Speaker 1: Welcome to Reaper for Podcasting. My name is Daniel Abendroth, and today I'm going to help you get started using Reaper. Whenever you first open Reaper, it can be daunting, intimidating, it's not really intuitive, and maybe you don't know really how to get started or where to go. When I got started with Reaper a couple of years ago, I came to that same situation. I was moving from Audacity, and it took me, I don't know, three or six months to actually fully make the transition to Reaper, because I didn't know how to do the basic little tasks. All the resources out there was geared towards music production. So if I wanted to find a little information, I'd have to sit through a 30-45 minute video covering a whole range of things that I don't need in order to find that one little thing I do. So my goal is to make it much more concise, to take just the things that you need to know for podcasts, production, and put that into one easy to digest video. So this video is going to get you just the basics, the very minimum to get you over that initial hurdle of using Reaper. Then you can take what you learned in this video and expand on it as you grow in your skills with Reaper. I will be uploading more videos on different techniques and different things in Reaper. So consider this just like the primer, just that little bit to get you over and get you comfortable experimenting with Reaper. So if you haven't already, go to reaper.fm and download the latest version of Reaper, and go ahead and install it. Then once you've done that, we'll continue in this video. So here we are the first time launching Reaper. It asks you to select your audio device. We're not going to do that right now. We're going to get to that in a minute. So just click no. And now here you need to either upload or import your license key or just click still evaluating. Reaper offers an unrestricted, unlimited free trial, meaning you can have a fully functioning version of Reaper for as long as you need in order to see if it's really the DAW you want. Like I said earlier, you know, it took me like six months to finally make that transition to learn enough about Reaper to make it my main DAW. And if it wasn't for this kind of very lenient trial period, I probably wouldn't have made the switch. So I'm really grateful that they do that. So experiment with Reaper, evaluate it. And then once you're ready to take that dive, you can just import the license key here and then get a fully licensed version. But for now, we're just going to use the evaluation version. And so let's go ahead and do that. So click still evaluating and maximize this window. So now we have Reaper. And like I said, it's kind of daunting to figure out where to start, what to do. So let's just go ahead and tweak some settings. So if you hit control P or command P on a Mac or go to options, preferences. Now, this is a very daunting menu as well. There's a lot in here. But we're just going to cover a few things. So the first thing we're going to do is set up the autosave, so that way we don't lose any of the work on the project that we have open. So go to project. And then down here, I like to do every five minutes. It saved me more than a few times. And then save to timestamp file and additional directory. And then I like to call that auto underscore save. Save to timestamp file and project directory. Whatever folder that your project lives in, it'll create everything there. So along with your audio files and everything that you're working on, you also have a long list of backups. And it kind of makes it much more, it's not as clean. So I like to have an additional directory, so that way there's a folder within the folder that has all my autosave. So in the case I ever need it, it's easy to find. And it's not cluttering up my main folder. So now we're going to go ahead and set up our audio devices, which is like the speakers and the microphone that you're going to be using. So under audio, click device. Choose your audio system. I use WaveOut. It's what works for me. Choose whatever works for you. So the reason I went with WaveOut was because I was using, I think, direct sound or something. And I was getting clicks in my playback that wasn't in the actual recording. It was a buffering issue. And switching to WaveOut fixed that. So if you're having issues, that's one place to check. So your input device is going to be the microphone. I am going to be using my ATR USB microphone. I'm using the Shure for the video. But I have a ATR 2100 that I'm going to use for this test recording. Output device is going to be, for me, speakers and headphones. Whatever you're using to listen to playback, that's what you'll choose there. So that's all we need to worry about right now. There is a lot of other settings and other ways you can personalize Reaper. But that's all we need for now. So let's go ahead and click OK. And now we're ready to get started recording. And to do that, we need to create a new track. And we can do that by coming over here and double-clicking on this blank space here. And now we need to arm the track simply by pressing this red Record Arm Disarm button. So we can see the meter bouncing. So we know something is being picked up. We want to make sure the correct mic is being picked up. So we're going to do a simple scratch test. So I have two mics going into my computer. So we test both of them to see which one's getting picked up. So nothing really there. So let me test this one. So you can see, whenever I scratched my MV7, it hardly moved. It's just picking up a faint trace of the sound wave. When I scratched the 2100, clearly the meter was moving. So we know that's the one being picked up. So now we can start recording. And we do that by either hitting Control or Command-R or pressing this red Record button. Reaper for Podcasting is a course designed to help you get started using Reaper for Podcasting. Reaper for Podcasting is a course designed to help you get started using Reaper for Podcasting. It's going to take you through the basics of learning Reaper and really take your podcasting and really take your podcast production to the next level. So once you're done recording, simply hit this Stop button. This screen will pop up to make sure that you save your audio. So click Save All. Don't need this anymore. So now we can get started editing. Now we need to go back to the beginning of the audio. So we do that by clicking Home. So we're not going to do any post-processing on this. We're just going to edit it. But in order to see the waveform, I'm going to go ahead and normalize it to make it bigger. And you just do that by hitting Control-Shift and N. So let's go ahead and start editing. So the first thing that we want to do is delete all this dead air right at the beginning. So in order to do that, scroll in with your mouse, the wheel. Click right before where you start talking. Hit S to make a split. Click on the part you want to delete. And then hit Delete. And then click on the remaining audio and drag it back to the beginning. And then Home to return home, return to the beginning of the track. Reaper for Podcasting is a. So I restarted here. So I need to go ahead and make sure where I want to restart. Reaper for Podcasting is a course