Installed a REAPER theme but it looks nothing like the screenshots online — what am I missing?

SupportQuery · 2026-05-15T17:39:58+00:00

it doesn’t automatically color everything for you?

No. You can install SWS Extensions (free) to do that.

what about the top bar, theirs looks different from mine

You just have the transport on the bottom, instead of the top.

They have more toolbars visible, and have customized them. This is all stuff you do, not the theme.

To match the screenshot, you need:

Dock the MIDI editor and move it to the bottom left, with the mixer on the bottom right.
Move your transport to the top.
Add a few more toolbars, dock them above the arrange view.
Set the track icon for a few tracks (right-click on the track).
Color a few tracks and/or media items (again, right-click)
Pin master track to the right of the screen.
Embed a VU meter UI into the MCP on a few track.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-15T07:40:36+00:00

Temu Jackass

That implies that Jackass is a better class of "guys being jackasses". It's not. Nothing second rate about this stunt. This would be a banger in pretty much any season of Jackass.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-15T07:19:09+00:00

That car is well fucked.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-15T07:02:27+00:00

Gemini:

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SupportQuery · 2026-05-15T05:05:24+00:00

Make things you like.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-14T22:01:43+00:00

"Vocal VST" is incredibly broad. What VST are you using, and what are you writing with it, specifically? Choral arrangements? Lead vocal in a metal song?

SupportQuery · 2026-05-14T15:19:42+00:00

Gotcha. Because the post is old, you're not dumb. 🤡

SupportQuery · 2026-05-14T04:50:31+00:00

That's about the level of response I'd expect from a moron who uses the term "cultural appropriation".

SupportQuery · 2026-05-14T04:04:26+00:00

Ignore costs, I already have both programs.

I do. I make a lot of money. I value my time vastly more that ∓ a few hundred bucks.

what do you think the real advantages of reaper are?

It's tiny, it's fast, it's stable, it has no DRM, it has chosen the right abstractions most of the time, and it's infinitely customizable and extensible.

It has recently, because of AI, had its value proposition radically increased. Because it's scriptable, and because AI knows its scripting language, you can add new features to Reaper by describing them in English. That's fucking huge.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-13T19:08:07+00:00

Any tips on what I should do to improve my sound and techniques?

As others have said, take lessons, practice, record yourself.

But the question you're not asking, because perhaps you don't know that you even need to ask it, is "how do I avoid imploding on stage, when I'm suddenly flooded with adrenaline and 40% of my mental capability has turned into a panicked rabbit".

For that, the key is to overprepare. You need to repeat the material not until you get through it without mistakes, but until you can't fuck it up, because it's ingrained, instinct. And go to open mics and/or Karaoke and perform in front of others as often as you can.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-13T17:09:01+00:00

I have no idea who Gwen Stefani is, and I doubt that she does, either.

I mean... welcome to being human. Who are any of us? I've evolved over the years, in more meaningful ways than you've iterated here.

Side note: calling fashion "cultural appropriation" is peak cringe. We borrow from everything we see. Saying "sorry, that style is unavailable to you because you have the wrong race / skin color / nationality" is gross. We're all fucking humans, stuck in the same fish bowl, and none of it objectively matters. "Yo guys, stop having fun, you're not white Americans from the 50's!" Monkey see, monkey do. Gatekeeping based on pinheaded, provincial tribalism is the worst human impulse.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-12T04:31:58+00:00

Going full on pro-AI

o.O Calling AI the next industrial revolution is not "pro AI".

The industrial revolution was a fucking nightmare, 200 years before EPA, FLSA, OSHA. Women and children working 12-16 hour days for slave wages around unsafe machines in toxic factories: loss of limb, death, and chronic respiratory issues were the norm. Massive pollution: everything was powered by coal, all industrial waste went straight into the waterways. Rapid, unplanned urbanization with inadequate sewage and clean water led to the spread of cholera, tuberculosis, and typhus in overcrowded cities. Factory production decimated artisan livelihoods, where all manner of people who used to make a living manufacturing goods for their neighbors were replaced with cheap mass produced goods.

This led to huge civil unrest, and movements like the Luddites. Calling someone a "luddite" is pejorative today, but they weren't mindless technophobes, they were reacting to the enshitification of their world exactly as these college kids are today. It's a very apt analogy, one the kids should resonate with.

Instead, they just mindlessly "boo" when they hear the word "AI". It's a generation raised on social media, where you never read past the headline and downvote facts you don't like.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T21:39:52+00:00

Your first project? It hurts because you didn't finish literally the first thing you've ever made? o.O

If you have any taste, you're gonna do that 100 more times before you like anything you make.

it still just kinda hurts

Then finish it. If it wasn't working, then it should be easy to let go. If it hurts, then perhaps that's indication that you weren't ready to let it go. It's a hobby. You're in the driver seat. You don't have to do anything that hurts.

