Topic: Reaper and meta data – very convoluted

[philipus]

Hello everybody

I'm editing a live WAV recording in Reaper. I tried Audacity, which I am more familiar with, but it's Normalise function added odd pops to the recording. I don't get that with Reaper's Normalise, so thought I would use that to split the recording into songs/tracks.

The problem is I just can't get my head around how metadata editing works in Reaper. In Audacity it's easy to add artist, album title, song titles etc but in Reaper it seems one has to create and name "regions". Then there's a Region/Marker Manager where one can add some info and a Project Render Metadata dialog box which seems to pull info from various places. It's all very convoluted and seems unnecessarily complex for simple use.

All I want is to split my recording into songs, tag them with a few tags and export to a suitable format (which in Reaper seems to be MP3 because it lacks AAC and other Apple formats, which is what I normally use).

Does anyone here know how to do this?

Thank you very much
Philip

[philipus]

Apologies for answering to my own post, but what I've found works the best so far is to do the following to go from a long recording to separate songs:

1. Select all, double-click the track and click Normalise in the dialog that comes up.
2. Run Auto Trim/Split Items (helps to assign a shortcut; one has to play around with mainly the dB setting a bit so it doesn't split too eagerly)
3. Assign Regions to the split items (again it helps to assign a shortcut)
4. Go through the recording to pull the ends of each region so they cover only one song
5. In the Region Marker Manager:
    a. delete all regions that are very short
    b. double-click the first region's box in the # column and type "1"; then tab and do the same for all other # fields
    c. double-click the first region's Name field and type "1" and then the song title; then tab and do the same for all remaining song titles
6. In the Region Render Matrix click the box under each track to ensure that it will be rendered (tip: CMD-A to select all, double-click on one of the boxes in the Render Track List column and select All tracks in the menu that pops up – this selects all boxes in the Region Render Matrix)
7. Press Render in the Matrix or File – Render
8. In the Render to File dialog:
    a. delete "Untitled" from File name, click Wildcard and select Regions/Markers – $region which will assign the title of each region as file name.
    b. select Region render matrix as Source and make any other changes you wish.
9. Press Render [X] files

It's not ideal because it doesn't populate other metadata fields. I'm no metadata nerd, but I do like to have things like genre, year and number of tracks but so far I haven't found a way to add that. 

[al w.]

If you’re having issues with Audacity’s normalization - which is a bit strange! You could also try using “Amplify” which will default to the equivalent increase as normalization to 0.0 - then you could normalize in Reaper, export to WAV, then import *that* to Audacity to split it up and apply metadata. The bookmarks feature in Audacity is one of the best tools for splitting up a long file that sound

This is similar to my usual flow except I use Logic for mastering. But I always cut up in Audacity

[philipus]

Thank you for your reply Al. I've noticed that strange behaviour with Audacity's normalisation before. But another annoyance is that it takes so long to apply on an hour-long recording. Reaper takes literally half a second. But perhaps I should just normalise in Reaper and do the rest in Audacity, including the export as Reaper doesn't offer any Apple formats. Another thing I haven't found in Reaper is a sort of "snap to sound" function when one cuts a track. I seem to remember that's possible in Audacity. Anyway thanks very much for chiming in.
Cheers
Philip

[nulldogmas]

Does Audacity still add the weird pops if the peak amplitude is set to something lower than 0.0 dB, like -0.1? A lot of audio players have issues with waveforms that actually touch the maximum boundary.

[al w.]

Thank you for your reply Al. I've noticed that strange behaviour with Audacity's normalisation before. But another annoyance is that it takes so long to apply on an hour-long recording. Reaper takes literally half a second. But perhaps I should just normalise in Reaper and do the rest in Audacity, including the export as Reaper doesn't offer any Apple formats. Another thing I haven't found in Reaper is a sort of "snap to sound" function when one cuts a track. I seem to remember that's possible in Audacity. Anyway thanks very much for chiming in.
Cheers
Philip

You're welcome!

[fanofjam]

Apologies for answering to my own post, but what I've found works the best so far is to do the following to go from a long recording to separate songs:

I'm using Reaper, but what you do sounds very cumbersome.  I use Reaper to master my entire show.  Once I'm happy I render it and save is my mixdown master.  I either have one file for the whole show or two files if I stopped recording at setbreak.  I track it out using CDWave.  Have used CDWave for 20 years and it's always been super quick and easy.  Once my tracks are created, I use Tigo Tago to tag my files with metadata.  Tigo Tago is also really quick and easy and has a few automatic functions for making tagging quick and easy,  Finally, once files are tagged, I create my MD5 file with Traders Little Helper.  All of these are free software.