designed to help you get started using Reaper for Pod. Reaper for Pod. I'm pretty sure this was my final take. So click right before that S. And then hit Delete. Now, it gets kind of old having to drag this back up. So what we're going to do, I'm going to hit Control-Z to restore that, and I'm going to turn on ripple deleting. And what that will do is whenever you make a delete, so right now it's set per track. So whenever I delete something in this track, everything behind will move forward to close that gap. So what you're going to see is whenever I delete this, this will go fill in the gap, and this will move all the way to the beginning of the track, just like that. Makes it a lot easier to edit quickly. Reaper for Podcasting is a course designed to help you get started using Reaper for Podcasting. It's going to take. So I need to take out this um. So one thing I can do is just click in front of it, and then behind it, and then delete it, like we've been doing before. That gets old, and it's just way too many steps. So what we're going to do is just highlight the part that we want deleted, hit Control-Delete. Save a few keystrokes. There are ways to make that easier, but for this video, I want to keep it super simple, so that's where we're going to leave it. I'm going to make another video later on that will explain how to make that a lot easier, a lot more efficient. Reaper for Podcasting is going to take you through the basics of. Another thing is, by default, you don't follow the play head. It just keeps going, and then it just jumps. That's really annoying for me, so in order to fix that, click Options, and then turn on Continuous Scrolling. So now, it's going to take you through. You keep up with the play head. It's going to take you through the basics of learning Reaper, and really take your, um, and really take, and really take, so now we're going to cut here, so make your split, and since this is a larger section, I'm just going to make a split and find where I want Reaper, and really take your, so right now, I want to get it right here, because I want to save that breath, but I can't click right in front of it, because I'm stuck to the grid line, so we're going to turn the grid lines off. By clicking this icon, they turn off, and now you can click anywhere. So we're going to split here, and then delete all that. And really take, and I don't like this much dead air right there, so hover over the split until you see that icon. So this one is selecting the track on the, or the region on the right, and then I can drag it to where I want it. And the great thing about Reaper, unlike Audacity, is that it's non-destructive, so even though I make these deletes, nothing is really gone. So all I got to do is come to the end of a region, get that icon, click it, and then I can just drag over and restore anything I've removed. That saved me more than a few times. And really take your, and really take, so I also want to delete all this as well. Reaper, and really take, so there's a little bit of weirdness here, so I'm going to take that out. And this breath kind of drops off abruptly. So I want to kind of fade that out a little bit. So two things I can do here. One, hover over the top corner, and you see this icon that you're, it's for the fade. You can click and drag and make that fade a little bit longer. And re, or I can create a crossfade with the audio behind it. So just click and drag, and you see Reaper automatically makes a crossfade. And really take, and really, super simple, and really take your podcasting, and really take your, and really, so that's way too abrupt, and really take, so do the same thing, create a crossfade, and really take your podcasting, to make that breath a little more natural, cast production to the next level. And we want to delete all this dead air at the end, so I'm going to highlight everything. Control, delete. Make sure it's not too weird at the end, next level. Perfect. Hit home to go back to the beginning, and we're going to listen through one more time, just to make sure that we didn't miss anything. Reaper for Podcasting is a course designed to help you get started using Reaper for Podcasting. It's going to take you through the basics of learning Reaper, and really take your podcast production to the next level. All right, it sounds pretty good. Obviously, it needs some cleanup, but for this video, it's going to be perfect. Now, we just need to render it to an MP3. In order to do that, hit File, and Render, or you can hit Control, Alt, Render, or whatever it is for Mac, and that'll bring up the Render menu. So this is the Render menu. There's only a couple of things here you need to worry about. The first thing is the file name. The file name will always delete to whatever you save the project as. So in this case, since we didn't save the project, it's just defaulted to Untitled. So let's go ahead and save that as Demo. This is the folder the file is going to render to. This is the default folder for Reaper. If you want to change that, just go to Browse, and you can search for the folder that you want. The next thing is right here. You can change it from Stereo to Mono. Since this file is pure vocal, we don't need Stereo. So let's go ahead and change that to Mono. And then the last thing is the format. Reaper defaults to WAV. Let's go and change that to MP3, because that's the file that you want in order to upload it to your media host. And then pretty much everything else, the default's going to be OK. We'll get into more details in other videos. But for now, this is perfect. So once you're ready, click on Render. Now, since this file is only like 12 seconds long, it was almost instantaneous. Longer episodes are going to be, obviously, take much longer to render. And you can actually see the waveform being rendered in real time, which is pretty cool. Kind of take a look at what the final is once you have compression and everything else. But for this, we don't need to do that. Now we have our demo.mp3. And you can click in this folder and see it. And that brings up your project folder. So since we didn't save a project folder, it's just stuck in the Reaper Media folder. And you can see our recordings and our peak files, our autosave folder, as well as our mp3. And that's it. You've successfully produced your first episode in Reaper. Well, I'm assuming it's your first. You might have actually struggled through an episode before this. Anyway, there you go. Now you have the basics of Reaper. And you can take that information and that knowledge and build upon it and grow your skill in Reaper. And subscribe to this channel, because I will be creating more videos on other techniques and how to edit better and record better and do everything else in Reaper geared towards podcasting. So if you're tired of watching all these music-related Reaper videos, trying to find those little tidbits, subscribe to this channel, because I'm going to be putting out a lot more content about using Reaper for podcasting. Thanks so much for watching. If you have questions or if you have specific topics that you want covered, leave them in the comments. And then I'll address them. Thanks so much for watching. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.