OK so I've been spending the last 9 days or so writing a new program, called REAPER (which stands for something along the lines of Rapid Environment for Audio Prototyping -- but I just like to think "don't fear it" or "reap your harvests" or whatnot).

Now I know, there are many products that fall into this category, ranging from crappy open source to not so crappy open source (requiring linux) to crappy closed source to super insanely expensive hardware-dongled closed source. So why am I writing yet another editor? Because I'm making something that fits the category of being exactly what I want to use. It's mostly like Vegas (without the video capability), but with features that I always wish Vegas had.

I will be posting some alpha builds soon, but in general I haven't decided on how to release it. I'm really tempted to do some nag-free shareware again. At the very least it will have very sensible public plug-in APIs that make it easy to extend, and maybe it'll go open source too, I don't know. We'll see. For now, here's an image:

There's a lot to do, which I'm excited about, but it's already quite usable, and already does things well that other software I've used does poorly. But now, I need to go do everything else. Fun fun fun. Stay tuned, I'll be posting the alphas in here, and hopefully a v0.9 beta type release by Christmas. The biggest obstacle I face is DirectX and VST plug-in support, since the APIs for hosting them seem to be a pain (well, DirectX, anyway, I haven't looked at the VST hosting API yet) . At the moment I just have Jesusonic integrated, which is super easy (since it has a reasonable API that doesn't require the disgusting monster that is DirectShow). Keep an eye on the comments of this article if you are interested, I'll likely just post links in there...

Finally, NINJAM users, expect a new release of the Windows client in the not too distant future, with some of the improvements to the audio system I've been making for this. Specifically, increasing the accuracy of the timing of the recorded loops (currently it's not too far off but it could be a lot better).