You are going to love Reaper once you get past the initial learning curve. Like any DAW you will constantly learn new things as you use it. What I love about Reaper is how efficient it utilizes computer resources. The song I just posted had 36 tracks including virtual instruments, and tons of plugins, and ran flawlessly on my modest i5 machine (8GB ram) - peak computer usage was 34%.

To put processing on tracks, you can just click on the little rectangles inside the top half of the channel icon in the mixer view. That opens a dialogue box where you can select what you want. The plugins that come with Reaper are very useful, and I use them all the time even though I do have some fancy ones.

There are lot of YouTube videos, and you can go to the Cockos forum as well to learn and ask questions. http://forum.cockos.com/forumdisplay.php?f=20

Welcome to the Reaper Club!

Peace,
TC

PS: I know, I know, I am a fanboy of Reaper :-p


If it has strings I will find a way to play it!

You can hear my tunes at https://soundcloud.com/tc-gypsy