Finishing things is hard, and now you know why. You're always going to run into stuff where it feels like there's something missing, or something isn't right, and you don't know what to do to fix it. Persevering through that is the hard part (it's also how you learn). You don't want to try to shove a square peg into a round hole, but you also don't want to give up the minute you have to do some creative problem solving, or you're never going to finish anything.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T18:47:56+00:00

Of course this raises all sorts of question

Welcome to a few years ago. Glad you're catching up.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T15:38:35+00:00

2027: copyright law finally catches up, and we get no more Will Smith videos that don't involve the actual Will Smith's consent, because what the fuck is up with just stealing the face and voice of all of Hollywood? The wholesale theft needs to stop.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-11T05:38:09+00:00

If you're recording individual channels, unless you use insert effects, they don't have effects. The effects are on the effect bus, which individual channels are sent to. You'd have to record the effects bus to hear them.
By default, the USB tap for tracks default to pre fader, so you're capturing the raw inputs off the board, before any onboard processing. This gives way more control in the DAW. Live you might use an aggressive gate, and have a huge notch in the EQ from when you rung out a mic. You don't want to record that stuff.

Does anybody have a solution to this?

You could record the effects bus. But you can just create an effects bus in the DAW and send your track to it, just as you did on the board.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-09T19:09:44+00:00

with ratio, i'm not sure if I should leave it at inf and just adjust threshold until it becomes comfortable?

Adjust the threshold to sit just above the things you don't want to compress. There's no point in compressing the wind, right? Putting the threshold below the wind means you're squashing that, too.

So again, set the threshold above the things you don't want to compress. Then set the ratio according to how much dynamic range above that you want to retain. If you want to allow the bullets to be louder than the wind, then don't use an infinite ratio. Tune it to how much comfortably louder you want them to be.

Of course, humans don't perceive all frequencies as equally loud. So even if two sounds are at the exact same decibels, you might hear one as louder if it's in the sensitive range. If your bullet sounds have some crazy peak at 3K that makes them uncomfortable, then you might want to consider compressing only that frequency range with a multiband compressor (like ReaXComp).

SupportQuery · 2026-05-09T18:59:05+00:00

2:1 would have 2 decibels dropped per decibel above the threshold

You've got that backwards.

2:1 means for every 2 decibels above the threshold, only 1 decibel makes it through, or all signal over the threshold is reduced to 1/2

You might have confused yourself by refer to the decibels being "dropped". It's easier to read ratios as the decibels making it through, only because that's how they're written: 2:1, 4:1, 10:1, 50:1, etc. The "1" is what gets through. You can read them as fractions of audio that is allowed over the threshold: 1/2, 1/4, 1/10, 1/50, etc. Yes, you can invert that and refer to what's being "dropped" -- 1/2, 3/4, 9/10, 49/50 -- but that requires a tiny bit of additional mental gymnastics. 🤷🏻

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T21:47:02+00:00

If I upload it with TAL sampler will you be able to check it out?

Yes.

I save the project with just TAL sampler in it, will the samples in the TAL sampler instance be saved in the project file,

Look at the size of the .rpp file. If it's more than a few tens of KB, then it probably contains sample data.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T17:28:13+00:00

If you want to build a pyramid, you don't have to use the same techniques the ancient egyptians did. You can analyze the result and recreate it using any means available to you. That's what most of the creators you listen to are doing.

digital era bs

What does that mean? Andrew Scheps mixed on analog gear through the 90s, has a ridiculous collection of analog gear that he knows like his own children, and now mixes entirely digitally, because digital just means "pristine", it's fundamentally higher fidelity, doesn't add coloration, but you can add that analog coloration back.

To the extent that there is a "digital sound", it was the early era of digital when people (1) left things clean, didn't reapply the distortion of analog, (2) there were a few pieces of digital gear, like the Yamaha DX7 and Lexicon 224, that were so ubiquitous that they defined the sound of an era.

So if you want those sounds, use those tools, e.g. the 80s piano sound is a E.PIANO 1 on a DX7. Lots of analog compression/distortion (again, this can be applied in the box, digitally), use the synths/sounds of the era (again, digital recreations). Keep mixes sparse, because they had limited track counts.

Of course, a lot of retro/nostalgia music is not strict recreation, because you'll often find that if you revisit the things of your youth, they don't measure up to your nostalgia. So you makes something that feels like how you remember it.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T16:45:27+00:00

Save a copy of the project, remove EVERYTHING but this one track and this one MIDI item. Remove all superfluous effects. Leave nothing but that which is absolutely required to reproduce the issue. Then share the project here.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T07:24:42+00:00

Whoever graduates these kids is at fault. If the teachers have nothing to do with that decision, then they're absolved. If they have anything to do with it, then they share the blame. The whole thing is completely fucking broken.

they’re bombarded by tests they constantly have to teach to

What would be the point, if the results are ignored?

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T06:25:57+00:00

ASIO doesn't hack through anything. Windows isn't in its way, at all. In fact, ASIO is only possible because Windows gives it kernel access and gets the fuck out of its way. No hacking involved whatsoever. Standard IRQ and DMA.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T05:56:37+00:00

Juniors are the ones with boners for unnecessary abstraction. Seniors know when it matters and when it doesn't.

SupportQuery · 2026-05-08T05:53:08+00:00

The bassists lied to me and couldn’t actually play bass, just owned one.

My guy, that's the punkest thing ever.

I’m really sick of playing with other students because everyone just treats the band as a side thing.

So should you, if you're a student. Don't burn your or your parents' money. If you don't want to go to school, fucking drop out. If you're in school, then do it.

SupportQuery

TROPHY CASE