Reaper and 3rd Parties

[Doublehelix]

Thanks for coming onboard for a couple of weeks Justin!

My question revolves around Reaper's ability to interface with 3rd party hardware devices mainly, but software fits this bill as well. More specifically, UAD-1 hardware/software and the Mackie Control and Expanders.

The story is pretty famous by now how you were able to single-handedly get the UAD plugins to work when you got pretty much zero help from Universal Audio.

And the ability to use my hardware controllers such as the Mackie's is just as essential.

So my question:

Is it hard for you as a small independent developer to get cooperation from the 3rd party developers? Are they starting to see you as a viable entity?

This is obviously critical since those of us that have been doing this for a while have a huge collection of plugins, and hardware devices (UAD-1, Powercore, Duendo, Mackie Control, etc.). Your included plugins seem to get good reviews, but we all want to continue to work in the way we are accustomed, and want to make sure that our investments are preserved.

I personally want to wish you the absolute BEST in getting Reaper up there with the big boys. We are all watching you very closely!

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

[Justin Frankel]

Originally Posted by Doublehelix

The story is pretty famous by now how you were able to single-handedly get the UAD plugins to work when you got pretty much zero help from Universal Audio.

For a long time we didn't get any contact from UAD. One of our users was nice enough to lend me his card, and I played with it trying to sort out why it had so many issues with REAPER.. Around the same time I actually got a friend of mine who was also friends with some UAD people to do an email introduction, which eventually lead to a reply from UAD, which essentially said that it seemed I was doing everything right, but that the UAD driver only works properly when using multiple plug-ins if those plug-ins are always called in the same order.

This led us to make the "UAD synchronous mode" which calls the UAD plug-ins as they wish, but also prevents you from fully utilizing multiple processors (since if you run on multiple processors often the order of calling plug-ins changes etc as things are load balanced). This is an issue that I am nearly certain UAD could fix in their driver, though they might disagree with that.

And the ability to use my hardware controllers such as the Mackie's is just as essential.

So my question:

Is it hard for you as a small independent developer to get cooperation from the 3rd party developers? Are they starting to see you as a viable entity?

It depends--some other developers/hardware manufacturers have been great to us: Frontier got us some of the first TranzPort and AlphaTracks to add support, iZ has been giving us RADAR information so we added session loading (and soon we'll be doing session saving as well). PreSonus lent us some hardware as well.

On the other hand, we originally emailed Mackie about supporting the MCU--the reply we got was "We only license the MCU SDK under NDA to certain DAW developers" (yow that was a lot of abbreviations).

Those are the extremes... stuff happens in the middle, too. Propellerhead licensed us the ReWire SDK, eventually (after months of waiting). That might have been an administrative error, but at any rate it was troubling at the time...

This is obviously critical since those of us that have been doing this for a while have a huge collection of plugins, and hardware devices (UAD-1, Powercore, Duendo, Mackie Control, etc.). Your included plugins seem to get good reviews, but we all want to continue to work in the way we are accustomed, and want to make sure that our investments are preserved.

We are very sensitive to this, too! Ideally we'd like to support everything that is useful to our users! The tough part is getting the specifications and hardware/software to test our implementations.

I personally want to wish you the absolute BEST in getting Reaper up there with the big boys. We are all watching you very closely!

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Cheers!

-Justin

[DrDeltaM]

Originally Posted by Justin Frankel

On the other hand, we originally emailed Mackie about supporting the MCU--the reply we got was "We only license the MCU SDK under NDA to certain DAW developers" (yow that was a lot of abbreviations).

I thought the MCU protocol was open to anybody, seems not then...

Afaik, the Logic Control protocol is very well documented actually (free d/l from Apple support site). And since anybody with an MCU can run it in LC mode, it might be a solution?

[DrDeltaM]

Link to the info I meant: http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/log...urfaceInfo.pdf

Check the Addendum B, full Midi implementation of the Logic Control.

[Justin Frankel]

Originally Posted by DrDeltaM

I thought the MCU protocol was open to anybody, seems not then...

Afaik, the Logic Control protocol is very well documented actually (free d/l from Apple support site). And since anybody with an MCU can run it in LC mode, it might be a solution?

Well, Mackie could've pointed us in that direction.. From what I can tell there are some small differences between the native MCU mode and the LC mode..

At the end of the day, it's a MIDI device, so it's not terribly difficult to see what's going on with it (MIDI-OX is good for this)

[blayz2002]

Hi Justin, and Reaper users,

So how is the usabilty of UAD 1 & MCU with Reaper then? As after having a look at your site, and the GUI's I'm thinkin hey lets give it a go as I'm currently using Logic 5.5.1 on a PC, and as every one knows that's no longer supported or developed, but it's what I learned on and am comfortable with.

I recently upgraded my PC to a Core 2 Duo, but because of Logics 1gb ram limitation I will be eventually moving on to another DAW, but the usability of both UAD & MCU are paramount to what I choose to go with.

Also if you hurry groove quantize (and being able to import midi groove templates) that might sway me as well

[Justin Frankel]

Originally Posted by blayz2002

Hi Justin, and Reaper users,

So how is the usabilty of UAD 1 & MCU with Reaper then? As after having a look at your site, and the GUI's I'm thinkin hey lets give it a go as I'm currently using Logic 5.5.1 on a PC, and as every one knows that's no longer supported or developed, but it's what I learned on and am comfortable with.

I recently upgraded my PC to a Core 2 Duo, but because of Logics 1gb ram limitation I will be eventually moving on to another DAW, but the usability of both UAD & MCU are paramount to what I choose to go with.

Also if you hurry groove quantize (and being able to import midi groove templates) that might sway me as well

The MCU works very well.. The UAD works provided you don't mind sacrificing your dual core utilization (you still benefit from the second core, but you can't fully load it like you can when not using the UAD).


-Justin

[DeadPoet]

An idea could be making a sort of wrapper for plugins (like Novation's RemoteSL technology) that maps common controls of plugins to the same control function on your controller. Eg. You have a controller with some endless rotary thingies and have the rightmost always dedicated to 'threshold' when opening any make of compressor.

That way I think you can implement support for any kind of midi controller on the market ??


Herwig

[Justin Frankel]

Originally Posted by DeadPoet

An idea could be making a sort of wrapper for plugins (like Novation's RemoteSL technology) that maps common controls of plugins to the same control function on your controller. Eg. You have a controller with some endless rotary thingies and have the rightmost always dedicated to 'threshold' when opening any make of compressor.

That way I think you can implement support for any kind of midi controller on the market ??


Herwig

We are planning on adding a control surface API so people can write native plug-ins to support specific controllers, as well as just for assigning actions, etc. No word on when this will be finished, though..

-Justin