Potentially trying out Reaper?

For some of you guys who've listened to any of my music or remixes of original music, sound design sessions, or just instances of me fucking around and making pure bullshit, the DAW that I've mostly been using is Tracktion Waveform, which has been serving me quite a bit since Tracktion T7 was around. However, I've had thoughts about giving Reaper a go. 

"Dear god Focal why are you trying out (or even switching to) Reaper of all DAW's?"

The Issues

I've been thinking about trying out Reaper since (1) it's customizable from what I've seen and heard, and (2) I've been experiencing some issues with Waveform; some of which either aren't fixed in different versions of Waveform (yet or at all), are introduced in said versions, or appear in other DAW's. The issues of these that I have are the following:

- Audio clips with auto-tempo enabled will "stutter" whenever the BPM is being automated. [Not a computer or project file issue as someone from the Tracktion Discord server suggested. Dysjoint from the server suggested using proxy files, but that's not a feature the free version have. Further testing proves that this is an issue specifically affecting MP3 audio files. WAV files seem to be fine.]

- Scrolling through an audio clip without moving the position of the clip itself and releasing MOUSE1 (left mouse button) while hovering over the browser (or the left side of the window) from the playlist causes Waveform to permanently hang until force-closed. [This issue was not in major versions 11 or 12 but was introduced in major version 13. Dysjoint had pointed this bug out on their YouTube channel once but the video isn't available, though I did find a KVR post with them mentioning it and the dev, Figbug, suggested providing a crash log which wouldn't work as this "crash" doesn't occur from just force-closing a process. The issue was put into v13 and never got patched to my knowledge.]

- Certain stock plug-ins would cause Waveform to crash. [One time I tested this in v12 with a delay for no reason by setting the time to 0 and it crashed Waveform (more on that further down). However, with the micro sampler (which can barely be automated), it tends to crash Waveform randomly for no reason whenever I use it.]

- Audio inside audio clips with either auto-tempo or auto-pitch enabled tend to shift themselves out of the initial position you've set them whenever you trim or cut them. [This might not be terrible when producing, but when it comes to making mixes, this becomes very intrusive.]

- (Re)loading too many audio clips with either auto-tempo or auto-pitch enabled will not only crash Waveform, but rather hard crash your computer. [This happened several times to me, but the most recent instance was when I was making a mix and I changed the BPM at a specific point by accident, and my laptop abruptly rebooted itself from each audio clip being reloaded all at once. I didn't get a BSOD either.]

- Setting the delay time (aka length) to 0ms crashes Waveform. [Not a major issue as I have no reason to set a delay's feedback time to 0ms, but this was still weird to me. Other plug-ins that have a delay/echo effect—including the stock 2-tap delay—allowed me to set the delay time to 0ms with no issue, but the legacy delay, which was a 1-tap, didn't. It wouldn't get reset to the minimum length of 1ms or whatever; it'd just crash Waveform entirely. This issue wasn't present in major version v11, but rather introduced in v12 before being patched in v13.]

- Having at least a large amount of tracks in a project file, regardless of the presence of plug-ins (stock and 3rd-party) will cause a noticeable slowdown of Waveform. More tracks being added makes this issue more prominent. [After watching Nasko's Bitwig streams on YouTube, I've learned that the Ableton devs apparently don't really give a shit about this issue and have no interest in resolving it, and then he proved that it's just Ableton Live and not just his computer by doing this exact test in both Ableton Live and Bitwig to where the latter still holds up and the former let's up. I curiously went to test this with Waveform and I saw the issue appear in v12 and v13. v11 has a 400 track limit which I never knew about, so I couldn't test it there.]

There are some other issues I had also experienced, but these were the only ones that I could remember from the top of my head. I'll update this post if I ever find those other issues.

Why I'm not Completely Switching to a Different DAW

Like with not fully rebranding to "FCL C0MPLEX" or fully switching to Affinity over paintdotnet, I'm not considering a full-on switch from Waveform to Reaper if I end up liking it, but it seems like a cool paid (U$60) DAW. Before using Waveform (or rather Tracktion T7 as it was before), I had planned on switching from Caustic (mobile DAW) for making music due to how very limited it is. 

In a similar situation with Nasko, I have several projects from Waveform that I either have to finish or want to turn into full songs, and unless I convert those to Reaper project files, a hard switch isnt of the possibility.

Why Reaper and Not FL Studio or Ableton Live

1. Check Nasko's first Bitwig 6 stream on YouTube for details on Ableton Live.

2. When it comes to FL Studio and Ableton Live, users of those DAW's seem to be shills enough to where you're damned if you use anything but the DAW they use. So as to not be one of those shills, I'm not using a shill DAW.

Again, I've already heard of Reaper at the time for its customization compared to other DAW's (according to the media, and it sounds like it's the "Linux" of music production), but I never tried it out since it's paid "and I mostly use paid software". As mentioned, it's listed for U$60 (one-time purchase) for a license, but I can trial it for approx. 2 months (30 days) before it expires. 

What makes this interesting as a DAW—which is why people are saying that it's "free" in free beer—is because while Reaper technically isn't free, its free 60-day trial (which matches the full functionality of Reaper) still expires, but it doesn't expire in a way such that the functionality isn't stripped down. This means that I'm still able to use the trial without paying, but that just means being asked to pay for a license every time I open Reaper. It's essentially got the WinRAR license where the trial expires but it doesn't get crippled of its features, which I honestly like.

/fin_

In conclusion, I'm not considering a full-on switch to Reaper as there are some things in Waveform that I want to do finish (or actually start), but I'll try it out at some point, and also try out some tool called Dawvert which is advertised to convert project files saved from one DAW to project files for another without altering the actual content of the project file.