Reaper and REN the Super Team

Bumping this up for anyone who's missed out.
Incredible info contained within this thread from some super knowledgeable guys.

Excellent thread guys, thanks for breaking the ground on this. I have a question though:

I'm using the MPC Studio with OSX Yosemite. I enabled the IAC driver and using that as my virtual midi cable. I'm able to send MMC from the Studio to Reaper with the exception of the record button. Is that normal? is there anyway to get the Studio to control record on Reaper?

I dont' think so.. I also tried this earlier on when i first found out about how good iac driver is with virtual midi cables.. I think that record and recoverdub are taken over when mpc soft is open.. (I think by design..)

Okay thanks. That saves me a lot of time.

Update on this dream team combo.

MPC Ren 1.8
32 outs
All running through Reaper which is setup to have those 32 outs on separate channels and then groups them into 4 buss groups (Drums/Bass/Pads/FX)

I have a midi controller on the way http://www.faderfox.de/pc4.html


I'll use this to control the following in Reaper:-

FX Sends from various channels
FX Settings (dry/wet/lo or hi cut/reverb time/feedback/etc..)
Mute on each buss for cutting in/out whole sections of sound
Master Volume level (A Godsend when playing live and the sound engineer wants the whole output lower or higher)

Beyond the controller, Reaper is also synced to the stop/start of the MPC should I wish to sync up automation and audio files but this can be turned on/off when needed.

That's a pretty tasty setup for the MPC and gives me the best of both worlds, DAW and Music Workstation/Sampler. Sounds can be recorded and processed in Reaper then dragged into the MPC or vice versa, although I primarily do all sequencing in the MPC so very rarely do the reverse.

Anyways, that's it in a nutshell. The two work hand in hand flawlessly and solve a multitude of issues with the plug in side of the MPC whether it's the limited amount of plug ins you can insert within its mixer or the poorly implemented way it functions as a plug in within a DAW.

Anyone using these two differently? Do share

Hey guys I see you've been breaking news ground with the ren, rearoute, reaper combo, I put this up on a separate thread but just incase thought I check, is it not possible to time sync the rens with reaper as a stand alone, I've used the loopbe1 hook up, got the transport keys talking but no midi timing, through clock, mtc or mmc, I've got to be missing something here, there must be a way of midiing em up to each others time sync??? If it's no for now it's no but just want to make sure, as I'm driving myself mad checking and unchecked preferences in the hope il stumble across it.
Great work and thread people, opened up loads of options and thanks for the templates.
Jed

All I have is the transport controls - when i press play in mpc it plays in reaper. I dont think directly linking the timecodes would work well since mpc sequences are all seperate and can be thrown out in any order..

if you need to line stuff up by bars between reaper and mpc, the locate button on the mpc is very useful. you either need to turn off the count in on the mpc software or turn on count in inside reaper which i find more useful. in the metronome settings in reaper you can set one bar count in then mute the levels of the reaper metronome.

I think what Jed is asking about is automatically having the two BPM's match up and be in permanent sync so if you go from 120 bpm to 140 bpm in your MPC, Reaper changes it's BPMs in accordance.

right, i understand. i dont know of any way to do that. for me its a minor annoyance to change the bpm in reaper but i never change tempos within a track.

Yeah that was it but no worries I'm sure a solution will arise at some point, it's just strange that they both send and receive time code, so the capability must be there, il try sending a clock or mtc message from another device to the mpc as the sound card using physical midi ins and see if that works, when you set reaper to receive it at least goes into standby awaiting a message to start but not tied to a clock, where as the mpc even after setting up receive doesn't go into standby, but the fact that it has the options to receive mtc and clock messages suggests it should, which is why I thought I may be missing something, like I said I try sending message to the physical ins and see how it behaves and post up any joy, ( when I get in from work)
Jed

Bumping for anyone who missed this gem of a thread.

This sounds great been using the mpc as a plug in in reaper bt its a bit unstable, will definately give this a look in.
Thanks!

Quick question, when you record your mpc in live rather than via export from mpc software if there any midi jitter introduced that will throw the bpm out a bit like with the old mpcs?
Cheersz, i will find out soon enough anyways

I've experienced random cases of tracks doing some weird jittering when exporting and when I've deleted the files and done it again it's gone and everything records fine. So I can't recreate the fault consistently.

That said, I don't need to export with the above Reaper/Renaissance setup as the Ren is fed directly into Reaper and each output from the Ren (1-32) has its own channel within Reaper to do with as you wish. The great thing about this is when I'm ready to record I just hit record on Reaper, leave a small lead in of a couple seconds and press play on the Ren and each sound is being recorded as an audio file and I'm recording a stereo recording of what's being heard through the mixing desk via my soundcards inputs being hooked to the desks main outputs.

It sounds complicated but it actually isn't and it has huge benefits with having bounced/recorded individually for later remixing or remastering or further processing.

Yep been testing it out, working great, im a long time reaper user so the rest is easy, much better than plug in mode, Thanks for this thread super helpful