This guide is an accompaniment to my Aircon 2026 talk "My DAW Can Do What?! - Rapid-Fire REAPER Radness", which condensed some pretty amazing REAPER features in 25 minutes. Of course, that left little time to actually go too in-depth on the topics covered. That's why I made this guide which includes recaps, links to, and tutorials for each of the tools and workflows mentioned.
Once the talk is available on-demand, the video will also be embedded right here!
Act I: Hidden in Plain Sight
1.1. Spectral Editing
Spectral editing is, in fact a really deep and handy feature that's incredibly easy to miss. From "painting out" unwanted pops and clicks, to fully transforming the harmonic content or transient structure of an audio file - it's all right here and, with some practice, pretty intuitive to use.
Best of all, all of these edits are processed in real-time and are completely non-destructive, meaning they can be adjusted, moved around, or removed at any time.
1.2. Getting Nerdy with Render Stats
A simple button click before rendering an audio file in REAPER can net you interactive HTML documents giving you second-to-second loudness measurements for any render job. This can be incredibly handy if you're working on long-form content where having to measure average loudness can be time consuming, especially if it has been a while since you last touched the session.
Small in file size and highly parsable, these files could also form the starting point of larger automated asset tracking systems your team could develop to keep tabs on where each of your asset category stands when it comes to loudness compliance.
When rendering multiple files at once, you can decide whether REAPER should output one render stats file per generated audio file, or combine them all in a single large file that encompasses the entire render job.
1.3. Got Videos to Edit? Do it in REAPER!
Not only does REAPER support creating audio alongside a video track, it, in fact, supports an unlimited number of video tracks and offers a variety of fundamental capabilities that make it quite a formidable video editing tool.
In fact, one of the ways I had been able to drastically speed up documenting my recording process was by simply syncing audio and video from each session in REAPER, grouping the items, and editing both in tandem - meaning once my assets were edited and mastered, so was my video!
1.4. Create Custom Context Menus
Any toolbar can be turned into a custom context menu that can be brought up at the mouse cursor at any time. This is incredibly useful for actions you commonly use during editing or ones that help with occasional issues that otherwise require multiple clicks or a trip to the Action List to solve.
To do so, simply assemble a toolbar via the Open Toolbar <x> action, right-click it and click Customize Toolbar, save your changes, then locate the Show Toolbar <x> at Mouse Cursor action and map it to the shortcut or hotkey of your choice. I mapped my go-to editing menu on F1 for example.
1.5. Reference Images? Just Put 'Em In Your Timeline!
1.6. Run Actions via MIDI
The Action List in REAPER essentially contains every single thing that REAPER can do outside of its settings. This means that any of these functions can also be triggered with a keyboard shortcut. However, that's not even the end of it. Any of these actions could also be triggered by a MIDI CC!
This of course opens up a bottomless well of possibilities to control your DAW. From handling transport via a footswitch, to mapping dials on your keyboard to timeline zoom, MIDI CC control allows you to make REAPER more intuitive, and, more importantly, more accessible for users with limb differences, differences in motor skills, or needs for other usability accommodations without the need for external helper applications.
Act II: Creation & Ideation
2.1. Stretch it to Infinity with RRREEEAAA
REAPER has a whopping 11(!) time stretching and pitch shifting algorithms so it's definitely all too easy to ignore a bunch of them outright once you've found your favorite. Each has specific strengths. For example, Elastique 3.3.3 Pro is cleanest for polyphonic sources and rhythmic material while Elastique 3.3.3 Soloist reigns supreme for monophonic sources.
However, the odd one out, an algorithm going by RRREEEAAA, can turn almost any source into drones, verb tails, and otherworldly textures by simply stretching them out to your heart's content.
Best of all, there's even a handy GUI extension for it that lets you apply it to any item super quickly without having to make it your default warping algorithm! You can download ReaStretch by importing the below repository with ReaPack and subsequently searching for "ReaStretch" when browsing packages.
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/tdspk/ReaScripts/main/index.xml
2.2. We've Got A Kaoss Pad At Home
When designing sound for anything that moves or evolves, few things can beat the ability to perform multiple parameter changes at once to really match the energy of a scene. Thankfully, this couldn't be any easier thanks to Tech Audio's geniusly simple and free XY Pad extension.
Mapping parameters is as simple as can be. Simply twiddle your desired knob in any plug-in, click the XY Pad window and either press the "X" or "Y" keys on your keyboard, or select Map to X/Y Axis in the Mappings menu.
This can be repeated indefinitely for each axis, allowing you to create multiple parameters across several plug-ins for each, with full control over ever parameter's variable range.
2.3. We've Got Radium At Home
Many of you probably know about Soundminer's famed Radium sampler. And you probably also know that it's quite a pricy proposition that just isn't in the cards for everyone. Worry not! Thanks to REAPER community member analogmad we were blessed with a great free alternative that allows mapping any number of sounds as round robins in REAPER's native ReaSamplOMatic5000 sampler, letting you perform them via MIDI.
