Belles Ondes : Creative Engineering

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== Protools VS Reaper - A concrete case ==

I had to use PT again on a client project and did switch back to PT for the whole last month. I had time to plan a complete “habitus training” session two weeks before in order to re-activate some fluent enough PT workflow and habits in advance. And I got in with a positive attitude, training for long enough to trigger productive habitus changes in workflow, AND in with the intent/mindset to re-learn how to appreciate the good things of PT, workflow wise.

That session made me realize how Reaper empowers users with its natural agility as I suffered from PT’s limitations and issues, and I wanted to write this feedback down as I have been exposed long enough to 2022 PT to get a basic set of habits back, but not enough to trigger PT habitus bias.

Disclaimer : being acclimatized to PT and actually enjoying it is totally fine and totally makes you a great human being with feelings. By no means anything below intends to criticize anyone who actually enjoys PT, it is my take at how PT has not “clutched” with my workflow. I insist on things that did not work for me, but keep in mind that my overall experience has been on target : artist was really happy with the session and walked out of the studio with all the audio material he wanted. Mission has been accomplished.

Now, let’s dig in.

TLDR : PT feels goofy, fragile, and totally lacks agility when compared to Reaper.

(I will be using the PT vocabulary for things here-below, so people not attuned with PT should consider a “Session” equivalent to a Reaper “Project”, a “Clip” equivalent to a Reaper “Item”, and the “Playlist system” equivalent to the Reaper “Take System”)

PT technology feels both goofy and fragile. Let me explain:

By goofy I mean, it is slow and inefficient. It takes above 1 minute to load, and you have to go through several process of ilok/Avid Connect/obscure thingies. This is horrible to navigate projects when studio time is getting to the end and you want to cross check everything across multiple sessions. So many downtimes even on a 2022 gen Ryzen 64GB RAM PC with PCIE SSD. In comparison, Reaper’s velocity is a bliss, navigating projects is almost instant which is really appreciated on large music projects with numerous sessions.

It won’t work if your internet is down, which is not that uncommon in places where recording computer is kept away from network for obvious security reasons. Not to mention that recording in remote places is compromised. I know there are ilok alternatives with dongles, but in 2022 I would expect the industry standard tool to help me getting productive. This is a major advantage for Reaper, because of the way licensing works, any session can be opened on any computer whatever the context. Productivity at its finest.

By fragile, I mean it hardly supports being stressed. My PT crashed a lot both on my laptop and dedicated studio PC. It even crashed at first launch with default configured directsound engine. “interface not found” message dropped and I had to open process explorer to kill it. I just wanted to start on default parameters, and It failed. Had to re-start (think re-wait) and switch to ASIO. Even there, ASIO panel could not be opened within Protools, there was some sort of deadlock going on, both with UAD Console, ASIO4All and XAirASIO. You had to open the product Asio panel manually. Changing sound engine triggers PT program restart. Event changing sample rate triggers project reload. When loading a project takes ages, this is a noticeable inconvenience. Overall, sound engine is really sensitive which generally means that any context change triggers session or program resets. Reaper on the other side is extremely stable, heavily tolerant to audio context changes and hardly ever requires any restart when changing anything audio context-wise. This is, again, a noticeable edge in productivity for those who work 10 hours a day on sessions.  

PT user experience lack agility. Let me explain:  

Whether you want to manage your session, your track or your clips, you have to deal with the rough PT user experience. At session level storage of parameters is not homogenous: for example, transport start-reset behavior is stored at PT software level, whereas input and output routing is stored at session level. Finding a session or program wide parameter is a mess, e.g. transport start-reset ‘N’ key acts as a toggle and is hidden inside the program shortcuts configuration. On Reaper, if you want to change transport button behavior, right clicking transport menu accesses all options. PT has a very weird program vs session configuration parameter storage allocation, which seems to bend towards session portability, but even with this in mind there are still some inconsistent behaviors from one computer to another.  

At tracks level, same feeling of lack of agility, enabling or disabling features feels clunky. If you want to do elastique modification on one channel, you have to enable elastique context first, leading to weird behaviors on tracks with grouped clips (think drums where ungrouping happens on grouped clips in case of context discrepancy). That has been painful and costed the complete reboot of a drum editing session because I forgot to change the context of the latest element of the drum group to "elastic" : its audio data Wwas automatically excluded from the clip group. I realised later on that HiHat Overheads were not in phase with the rest and realised late because it was late in the night, after a long tracking day, during the strongest edits on the last verse of a song. It lead to snare fake doubles. No warning showed up and that cost us two hours of session to roll things back. That would have never happened in Reaper.

Track basic configuration is static and cannot be modified on the fly, don’t even think about importing a stereo file on a mono track. If you compare this to Reaper, this is night and day. You even have to create a master track, or a click track. Creating a bus requires to change routing manually, etc… everything requires 2 times more actions on PT than on Reaper. Even shortcuts feel clunky too : alt applies something to ALL TRACKS, while Shift+Alt affects only selected tracks. Why is “ALT only” the global modifier? This is such an error-prone philosophy, that is a big human error enhancer to me. Too many modifiers for every major action.

Recording monitoring is painful, you have to unlink recording and listening fader and lower recording faders if you use direct monitoring. Or click low latency monitoring, which leads to confusion : this just means you only use soundcard direct monitoring. I totally dig that this is a legacy feature from AVID/Digidesign hardware, but if you compare among PT users those who have access to Venue systems or equivalent, and those who work ITB, it's about time to think about paradigm shift tbh.  

Overall, track management feels painful hen compared to the flexible, versatile and easy to configure Reaper pattern. On this particular topic, the detailed, precise and exhaustive Reaper configurability makes it very clear to understand and consequently seriously lowers potential human errors. This is the part that lead to the highest number of frictions for me.

At clip level, this is even more obvious. Beside the fact that there is no way to natively group recorded items when tracking grouped tracks (think drums for editing), playlist system is almost impossible to use with grouped items and makes multicomping a horrible experience of pick and choose. Fades and xfades are sometimes rejected because of audio context (Reaper does auto 0 padding which makes editing a bliss). Reaper’s take system is far more efficient and easyer to use.

Eventually, I just don’t like the shortcut philosophy of PT. I understand that the workflow comes from ages of experience, but at some point in time, “smart” selection/edit/fade tool is not enough. Productivity wise, it hurts spending time on the ALT/CTRL/MAJ key. Alt+mousewheel for zooming, MAJ+Mousewheel then CTRL+E for selection, etc… All my day to day edit shortcuts are modifier based.

Among other details that triggered additional friction :

  * I've been seriously annoyed by being obliged to click on the upper time ruler to change transport playback starting point. When editing on large screens, having to move back up is a waste of time.  

  * Crashes can be a serious pain. Sure, finding backups is easy inside the session folder. But it honestly feels not so Pro to have several daily crashes and it certainly did not help the intense vocal tracking session we had to add to the stress of the lead singer not performing at her best the stress of losing the take that was – if not perfectly in tune – the sincerest. In comparison, Reaper crashes almost 4 times less.

  * Could not load my former cloud stored projects because of version incompatibility. Had to delete them because my PT account was too old. This kind of obsolescence annoys me with regards to the price point.

  * Tried to import 8 M4A AAC files from another client to practice mixing and it failed. PT asked to install Apple Quicktime Pro. Industry standard not able to decode an mp3 file felt clunky. Thanks VLC for this one.

This recent experience, which is long enough to trigger habits but not long enough to trigger habitus bias, made me regret most of Reaper’s flexibility and configurability features, and I’ve been switching back to editing my drums on Reaper this weekend with the satisfying result of increasing drastically my productivity.