It opens instantly, it's very fast and snappy and it practically never crashes.

I particularly like the concept that everything is just a track. In REAPER, tracks can be arbitrarily nested, they can contain all kinds of items and you can route signals between them.

You need a group? Just make a track and add other tracks to it.

You need a bus? Just a make track and send to it from other tracks.

You need an instrument track? Just add a VSTi to it.

You need a MIDI track? Just add a MIDI item.

In most other DAWs, these are all different things, for no good reason IMO.

It's a straight line from Jesusonic to Reaper: Jesusonic JSFX script is in Reaper, and there's a whole selection of stock JS plugins that come with it and it's actually quite easy to program.

I always figured JSFX was javascript :) I've used reaper and plenty of jsfx plugins for a long time, just never bothered to look under the hood.

Whoa TIL. Jsfx feels way cooler now. Fwiw jsfx is easy fodder for llm’s if you need a quick utility. Mine was a midi channel filter

That's one of my favourite features of Reaper - the fact that scripts I wrote for WinAmp as a teenager can be transplanted there.

I seem to recall he was also working on some software that allowed musicians to jam together over the internet, it somehow took advantage of inherent latency instead of just trying to minimize it.

Edit: found it: https://www.cockos.com/ninjam/

I've never used it, but it's a fascinating idea. The quirk is that no two participants, assuming they're each actually playing and not just listening, will hear the same thing. The following things happen simultaneously:

* Alice will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Bob) played X measures ago

* Bob will play for X measures, while hearing what everyone else (including Alice) played X measures ago

So for the measures mentioned above, Alice might conclude that things went very well, and Bob might conclude that things didn't jibe, and even if these were each true objective facts, they could both be correct as they are not discussing the same thing. There can be no retrospective discussion of a shared experience, only of individual experiences.

I used to use ninjam many years ago, I don't remember the delay being a deal breaker for me, it was just a fun way to practice with other players. If you found a good drummer you could just jam along and have fun with it.

For quality Reaper reviews on every update, The Reaper Blog [0] is most excellent and keeps me excited about the deluge of releases.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@TheREAPERBlog

They really should do an auto updater because it's almost like every time you launch Reaper you are nagged that there's a new version to download.

Oh cool. I used to use Reaper to edit my podcast. Great program. Very easy to use even for a noob.

Reaper has been growing MASSIVELY in popularity in recent years. It's actively on course to topple Pro Tools as the de factory standard for recording studios. It was considered "the little guy" and a niche product just a few years ago but industry professionals have been discovering it and it's popularity is going exponential.

And Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design.

> Reaper is currently a de-facto standard for game audio design

Such a wide and strong claim, I'm not sure there is a single de-facto choice specifically for "game audio design", I've seen most major DAWs, including Reaper, to be used for game audio. If anything is close to a de-facto standard in video game audio, it'd be Wwise and/or FMOD as audio middlewares, then whatever the artists happen to be familiar with for the actual production.

Unless you're talking about some specific genre here, either music- or game-wise?

From my experience, it’s very rare to see someone not using Reaper for sound design. Some use Pro Tools or Cubase, but they aren’t as common as Reaper. It really has no competition due to how easy it is to prepare dozens of assets with a single render (all with correct naming and loudness) as well as extensions that add features no other DAW has (e.g. Global Sampler, stuff by LKC Tools, etc.).

It’s not very good for music, though, so here, the situation is a bit more diverse. So yes, I’m talking concretely about sound design.

I think now it seems clear you're talking about "sound effect design" specifically maybe, rather than sound design? Particularly because you say it's not good for music production, but plenty of us do sound design together with music product, but I've also never done sound effect design, which it does sound like you're talking about.

I’ve never heard of anyone making distinction between “sound design” and “sound effect design” in gamedev. I don’t know anything about cinema or other creative industries though, but my original post is only about video games.

> making distinction between “sound design” and “sound effect design” in gamedev

I think it's more because I come from the side of music production, "sound design" is something I do all the time, but for the purpose of music production. So maybe because I come from the other side, "sound design" makes it sound like you're talking about general sound design, the same stuff you'd do for music production and music in general, but considering the rest of your message, I think probably other's will easier understand you if you'd say "sound effect design" instead of just "sound design". Kind of like any programming is programming, but "demo scene programming" is a sub-niche of that.

No harm no foul, just thought I'd add some extra context for others who similarly got confused by it as me.

It seems fantastic for music to me. I've made some music in it myself. What is it missing?

Harmonix uses REAPER for authoring Rock Band and Fortnite Festival charts and syncing them to the stems

Glad to see a shout-out for Reaper in the first comments, its my favorite DAW and I've used them all.

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