I started using reaper last year and have never looked back.

Hello all.

So as the title suggests, I started using reaper last year after nearly a decade using sonar, and the truth is, I have never looked back.

As a blind producer, there was a time when accessibility options in terms of using daws were extremely limited, up until a couple of years ago. If you were a blind audio engineer or producer and wanted to produce music, up until around 2016 or 2017, your options were severely limited. If you were using windows, the only option was to use a much older version of the cakewalk sonar daw, version 8.5 to be exact, with 2 really complicated but comprehensive scripting solutions for the jaws for windows screen reader, cake talking for sonar, and j sonar, respectively.

While i did enjoy using sonar at the time, it wasn’t until I started using reaper that I realised it was a pain in the ass to get certain activities done in sonar that are pretty much a breeze to do in reaper.

For example, I like that there are no separate audio and midi tracks in reaper per-say compared to sonar. It was also a real pain trying to get rid of virtual instrument tracks that you no longer wanted to use in a project. In sonar 8.5 if you wanted to delete virtual instrument tracks, you first had to go into sonars synth track view and delete the synth, then delete the related audio and midi tracks that were related to that synth.

Another issue was importing media into your projects in sonar. There was no automatic tempo matching in that version of sonar, and no easy way of changing the key or pitch of any imported audio to match the key of your project. That is now a breeze with reaper with the media explorer. It was also much harder to rearrange tracks in sonar as well compared to reaper.

I primarily work with midi and I much prefer working with midi in reaper compared to sonar. There is also a great support community for anyone who needs help with it, and reaper also works with the free windows based screen reader NVDA with the assistance of a few extensions.

All in all, I am very pleased with my decision to start using reaper and while I am still getting use to the workflow, I would never look back.