Simply select any number of items on one track, run the action "Script: _AM_Playdium_Load_Selected_Media_Items_into_RS5K.lua", and the items will be mapped as samples in ReaSamplOMatic5000 alongside a custom MIDI randomizer plug-in. Each key press on your MIDI controller will now result in a random one of the selected samples playing.
Do this for several tracks contained within a folder track, and you can perform near infinite variations of that combination of sounds with the ability to record the audio from each layer separately for later editing.
2.4. Parameter Modulation
Much like in Ableton, Reason, or Bitwig, REAPER allows for any automatable parameter to be modulated either by an LFO or audio signals from its own or other tracks, essentially making absolutely everything sidechainable.
This is of course an incredibly handy feature for sound design. Increase distortion during louder portions of the signal while leaving quiet ones untouched? Have the transient of another layer affect a frequency shifter frequency on another? Sidechain a flanger's feedback level to your kick drum? Idk, the last one's kinda weird but guess what... it's all possible!
The quickest way to do so is to either set a shortcut or make a toolbar button for the action Envelopes: View envelopes for last touched track/item, which will automatically show the automation lane for whichever plug-in or track parameter you last clicked on.
From here, click the sine wave button to view the plug-in modulation dialog.
Here, you can select whether an Audio signal or LFO should be modulating the parameter in question. When first bringing this up, only the track's native audio channels will show up as available modulation sources. However, this changes the moment another track is being sent to this one. If so, you'll see tracks 3+4 and so forth, depending on how many receives you've set up (little reminder, setting up a send is as easy as dragging and dropping one track's Route button onto the other!).
From here you can tweak the sensitivity, value range, and ballistics (i.e. how fast the parameter should respond to your audio signal) to your liking.
Needless to say, this is an incredible sound design tool that you get right out of the box!
Act III: Efficiency to the Max
3.1. Rendering Extensions
Personally, by far the most transformative change to my workflow has been adopting rendering extensions for REAPER. In my case, I'm fully invested in nvk_WORKFLOW 2 by nvk.tools but there are a variety of others offering similarly game changing workflow acceleration.
In short, these extension will build upon REAPER's already excellent render pipeline and add powerful asset naming, render preset, and automation capabilities that make it a lot easier to always render the right things, with the correct names, at the correct loudness, into the appropriate folders - making your life and those of your teammates a lot easier in the process.
While this topic could fill a 5000+ word blog post, I'd rather let some of the products do the talking. Check out the videos below and don't hesitate to try out RENDERVAN and LKC Render Blocks for free!
Get RENDERVAN by importing this repository via ReaPack:
raw.githubusercontent.com/vanyzblazo/KRZYSIEKS-WELLNESS-PACK/main/index.xml
3.2. Rendering & Wildcards
Continuing on the topic of rendering with another subject that could fill an entire essay: Wildcards are seriously dope and a REAPER feature you should incorporate into your workflow ASAP if you haven't already.
Put simply, Wildcards are dynamic variables that allow you to automatically add project information to file names, metadata, and more. There is a huge scope of variables you can populate this way but some of my personal highlights are:
- $marker - Adds the name of the marker preceding the rendered region or item.
- $region - Adds the name of the region containing the rendered items.
- $item - Adds the file name or custom name of the selected item rendered.
- $tracknumber - Adds track number of rendered track, great for sending out tracks for mixing.
- $folders[_] - Includes the selected item's parent folder track structure either as a file folder structure (i.e. \folder1\folder2\audiofile.wav) or separated by your desired separator inserted in brackets (like underscores, dashes, spaces, etc.)
- $date - Add date of render, great for mixes and revisions of long form content.
- $format - Adds channel count of rendered file.
By simply adding a wildcard in the file name filed of the render window or one of the previously mentioned render extension's renaming tools, these variables will automatically populate when rendering files, making it easy to always have your files named correctly and placed in the correct location. This is especially crucial when iterating on the same files a lot throughout a longer project.
To make this extra foolproof, wildcards will be recognized even when spelled slightly incorrectly or partially (see below).
3.3. Rendering Multiple Projects at Once
The Render Queue is an absolute knockout feature in REAPER if you often find yourself rendering lots of alternative mixes of your work, needing to bust out stems for an entire album or live show, making big picture tweaks on multiple projects in a row, or needing to render several projects worth of long-form content and don't want to have it eat into time you could be spending actively working.
Essentially, the Render Queue lets you add any render job to a queue rather than executing it right away, letting you render your day's work in one go whenever it's most convenient rather than having to wait for the render job to finish before you can move on to other things.
Render time can really add up, especially when bouncing alternative mixes or longform content so being able to do this while AFK might be one of REAPER's biggest time savers for anyone working in audio post, mixing, mastering, or podcasting.
3.4. Fixing Oopsies Quickly
Act IV: 🤯🤯🤯
4.1. Turn Any FX Chain Into an IR
Within the awesome ReaTeam Scripts repository hides this incredible little gem of a script allowing you to turn any effects chain in REAPER into a bespoke impulse response for recall in convolution plug-ins or even the convolution reverb in your audio middleware or game engine of choice!
