REAPER v3: From MIDI to Automation to Guitar Hero Control, the Alt DAW Improves

Welcome to the alt-DAW scene. Last week, not only did Renoise continue its rebirth of the forgotten “tracker” genre of music making software with ReWire support, but we saw a big new version of REAPER, the beloved lightweight audio production tool from the original creator of Winamp.
What makes an “alt DAW”, or “indie” production software? To me, it’s:
- small development teams of a few people
- tightly-integrated communities directly involved in feature requests
- trusting users instead of adding significant DRM, returning to the traditional “shareware” business model of old
- affordable pricing
That’s not to take away from some of the bigger players – I was struck this week with the (unsurprising) ubiquity of Ableton Live at MUTEK; it’s a real testament to what they have accomplished. But choice is essential, and looking at the history of music technology, it’s in the periods of real choice that the most interesting things have happened. It makes everything better when developers really have to compete.
Cockos REAPER has spread almost virally as an underground DAW, partly because you can download the thing and get started with without any restrictions, then buy it for as little as US$60 for personal use.
http://www.reaper.fm/index.php
It’s not just for Windows people any more, either – the Mac version is now officially supported. You can run on Windows 7 or Windows 2000 or even 98 (with limited support). You can run on 10.4 Macs, or even PowerPC (though Intel is recommended). You can even run on Linux with official WINE support, though I’d still like to see a native Linux version, especially as Linux on netbooks is getting so lovely.

Version 3.0 came out this week. There are a huge number of improvements:
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