Home Recording Tips: Running Reaper on Linux

Over the past couple of years, I have become rather fond of REAPER DAW for multi-track recording and mixing.  Recently, I have switch my primary OS from Windows 7 to Fedora 14.  The reasons for doing so are outside the scope of this blog but suffice it to say that I am very happy with my decision.  Well, except for saying goodbye to my old friend, Reaper.

I was trolling through some audio forums and I saw that some people were using Wine in Linux to get some audio apps to run.  Me not being afraid of a challenge like that, I started researching how to get Reaper running on Linux.  I didn’t do a lot of digging but I did notice that what I found was rather dated and problematic.  So, with a little more poking around and configuring, I was able to get Reaper running on my Linux installation.

Now, just for disclosure, this was a proof of concept project.  I have Reaper running on a separate boot instance and still run Windows 7.  So my Linux machine is not a dedicated DAW and would probably suffer some moderate latency issues.  Just saying.

Here’s how it went (all but the Reaper install as root):

First I updated my system (I’m OCD so it makes me feel warm and fuzzy):

yum update

Then I installed Wine.  You can download the distro but I have Fedora so I used YUM:

yum install wine

Here’s the tricky part.  It is recommended (actually required) that you install wineasio, which is the ASIO driver adapter that talks to JACK on Linux.  Wineasio is natively 32 bit only, this caused me some trouble since I am running the 64 bit version of Fedora.  However, my research paid off when I found XenCenter from JACKLabs.  This has the wineasio bundled up with both 32 and 64 bit versions.  I grabbed the XenCenter.msi and installed it through Wine without issue.

Finally, I downloaded Reaper and installed it through Wine as well.

The Test:

I pulled over a reference mix from my backup drive to a local folder in Linux (used for evaluating DAWs and such).  Luckily, it already had a Reaper project with the multi-tracks so I just double-clicked on it and it loaded right up.  Now, since I haven’t installed my plug-ins yet, many of them were disabled but to my amazement, the song played right out the gate.  After tweaking the rendering setting to my defaults, rendered the mix and noticed that it ran noticeably faster.  Obviously, the mix isn’t as tight since it’s pretty much a dry mix (martini?) but for mixing-the majority of my work- it works great.

One note since I have been working with Reaper for about a day under Wine:  Some of my plug-ins are not 100% stable.  I have had to do some adjustments but for the large part, the system is stable.  I had some trouble with a couple plugins that were free and when I cleared the VTS cache and rescanned, they crashed Reaper.  Once Identified them and removed them, the system sparked right up again.

Since this was a proof of concept, I used the 32bit version of Reaper but I am sure the 64 bit will do just fine as well (I will update this post with my findings).

If you have any questions or anything to add to this, leave a comment.  I will be sure to add it to the guide.

Here are the links you might find helpful:

• Fedora Project
• Wine
• JACK Labs, XenCenter
• WineASIO
• Reaper