> - You are an individual, and REAPER is only for your personal use, or
> - You are an individual or business using REAPER commercially, and yearly gross revenue does not exceed USD $20,000, or
> - You are an educational or non-profit organization.
Oh, it actually seems pretty reasonable. At least as someone not involved in the DAW space. $60 for professional grade tools on a non-subscription looks like it's comfortable for someone to get into this.
out of curiosity what do you use it for in the non-professional realm? just interested since honestly reaper looks very intimidating as an outsider looking in
I’ve used it for recording my guitar practice. I can throw in a jam track or backing track then record myself playing with it. One of the best things you can do as a musician is listen to yourself, you’ll spot all kinds of ways to improve.
* Recording my practice to listen back
* Recording music just for fun
* Using it to play back songs I want to learn at different tempos and speeds (I play guitar at a church so this comes in very handy).
I bought a license when I first got serious about music with the launch of 5 in 2015, and I'm still getting updates. I've moved on to Ableton Live for making music, but there's no match for Reaper when it comes to editing or finalizing audio. SWS and Reapak provide a tool for just about any operation.
For example: I use Ozone to do a quick and dirty master on songs. The tool suggests running it on the loudest part of the audio. SWS provides an action that moves the playhead to the loudest part of a clip so there's no guesswork.
It's practically free at that price, and given that it's more-or-less a "Dude In A Shed" project it's hard to begrudge the money.
If you think 60 bucks for a professional non-subscription heavy-duty media tool is good, DaVinci Resolve is going to blow your tiny wee mind - you can use the same tools they use to make stuff for Netflix, right there on your desktop, for *free*. If you want the extra features of the paid one (maybe you want to cut 8K video, or you really need neural network rescaling, or something) it's about 300 dollars. And that's it, that's you - you own a licence, it's yours, forever, including the upgrades.
At the money that Reaper costs, it's worth buying a copy just to help the folks out.
Huh TIL! Reaper is considered by a lot of professionals to be the best all around DAW for those who are unaware of the audio world. It only really gets the respect it deserves though in the world of game audio design. If DAW's were compared to operating systems, logic/ableton would be macOS, Pro Tools would be Windows, and Reaper would be Linux.
I've made this same comparison between OS and DAWs and totally agree. I'm a reaper user for like 13 years now. I use it on a mac, though it's cool to see how far audio production on Linux has become, with both REAPER and now Bitwig available for Linux.
https://www.reaper.fm/