Select ‘Main File’, which should be at the top of the list, and you’ll be presented with two columns of commands. We’ll start with the File menu from Reaper’s primary menu bar. The drop-down selector, found top-left, allows you to choose which elements you’ll customise. To get started, from the main window, go to the Options menu, then select ‘Customise menus/toolbars.’ to bring up the appropriate window. Menu ModsĪll Reaper’s drop-down menus, context menus, and toobars link back to Action items. They lie beneath many default controls, including toolbar buttons, dropdown and contextual menus, and even fundamental commands like loading and saving projects. The Actions list comprises several thousand commands, each of which can be assigned to various different input triggers. Actions already lie at the heart of your own interaction with Reaper - for example, when you hit the space bar to start and stop playback of your timeline, you’re triggering an Action named ‘Transport: Play/stop’. In case you missed the March workshop, I’ll briefly recap what Actions are all about. This is what we’ll be exploring this month and, as in the earlier article, you’ll need the free SWS/S&M extension ( if you wish to follow all the examples.

This feature allows you to tweak Reaper’s user interface subtly so that it better suits your existing workflow, but it can also radically alter Reaper’s layout and functionality. What you don’t like about Reaper, you can probably change!īack in SOS March 2016 ( ), we created some custom Reaper Actions and assigned keyboard shortcuts to them, but Actions can also be assigned to menus and toolbars. CubicPack: using the theming engine in conjunction with custom toolbars to bring the Reaper user interface much closer to that of the ‘target’ DAW, Cubase.

Reaper action strings