Useable Recording Behaviour For A Band

Hi, After using Reaper for 3 years at home, working on my own music, mainly electronic stuff I've been more than satisfied and I'm used to how it looks and feels. I'm not a 'power' user as I was with Cubase previously but I know enough. I've recently started back up at an old studio I used to work at. Cubase is now version 8, 3 versions on from when I last used it and I'm not comfortable with it anymore. Of course, I installed Reaper and everything was cool. BUT...now I'm using it in a demanding environment and cracks are appearing for me. So far I've not had to record a full band but the 'Splits existing items..' has already killed me on a few sessions. It's a really, really ugly implementation, creates an incomprehensible mosaic of audio and I'm hard pressed as to see a scenario where it would be a time saver seeing as how much time I spent correcting it's handy-work. You would thing that with the modular nature of Reaper the simple thing would be a 'Don't split existing items...' and I would have the behaviour I and probably many other users from Cubase and other DAWS are accustomed to. This I cannot understand. So this coming month I have 7 people coming into the studio to record as a band. And instead of being confident in Reaper I'm bricking it imagining the chaos 7 musicians doing multiple takes will create. And so I'm looking for an alternative. And Yes, you can turn off the 'Splits existing items and create new takes.' and deal with layers. Great no splits but there is an entirely new can of worms, layers are not takes, it's a workaround not a solution. I'm trying to research this searching the forums and find something that works for me, but I'm getting pretty annoyed at the amount of time I'm having to invest in learning something that I shouldn't really have to learn. ( I say that as someone who has used musical software for 21 years) Any help, pointing in the right direction will be appreciated. I'm almost considering re-learning Cubase as Reaper doesn't seem fit for this purpose, but I'm willing to concede to my ignorance and be enlightened to the esoteric ways of Cockos. :) I love a lot of things about Reaper, for my own music production which is mainly programmed, it's totally adequate, I've learnt to get the best out of it, and there are features that can't be had anywhere else, as well as things missing. But I'm not sure about risking it when someone's paying me, so I'd love to hear from anybody who's using it in that environment and it's working out great for them. Cheers..

What exactly do you want to happen differently? I'm afraid I don't really remember how Cubase (or even Sonar) do it. I do remember it being different, and it took me a while to get used to Reaper's paradigm, but it really does work reasonably well in most cases. I really think that you just need to trust it and get used to it and you'll be fine. If you've got somebody doing a whole bunch of alternate takes in a whole bunch of spots on a whole bunch of tracks - especially if those "punch in and out" spots are all essentially random and willy nilly - it's going to be a mess in any DAW. All that said, I'm definitely interested in hearing other people's ideas on how to more efficiently navigate these issues cause I don't feel like I'm as comfortable with it as I could be. Some random ideas: Don't keep every take! Just because we can doesnt mean we should. If you've got somebody loop recording, you might not want to stop them to fiddle around, but I'm pretty sure you can delete takes while recoding new ones. If you know the last one sucked, kill it now. Or if you know that the last take was the keeper, "crop to active take" and move on. What else are you (as engineer) really doing while dude is flailing away? Checking Facebook? Don't punch in and out randomly and all willy nilly. Identify a problem are, figure out how to make punch-in recording work, and do it. Again, just because we can clean up our edits doesn't mean we have to rely on that, especially if it's causing problems down the line. We don't have to necessarily be as precise as tape, but we can have every take start and stop in the same place. Otherwise you end up with a bunch of tiny little unnecessary items. Delete all of those tiny little unnecessary items as soon as possible. Don't try to select the right take on all of them, don't try to heal the splits or glue anything. Select item, delete, fill the gaps by dragging the edges of remaining items appropriately.

Thanks for the reply. In Cubase you can record takes of varying lengths and there is no automatic splitting of previous takes. You will not end up with audio that is chopped to death because the musician has done another take but messed up after the first chorus, or anywhere else in the song. The musician might feel like they did a great take up to that point and will want to reference back to that after a few more. That take has now split all previous takes. The more takes, the more you're going to spend time deleting things and correcting this automatic behaviour. The very simple and strangely omitted thing will be to have 'split existing items..' as a checkable option. I would be more than happy with that. That is the behaviour I expect from the DAW. I don't need it to automatically do something for me, unless I find it of value and choose it do it. I can see no workflow benefit to this being default. If I could find a use for it then I'd use it. But I feel as if I'm missing something and don't understand properly because it seems like such an unusable thing that it couldn't be allowed to go on undealt with, and I've read the forums and I'm certainly not alone in feeling this way and the complaints are long standing. So Cockos must really believe in this method, but I just can't see any benefit other than what I mentioned above. The other behaviour option is to use layers, and I have tried to get some workflow going with that but it's not good. You cannot just select parts of different takes in that way to build a comp, you have to mute/unmute. You no longer get splits in the audio but other strange things happen that aren't what I want :) You cannot toggle through layers as you can with takes so your losing functionality on top. I've just got to find the right bit of information to help me out. I'm sure people are doing recording work with it, but at the moment I'm not confident that I won't have a train wreck to sort out. But I don't think it's going to be the most simple of fixes until splitting whilst recording is optional.