Joe’s Guide to ReaPlugs. The amazing FREE plugins from the makers of the REAPER DAW.
If you haven’t tried Reaper yet, I highly recommend giving it a shot. It’s my #1 DAW and the acronym describes exactly what it does best: it is the most Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering and Recording in my perspective. One of my favorite things about Reaper is the free plugin suite that comes with it: ReaPlugs. They are extremely transparent and extremely CPU efficient plugins so you can use literally hundreds of instances without your CPU gasping for cool air. With ReaPlugs, you get super low latency, high quality plugins that ONLY do what you ask, and nothing more: no coloration to the sound, no distortion, no quirky glitches, all with a simple and clean user interface.
Download here:
Update: It's technically able to be run on Mac with Wine, so is it worth the hassle? Honestly, it depends on how tech-savvy you are, but stick around for more free plugins that are Mac native/compatible!
WHAT YOU GET:
ReaComp: Perfectly Transparent Compressor. Perfect for vocals, drums, and general dynamics control. I use it everywhere in every project because it is so incredibly versatile. It can also completely replace things like “Waves Vocal Rider” all you need to do is set the release extremely long and pre-comp to several milliseconds before the audio comes in.
ReaXcomp: Unlimited Transparent Multi-Band Compressor. I use this one all the time on busses and folders. It’s the perfect go to plug-in that quickly balances the transients across the frequency spectrum. It’s super useful to use on drums or backing vocals with a 50/50 wet/dry mix after you clock in the settings to your liking. It will keep the track or folder supported without sounding too compressed. It's also amazing at brightening up a track without losing power.
ReaEQ: Transparent EQ with Unlimited Bands. This plug-in along with the JS plug-in ReEQ (which has a super similar name) are my go-to EQ’s as they are perfectly clear and SO fast. You can just keep adding more and more bands (not that you should) but it’s great for audio that needs super detailed EQing or general simple sweeps of boosts or cuts. It also really helps to see the audio Phase which EQ’s generally effect. If you hit the button in the bottom right corner, you can see if your EQing is doing more damage than good in an instant.
ReaDelay: Multi-Tap Fully Customizable Delay. This plug-in is one of the EASIEST delay plug-ins ever. Instead of messing around with a million settings, you can just dial in what you want exactly on each delay instance. Each “Tap” represented by a tab below, is a single delay instance which can feedback into itself. This means you can do anything from an easy ping-pong style delay to a complex almost never ending reverb type of delay.
ReaFIR: FFT Based Dynamics and EQ Processor. This plug-in is a pretty wild processor. Not only is it an extremely precise EQ, but it can be all of the following: EQ, Gate, Compressor, Convolution L/R processor and a “subracter”. What does that mean?
EQ – Self-explanatory linear equalizer with point precision. It is a Linear-Phase EQ so it doesn't cause any phasing issues which makes it very suitable for mastering.
Gate – Only allows through audio that hits the certain threshold at the specific frequency you can do some pretty cool FX sounds with this as well as use it as a utility plug-in.
Compressor – set the threshold like a multiband compressor but you get the entire frequency spectrum all at once which is a pretty powerful tool
Convolution L/R – This is straight from the website cause I couldn’t describe it better myself: “filters the left channel's signal with the right channel's signal, and applies the adjustment curve as an EQ control. So what you will hear in Convolve LR mode is the "like" frequencies from the Left and right channels together, and any dissimilar frequencies will be faint or non-existent.”
Subtract Mode – You can use this to do noise removal or room tone removal. All you do is pull down a frequency that is bugging you and it will be subtracted from the signal once it hits a certain threshold. You can also build a noise profile and subtract noisy fans or background hum (use with caution).
ReaGate: Simple and Easy Gate with Excellent Detailed Controls. Everything you could need in a gate plugin is clearly and easily spelled out for you. Also works as an inverse gate… which may be helpful to you as an effect or for setting the right gate settings on a certain frequency.
The More Niche Plug-Ins Included:
ReaStream:
Have you ever need to stream audio over your network or between two different audio softwares? With ReaStream, you can send audio outputs on your local network to run a headphone mix on someone else’s computer or record on two different devices simultaneously. You can also run audio into OBS with the plugin sending from your DAW and receiving from OBS. Maybe you want to share audio output from one DAW to your friends computer in another DAW? This is all possible with ReaStreams audio networking capabilities.
ReaJS:
This extremely unique plugin is actually not just a Plugin – it is an entire world of plug-ins. You can load in hudnreds of JS effects including delays, compressors, limiters, convolution based reverbs and amps, reverbs, distortions, samplers, effects, noise editors, analyzers for audio and MIDI etc. All of these JS plugins have been carefully crafted for REAPER but now you can use them in any DAW. You can even write your own plug-ins from scratch.
ReaControlMIDI
This MIDI control plug-in is a great utility plug-in. This one allows very specific controls of MIDI messages sent to your MIDI devices or your VSTi's.
HOT TAKE: I understand the user interface is “cheap looking” or rather bare minimum effort on these plug-ins… but please let me know when someone can hear how a plug-in looks… haha! What matters is that they are extremely effective and efficient. If you are like me and you are working on mixes with hundreds of tracks and VST instruments, you need to be careful about CPU usage. I truly only care about the audio quality of the final product, and these are the highest quality plugins for the least amount of CPU I have found besides Airwindows Plugin’s (for which I will also write a small article). If you need plug-ins that simply get the job done, these are for you.
Hope you enjoyed my breakdown of the ReaPlugs. I enjoyed sharing them with you and giving you a little background on how I use each one. I’ll be posting much more about free plug-ins and instruments I use as I develop this blog further. I love to contribute making audio production extremely accessible by embracing the free tools we have and the more I can share, the more people can make beautiful music. Music creation doesn't need gate keeping and hundreds of thousands of dollars to do anymore, so let's just spread the love to the software that helps us achieve those goals for absolutely no cost at all.
Cheers,
Joe
