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Reaper and Linux

Are you brave enough to produce music on Linux?

To be honest, this is just a guide/notes for myself because I’m not the kind of person to instantly get it on the first try. I’ll be referencing this myself from time to time.

setup

Well, if you are brave enough, one of the more full-fledged DAWs out there that support Linux is Reaper. It’s not open source (as I know of), but it is probably more powerful than the ones that are open source. And it’s also very lightweight, which was perfect for my use cases.

Download, extract Reaper from their website https://reaper.fm, I’m sure you can figure out how. At the time of this post, I was using 6.36.

cd into that folder, ~/Desktop/somewhere/reaper_linux_x86_64/REAPER/, and launch it directly. You don’t need to run install-reaper.sh. Personally I’m never a fan of stuff that mess with my system, just run the executable.

cd REAPER
./reaper

Okay, now if everything looks good, install sfizz, which is an open source VST plugin that lets you play soundfonts. Here’s the downloads page here and here’s the GitHub page here.

AFAIK sfizz is the only tool capable of playing Virtual Playing Orchestra and Freepats well enough.

Finally, find out where it’s installed, because the docs never explain it anywhere.

dpkg -L sfizz 
# I see most vst3 files under /usr/lib/vst3

Now, in Reaper, we want it to look into directories for grabbing the VST plugins. So, go to Options > Preferences > Plug-ins > VST and add /usr/lib/vst3/; as one of the paths to scan. Then, hit Re-scan....

soundfonts

Okay, you can download soundfonts now. The ones I recommend are the standard Virtual Playing Orchestra here and FreePats various sound fonts here. I don’t know if there are any mirrors for these sound banks. You should get the WAV formats of these files since they are uncompressed .

.sfz files are basically metadata that map each note to the corresponding WAV file. sfizz uses the .sfz file to play the appropriate note when called for.

Download and extract the ZIPs from FreePats in the directory ~/Documents/SFZ instruments/, which is the default path sfizz looks at scanning for .sfz files.

actually using Reaper

So, the fastest way to get started is to import a MIDI file into Reaper. MIDI files are essentially sheet music in plaintext form. If you use MuseScore, you can generate MIDIs pretty easily. Or you can use vanbasco’s search engine to find MIDIs of your favorite music that other people have already created. You’re probably smart enough to figure out the technicalities, so I’ll leave that out.

Import the MIDI file with the default settings: Expand n MIDI tracks… Import MIDI tempo map… and Import MIDI markers.

If you try to play it, you won’t hear anything. That’s because the tracks aren’t mapped to any sounds.

The very first thing you should do is configure your audio playback settings (Options > Preferences > Device > Audio Systems > PulseAudio).

For each track, there’s probably a name. You need a soundfont to play that track. To do this, click the [FX] button and find VST3i - you should see sfizz. If it exists, that’s good. For now, we only want to see if sound works. So, instaed of using sfizz, go to Categories > Synth > ReaSynth which is the default synth. Now scroll to a position where the track has notes, and press play.

• If the green bar flashes, Reaper recognizes it is playing something.
  • If the green bar flashes, but you don’t hear audio output, fix your audio preferences in Options > Preferences > Device > Audio Systems and try again.
• If the green bar does not flash, you messed up when setting up the synth. Try going to FX and Adding the correct synth.

Now, if everything has been good so far, you can see if the soundfonts work.

Press [FX] and either (a) Remove the synth (the button is on the bottom left of the FX pop-up window or (b) uncheck the ReaSynth plugin.

Then, in the same screen Add > VST3i > sfizz. Click the little dropdown button next to where it says “No file”, navigate to where your sfz is, and double click on the .sfz file. If it loads properly, you can press the little piano keyboard at the bottom and you should hear notes.

Some .sfz formats may not support sfizz. Virtual Playing Orchestra and FreePats have been tested and should work properly on sfizz.

If you play the piece now, it should make the sound of the .sfz you selected.

A note of caution: in my experience sfizz randomly breaks if you press CTRL+A (select the whole piece) or HOME (go to the front of the piece). The only way I know to fix this is to go to FX, click on sfizz, select a different .sfz and go back to the current .sfz. A quick way to do this is to press < and > if there are multiple .sfz in that folder (e.g. Virtual Playing Orchestra).

more reaper things

I’ll add more stuff here by editing this post or just making a new post. Until next time!

tags: music, art