Reaper Preferences to save Disc Space
Reaper Preferences to save Disc Space
Reaper is nearly infinitely customizable. This makes it ultra flexible, but, at times this flexibility may feel overwhelming because of the sheer number of preferences. This article will focus on preferences which will save you some disc space.
Preferences
Open the preferences dialog by pressing ctrl/p You will be placed in a tree view with 9 main branches and many sub branches. You will generally arrive at the same place where you were when you last visited this dialog. Tab until you hear “tree view.”
General Settings
There are many settings which are generally self-explanatory, But there are some settings you will want to make to organize your projects. First in the Path settings branch, make sure you have set a directory for New projects. When you save new projects, you will have an opportunity to tell Reaper to create a directory specifically for the project.
In the same branch, set a directory for peak files. It isn’t necessary to keep these with your project, and you may want to delete them after a while to save space on your drive.
Project settings
In the Project settings area you will want to configure Reaper’s backup options. If you are saving the undo history (set this in general settings branch) then You may want to uncheck the option for Keeping multiple backups and the options for timestamp backups.
project settings
Besides the project settings branch in the preferences dialog, there is an entirely separate project settings dialog. This is slightly different because it deals with how each project is configured. Press alt/enter to open this dialog. Tab or shift/tab to get to the tabs.
Media Tab
From the tab selector, select the media tab. Tab to where you can set the Path to save media files. You should type in a name like “media” or “audio.” This will direct Reaper to put your recorded audio in to a directory called by that name inside of the folder that it creates for your projects. Next, tab to the Audio format option. This will be a personal preference, but using FLAK files will save disc space while preserving audio quality. The type of flac files which you can set in this area will be personal preference and is beyond the scope of this article.
Saving Projects
As mentioned earlier, when you save a project, you will have the opportunity to tell Reaper to create a new directory for the project. This new directory will be created in the directory you specified for Reaper projects in the “paths” directory in the main Reaper preferences dialog. To set this option You will need to use your screen readers object navigation features since this option, and a few others are not reachable by using the tab key. When you open the saveAs dialog, type your project name, then object nav once to the right, then down. The first option you will land on is the “Create directory for project” option Check this to place our project in a directory all of its own. Navigate to the right and you’ll find the copy media option. This will copy any external files you are using in tis project in to your media directory. This will allow you to use the files without altering your original copies. Object navigate to the right and you reach the “convert” option. This will tell reaper to convert the media files to your preferred format.
Conclusion
This is just a small portion of the vast preferences system in Reaper, but these options will organize your projects and keep your files to a manageable size. There are many other features which you will learn to configure in other articles