5. People who record, but have nothing to do with music whatsoever. For example, I have literally no musical skills whatsoever, but have at least 15k hours in my DAW. I'm a Voice actor, who worked hard to customize my DAW to get rid of as much music making stuff as possible from cluttering my interface (Reaper FTW)
It's a Digital AUDIO workstation, not a Digital MUSIC workstation
I use Ardour when I do sound design. A lot of the time you want to be able to automate volume changes, or add a reverb or an EQ(With real-time controls instead of the annoying batch "Change it, then test it" workflow), etc.
I'd be happy too,it's mostly templates: project templates, individual fx presets, fx chain templates for corrections, sweetening and mastering, export/render prsets, filename templates, And lots of keystroke macros that help me speed up my work. Things like specific keystrokes for punch and roll, quick edits and ripple delete. It's an amalgamation of lots of small optimizations. Reaper is also really good at UI customization, so you can hide grids, measures ,snapping, and really optimize things. ChatGPT is also reasonably good at writing Lua scripts for reaper called ReaScript that can leverage the API for automations more complex than what you can do with SWS additions to the immense actions list. If you have something specific, feel free to reach out directly. I love this stuff.
Any pointers on where to start with all that? I can grok Audacity (which is a handy but terribly basic program). When it came to Reaper, I found it very confusing, and never managed to do much with it. My needs are basically voice only.
Yeah, of course! But, this will be a thing that I hope doesn't get flagged. I have a totally free course for configuring reaper for VO at academy.boothjunkie.com. it goes through all my initial optimizations for reaper. If you're comfortable with your VST setup, this will go a long way in getting you started, and you can incorporate your VO chain.
If you want to take this out of HN and talk more specifically, my website is in my profile and I'd be happy to help however I can. If you want to dig deeper into anything specific, I'd be happy to share any experience I have.
NB: occasional self-promotion, particularly in context and with an appropriate resource is more than fine on HN. The fact that the course is free should count for something as well:
It's ok to post your own stuff part of the time, but the primary use of the site should be for curiosity.
It's a Digital AUDIO workstation, not a Digital MUSIC workstation