Reapack: More functionality and Effects

As if the functionality that comes with Reaper weren't enough, and if you find yourself feeling stifled by the limits to what SWS offers in addition, Reapack offers a batch of new actions and JS effects. This article describes how to install, configure and syncronise Reapack.

what is Reapack?

Reapack is a means to download various repositories of Reaper scripts and plug-ins from various places on the internet. You can add additional repositries from which to download after setup.

Important Disclaimer

Reapack is a third-party extension that offers access to repositries that its developers deem safe and useful. CAVI cannot guarantee the fitness for a particular purpose, the reliability, accessibility or freedom from malware of any scripts downloaded and consequently accepts no responsibility for the integrity or security of your system. Exercise due dilligence at all times.

That said, I and many other members of the blind Reaper community have found various scripts and plug-ins to which Reapack affords access very useful and we hope you will too.

Installing Reapack

1. Ensure all instances of Reaper are closed and Download the Reapack DLL, 32 or 64 bit according to your Reaper installation, from the Reapack site and place it in the user plug-ins directory for the version of Reaper with which you wish it to be associated.
2. Load Reaper and press alt shift x to bring up the extensions menu and cursor up til you get to the Reapack submenu.
3. Press cursor right and cursor down to "Manage Repositries".
4. Clicking on this, you will be presented with a list of repositries, which must be enabled and syncronised in order for their contents to be integrated into Reaper.
5. While not all the content is useful to us, since some of it pertains to colour and mouse actions, it's probably easiest to integrate it all and pick what you wish to use at need.
6. therefore, highlight each repositry individually and, if using NVDA, press NVDA numpad slash and then NVDA numpad enter.
7. tab to the "Install/Update" button in the dialogue that will appear and press it.
8. A download progress dialogue should appear that will let you know what's being downloaded followed by a transaction report, letting you know what was installed, what removed and what errors there might have been. (Sometimes packages become obsolete and can be removed depending on settings configured elsewhere.

Once this has been done for all repositories, there should be over 6000 actions in the actions list, including those that were already there.

Do bear in mind that, as well as the actions that are of little benefit to us because of what they do, changing the colour of things for example, some actions invoke inaccessible dialogues and are therefore also useless.

Important Note

Once you have integrated Reapack, if you wish to update Osara, you must ensure that you do not import its keymap via the installer as this will break Reapack's integration. you must import the Osara keymap manually after installing any updates.

Additional settings

From the "Manage Repositories" dialogue, you can tab to an options button, which, when clicked, will invoke a context menu. From here, you can choose whether or not to download prereleases for packages and whether or not to install new packages automatically.

Importing New Repositories

It is possible to import repositories not included with Reapack by default. To do this, simply click the import button from the manage repositries dialogue and enter the correct URL into the edit box that appears. Not all script publishers have their websites configured for this to work though. I have never done this successfully and know of no-one that has. If you know of any other reliable repository, please provide its URL and any additional instructions for successful importing and they will be added to this article.