ProjectHierarchy

The building blocks of editing in reaper

As you are learning to use Reaper it is important to learn what components exist in it and what they can do for you as far as your workflow is concerned.

When you work on something in Reaper you use a project to contain all the pieces of information related to what you are currently working on. Think of a project as the container that holds all the stuff you need to get your masterpiece finished.

If you look at a project in your file explorer it consists of an rpp file, possibly some undo files, and various pieces of media. The rpp file is an xml that gives reaper the instructions on what to do with your project using all of the pieces of data and affects you need.

the option to create a folder for your project can be useful to keep your projects together although nothing technically stops you from storing everything all in one folder. There are good reasons to put each project you make into a separate folder though whenever possible as if you have everything in one folder and select clean project directory you will loose lots of files!

A sub-project is a project inside a project, and can be useful if you want to work on a portion of your project such as backing vocals without affecting the rest of the project. these may be covered in class or a study group.

The timeline specifies where everything happens in time for your project. Generally the timeline starts at 0:00 and runs the length of your project however it can be changed to suit your needs.

A track is a linear sequence of events that happen in your project and is made up of either items or audio sent to it. Think of tracks in Reaper as similar to tracks on magnetic tape they can play at the same time and allow you to mix multiple linear audio streams.

Items are pieces of project data that can contain audio data, midi data or silence. Items are pieces of media with instructions inside the project file to say which part of the media is needed for a project, how to loop it, at what speed it is to be played, also volume and direction etc. these are all known as item properties and will be covered in their own article. Items usually point at media, and provide the instructions on what to do with that media. Media can be stored in the project directory, or in other locations depending on what you are trying to achieve; for example you might have a sound affects library stored on Bluray, and want pieces of it in your project but see no need to duplicate the data on an ssd or magnetic storage unnecessarily.

Takes allow you to have multiple versions of items, think of them as allowing a vocalist to have multiple recordings of something, and be able to apply pan, volume and affects to each take. It is easy to switch takes inside a project and allows the engineer to compare various takes easily and quickly, also called auditioning the takes.

Media is your sound or midi data, the actual base stuff that Reaper works on to generate your project. You can store media how and where you want on your computer; however keeping it inside your project folder can greatly ease organization of your work.