Reaper and Area Selection: Something like this?

This is how I think Reaper's Area Selection / editing / Audiosuite style of fx on the waveform should look and update. This video in Multi-channel Sound Forge displays what I'm wanting in the last 25% of Reaper to make it perfect for me. I know this isn't everyones cup of tea, and I have always been speedier using destructive editing for some reason as I learnt on SF back in the 90's. A setting to make this destructive or non- would be good I suppose. This is what I'm looking for in a complete editor/DAW/Sequencer and no of nothing else like it. Obviously Sound Forge would never be true "Multi-track'' as they use Vegas etc for that. So me using SF as a multi-channel editor, is a bit clunky with lots of DAW features missing. But surely Reaper could just change slightly to be able to edit/shade over audio tracks and edit WYSIWG style of waveform editing? I can't think of anything else like this as SF won't go full Multi-Track DAW, and Reaper doesn't seem to want to do Area Selection even though its the most asked for FR. Maybe Pro-tools? (ugh) or Audacity / Audition? Come on Cockos, is this really so hard? maybe as mentioned a setting/preferences for old style editing and this new destructive? :) ?

This is a great suggestion! I too learnt about audio wav editing in SoundForge back in the 90's and haven't found anything ot compare with it since. My Akai MPC Renaissance allows you to carry out basic editing on a highlighted section of a sample but doesn't allow you to just insert a vst fx on that section ala Sound Forge. A very, very handy tool that us sound designers/sampling enthusiasts need in our life.

Take a look at mouse modifiers and custom actions. You can dial up everything you're looking for. Make custom actions to delete the originals and so forth after the processing. The difference is, you will have to "pay" for the feature with your time. The time it takes to dial up your preferred workflow. You could achieve the style of editing and destructive processing in that video. But you will have to put in the time to learn the options and tweak. You can probably get all that with just making custom actions (ie. no scripts).

You should make it clear it is 2 features you actually want : 1) Area selection 2) "Destructive" processing of the selected audio. (It probably never should really be "destructive" as that would be insane these days when disk space is cheap and just creating new versions of the files is much safer.) These 2 don't really imply each other. You could have 2) without area selection, as the processing could be targeted on the selected media item. 1) certainly doesn't imply 2). Area selections could be used for other operations besides "destructive" processing.

If you find the solution to this dilemma please let us know ;)

There's really no real way around it, Reaper was designed to mimic the editing flow of Vegas, and except for Vegas, it's the only modern editor I know of that doesn't have area or range selection. That isn't intended to imply anything in particular saying that, it's just a truth , that the overwhelming majority of audio editors use area / range selection, for very good reason. Reaper uses time selection, and it works well, but it's not area / range selection so, it's just not, and people who prefer range selection will probably never be fully content with the relative workarounds. They still get the work done though so, not the end of the world.

Yes.. as other already mentioned, there are ways, how to use time selection instead of area selection. If you work with Reaper for longer time and became accustomed to it, you probably won't be missing area selection. However, I personally feel in general, area selection will be very welcome addition to Reaper.. Countless times, I talked to other people (also experienced engineers), who tried Reaper for audio editing, but were very confused (or they actually gave it up) by missing area selection. I need to describe "workarounds" and different approach, but IMO this can be still significant thing, if you use several DAWs.. and this really basic paradigm is different at Reaper. Michal

:) Yeah, I even accidentally used similar colours in the feature requests for the mockups that Studio One uses. They seemed to work best at the time. Btw, post your "we still want this" posts in the the discussion thread of the request as well. The issue tracker has been closed, so we are back to using just the feature request forum. Go here : I've already bumped the thread.