Source-destination Editing With ReaClassical

Here’s ReaClassical in a simple horizontal‑workflow guise. Just three tracks, and three takes of the same material. On the right an ‘assembly line edit’ is being put together using the best moments from the takes: note the specialised Source and Dest (Destination) markers in the ruler.

We explore a clever set of donationware scripts that transform the popular Reaper DAW software into a source‑destination editing powerhouse.

Reaper is a DAW that’s famous for its unparalleled scope for customisation, and there’s a very active community of developers who write scripts to take advantage of that. A select few, though, take the script‑writing further than others, to turn this DAW into something quite different. One such project is ReaClassical — a set of open‑source scripts that transforms Reaper into an amazingly capable source‑destination audio editor that has specialist features to support your sessions from recording right through to mixing, mastering and album authoring. I suppose I could conceivably have written this article as a review, but it would have taken way too many pages to do it justice. Instead, I thought it might be a good idea to demonstrate some of the possibilities by taking you through a few useful examples of how and why you might want to use it.

Source‑destination Editing

So, what’s ‘source‑destination editing’, exactly? Still uncommon in audio circles, it’s a standard approach in the video world that comes into its own when dealing with mostly acoustic musical styles, where performances are played and recorded naturally rather than performed to a click track, and overdubbing isn’t typically used. Which is to say classical music, many types of folk/world music, and jazz. For such styles it’s normal, in a recording session, for the recordist/producer to gather multiple takes (the ‘source’) of the same pieces, with a view to piecing together a ‘best bits’ edit (the ‘destination’) in post‑production, cutting between takes to cover musical glitches, possibly assisted by notes made by a producer during the sessions.

It isn’t impossible to do this using Reaper in its standard form, of course, or indeed most DAW software. But for this job, a source‑destination (S‑D) system is faster and more flexible. It supports gathering material on the recording session, with really robust track and item grouping. Editing then happens on slick and fast ripple‑edit principles, so you can build edits without laborious cutting and pasting. Crossfading also plays a big part, knitting together edited material with quite different facilities from those offered by the vast majority of DAWs. In ReaClassical, keyboard shortcuts drive every aspect of this: the user is rarely required to use any modifier‑key combinations, and the shortcuts are grouped tightly and logically on your computer keyboard — all of which is intended to facilitate ease and speed of use.

This isn’t the only S‑D‑capable DAW, but virtually all of the others that are currently available are Windows‑only affairs, and they’re often quite expensive too: Sequoia, Pyramix and SADiE, for example. ReaClassical will run in macOS and various flavours of Linux, as well as Windows, and it’s donationware. Given that Reaper is also inexpensive, this makes it a much more accessible system than most.

On The Session

To use ReaClassical on a recording session, after booting up the portable Reaper install, pressing F7 is a good first step. A Horizontal Workflow dialogue box (we’ll return to that terminology) asks how many tracks are required, and the answer should equate to how many stereo or mono mic sources you’re intending to use. Hit OK, and ReaClassical creates enough track lanes, with track (and item) linking already set up. Next steps are to name the tracks (double‑click fields in the Track Control Panel in the usual way) and configure track inputs (right‑click in the nearby level meter, or use the Routing Matrix).

You can set up tracks as you please, but it’s a good practice to choose your main stereo pair of mics for the parent track, track 1: this ensures that a healthy, representative waveform is visible even when the track group is closed. When you’ve done this, press F7 again to ‘sync’ tracks and mixer channel names, and build some behind‑the‑scenes routings. Finally, save your new project.

To start recording, F9 is your friend. A first press record‑arms all your tracks. Press again to start recording, and once more to stop. You may notice immediately the way ReaClassical names your recorded media items in the track lanes: along with the track’s number and name, they’re given a ‘T’ suffix that gives them a unique ‘take’ identification. This numbering is the key to tallying up recorded material with a producer’s notes made on a session about what went well and what might need attention. ReaClassical keeps incrementing this number as you make more recording passes, and it keeps this harmonised between tracks even if you add new tracks (using the Shift+T shortcut) some way into a session.

The floating Take Number window is a wonderfully clear reference during a recording session, and Find Takes is a real time‑saver for quickly locating Source material, especially if you’ve recorded hours of it, and hundreds of takes.

Two really specialised features build on this take functionality, and they’re worth their weight in gold. The first is a current take number display: Ctrl+Return or Ctrl+Enter (Command on macOS, as always) opens it. This is a simple floating window with a nice clear number: when not recording it shows in green the number of the next take, but during recording the number of the current take, in red. It brings so much clarity to a session, especially hours in! The second feature is closely related. When not recording, pressing Return or Enter opens a Find Take dialogue box. Type in a number (and hit Enter or Return), and ReaClassical relocates the play cursor to the start of that take, reading the metadata in the audio items, with not a marker in sight.

There’s one more thing to mention here: playback, which is often required in a session to check balance, and...