Reascript is (in my opinion) one of the best parts of the Reaper Digital Audio Workstation. In short – Reascript allows you to create extremely detailed custom actions that Reaper does not ship with itself. For some quick examples, look at X-Raym and HeDa’s scripts.
A little background, for those completely unfamiliar
In the realm of professional audio editing, there is a small handful of software that can all – for the most part – get the job done. Most of these are proprietary closed systems and each excels at something a little different than the other. Very few pieces of audio software allow for heavy user customization via programming or even custom shortcuts. Those that do don’t make the process easy.
When you combine Reaper’s cost ($60 for a discounted license/$225 for a commercial license) and customizability – it’s incredibly difficult to argue against at least giving the software a shot.
For those of you who get bit by the bug and want to dig further into the system, I’ll explain more below.
How do Reascripts work?
Reaper has a super window called the “Actions List”, opened by pressing “?” on your keyboard.
This window at first looks like any other software that allows you to set user-defined shortcut keys. However, it doesn’t stop there.
From this window you can:
- Setup “Custom Actions”, which are user-defined combinations of pre-existing actions.
- Export and import Keymaps, which are completely custom setups of user-defined keyboard shortcuts.
- Create, edit, and load Reascripts, which as described above are “Custom Actions” on steroids.
For the examples I provided above (again X-Raym and HeDa), you can load a developer’s script through the “Load” button next to the text that says “Reascript”. From there, assign your own shortcut key for the specific script, and get to playing with it!
Go take some time to try a couple of scripts. Later this week I will be giving you a primer on how you can begin to learn to write your own!
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