This can be useful in a number of scenarios. Say you're designing a bespoke processing chain to process your character's voices with when they're wearing helmets or talking through radio comms. You could then export this as an IR (or "futz" if you will) and process VO in real-time via your game's convolution processor of choice rather than processing countless VO lines multiple times - or even worse, having to do so for multiple languages.
Of course, this process is still limited by the general limitations of the convolution process. Time-based effects (reverb, delay) and general timbre changes (EQ, speaker modeling) work best, while modulation. pitch shifting, and otherwise transformative effects will produce unpredictable (but not always undesirable) results. Trial and error is the name of the game here, but the results may end up saving you a ton of time and extraneous processing in the long run.
Simply import the repository below via ReaPack and find the action "amagalma_Create Impulse Response (IR) of the FX chain of the selected track" in your action list after to give this a try.
4.2. ReaVerb is Seriously Deep!
When first opening the ReaVerb plug-in, you'd be forgiven for thinking it was the most plain and barebones reverb out these. No presets, no IRs, and no immediate clue as to what you'll need to do to get any actual reverb out of the thing besides a little Add button in the Impulse response generation field.
And that field is exactly where its power lies. Rather than being a reverb generator with a fixed signal flow and limited pre-defined parameters to tweak an existing IR or preset, ReaVerb is fundamentally modular.
To import an IR file, you would click Add and add the File module, then load in your desired audio clip, no matter whether it's a proper impulse or just any other audio you want to transform your source signal with (seriously, try convolving your audio with random other bits of audio and see what kinda madness you can come up with!).
From there, you can add additional modules like algorithmic verb generation, stretching, gain adjustments, reversing, and other processing steps that get applied to the output IR in sequence.
Besides reverb and unpredictable sonic transformation, you can also use ReaVerb as a cabinet modeler or FutzBox-lite provided that you have the relevant IR files at hand - many of which are available for free here.
Record and Deconvolve Your Own IRs!
This is by far my favorite part of ReaVerb: It offers a complete toolkit to generate variable length sine sweeps as well as deconvolution tools allowing you to capture your own impulse responses in a flash and immediately turn them into usable reverbs and futzes. Even better still, this process is fully agnostic to channel count, meaning you can capture and deconvolve anything from mono to nth-order Ambisonics.
Part 2 of the Sound on Sound articles linked below will take you through the entire IR creation process! Be sure to read there because they're a treasure trove of knowledge on the power of ReaVerb!
4.3. REAPER To Go!
What if I told you you could just pop REAPER onto a flash drive and run it from any PC without needing to install it? Well, I just did.
During the installation process, REAPER gives you the option to create a portable installation, essentially decoupling REAPER from your host computer, enabling it to run from a removable drive and even allowing you to run multiple installs in parallel on your own machine!
Since each of these installs can have its own configuration, this is also a handy feature if you'd like to have different flavors of REAPER for different tasks. Want a mostly vanilla install for sound design and one that looks and behaves more like Ableton Live (including clip launching btw.) for music production? The world is your oyster.
4.4. Keep a ReaPet
We all need a bit of whimsy in our lives. So why adopt an adorable sidekick who can track your productivity while also looking cute as heck?
ReaPet is a pomodoro timer, number-of-performed-actions-tracker, and gives you gamified rewards for completing focus sessions in the form of tokens you can spend on new cute critters to keep you company at work. You can grab ReaPet by importing the following repository via ReaPack:
https://github.com/YichengZ/zyc-scripts/raw/main/index.xml
In Closing.
With REAPER's infinite extensibility comes a danger of getting caught up in a state of constant optimization. It's important to not let your tools distract you from getting your actual work done and expressing yourself creatively. Any optimization, extension, or workflow change should come from a desire to remove friction between your ideas and the act of manifesting them in a rendered WAV file.
My recommendation is to give yourself time after a project to reflect on which parts of your workflow served you well, and which ones could still use improvement. Armed with that knowledge, set some time aside to research and test tools that sound immediately useful to you and rinse and repeat this process after your next project.
If you've ever gone from having barely any 3rd party plug-ins to suddenly being subscribed to a company's "Everything Bundle", you'll know how paralyzing an overabundance of choice can be. Take the time to learn your tools and refine wherever pain points appear.
For those interested in learning about my favorite tools, extensions, workflows, and non-audio tools for game audio, check out the guides linked below.
Now go out there and make some audio magic!
Supercharge REAPER
Game Audio Tools beyond the DAW
Further Reading & Tips
I’m Giving a Talk at AirCon 2026!
Behind the Foley of Ghost of Yōtei
Behind the Sound of Ghost of Yōtei (ASFX Article)
A new Guide for Game Audio Tools Beyond the DAW
Elevate Your Audio Production with REAPER – Now Available!
Game Audio Explained | An ASFX Guide
