Reaper 7 finally changed Comping! Prior comping was one of the most complained about features in Reaper for years. Can't wait to try it out.

That threw me completely for a short while.
As I'm jazz-oriented, to me "comping" means "accompanying".
I now know the term can also mean "compositing". A rather better term than the old (and arguably wrong) "punch-in/punch-out", I think.

The ergonomics seem good.

FWIW Comping is a very common term in mixing, e.g., I comped four RT 1234 tracks to get the final track.

A common net definition would be: Comping is combining multiple audio clips from multiple tracks onto a single track for common processing. These clips are along the timeline and do not overlap.

Bud

Same word, two different definitions. And ya, this is not punch-in/punch-out.

The point here is that Reaper never had "lanes". The multiple takes were always in a single lane in a single track. Now they are in different lanes, within the same track. This will hopefully make a lot of people happy.

That is how comping should work. Similar to studio one.

Yeah all you studio one guys can come on back to reaper now.

Just tried v7 after a couple of years using v5 (I bought the license on v4, it was valid for v5 as well, and I was pretty happy with that version)

The new comping technique is the main reason I will most probably upgrade. I love those guys' philosophy about development. They don't add a ton of new features with every version, they add just a few, but REALLY well thought and implemented. They are also really focused in bug fixing and stability, Reaper is probably one of the most solid programs I've ever tried.

And of course, it will never cease to amaze me how they manage to pack one of the best, smoother, faster, solid, full featured and intuitive DAWs on the market on 14mb of code.

They are geniuses.

If I generate different solo sections in Biab I can instantly transfer them to a new track in Reaper using Open SGU in Reaper .
If I select all the items then > Action: "Tracks: Implode selected items across tracks to one fixed lane track"
then set to comping. Because the riff aren't consolidated wav files you have so much more control and creativity.
This makes video editing so easy, and you can also edit Video RealTracks.

I watched this Kenny G. video this evening, thanks for posting Dan.
Years and years ago I heard somewhere that pro mixing engineers would do this for their clients; basically stich together the best parts from multiple takes.

Fast forward to now where I've never personally done this, but play my bass, keyboard or drum pad thru the entire song and if I sufficiently mess up (which is often), then that Take gets deleted and I start over.

But here is where some enterprising programmer could make his/her mark. Imagine if a DAW could have a knowledge of timing and pitch mistakes and that I've made a handful of takes on say, the bass. It would start by analyzing Take #1 and stop at the 1st mistake it found. It would then scroll thru the other Takes to find the best section to replace the problem area. It would then continue in Take #1 and repeat untill the entire bass performance has been optimized on the minimization of errors by stiching together the best from all the takes similarly to what Kenny is manually doing in Reaper. I'm not even sure if AI would be needed for this.

Truth be told, I have somewhat mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I'd end up with some pretty good and error-free final bass recordings. But on the other hand, would the final result really be "me"? And how damaging would this be to my playing ability?

This idea reminds me of Auto-Tune so maybe this has already been implemented?

Steve, you have a PM.

The problem is that it would choose the most "average" performances, since those would have the least amount of deviation.

Not necessarily, it's all in how you program it.

The Auto-Tune team seems to have solved this and other problems . . . so much so that usage of it was thought by some to be "cheating".
Remember all the hoopala when it was first released?

Yes. I also wrote my own version of Auto-Tune, so I've got a high level of confidence when I say you're comparing apples to oranges.

Back on topic, the new implementation of comping ("compositing", not "accompanying") is Reaper is pretty awesome.

[quote=dcuny. . .so I've got a high level of confidence when I say you're comparing apples to oranges. [/quote]

David, you seem confused, I'm not comparing anything.
I'm saying "Imagine if . . ."

I do agree that Reaper and all modern DAWs are the result of great software engineering.

And for video editing is great, you can use the Video RealTracks of the all the instruments in a Biab song and fade from one to the other:

OK, I'll imagine.

How would a computer program recognize that something were a mistake? I mean, barring "magic", there's got to be some criteria, right?

And the criteria is going to be some sort of error function.

In the case of Auto-Tune, it's a measure of distance of a pitch from "good" pitches. The larger the error, the faster the correction speed in the direction of the "good" pitch.

Similarly, the criteria for evaluating a "good" performance is the distance from "good" pitches, and the distance from "good" beats.

As a rule, something generic is going to score higher than something that's "interesting".

That's me imagining how it would work, because... well, that's pretty much the way it would work.

I'm not going to engage in pointless debates. Suffice to say that I know that what I'm imagining above is technically feasible, if not already coded somewhere by a forward-thinking programmer. Yes, criteria would clearly be involved.

And I'm glad that solid software engineering is being continually poured into Reaper. We need several technically strong DAWs in the marketplace to ensure healthy competition.