17.1 Understanding REAPER’s Channel Routing
This section is mainly intended for more experienced users of DAW software.
Kind: concept (user-guide-section) Chapter: 17 More Routing Examples Source: REAPER User Guide v7.70
This section is mainly intended for more experienced users of DAW software. REAPER’s basic routing capabilities include buses, submixes and folders. Tracks in REAPER can in fact carry up to 128 channels of information. These can be used for simple or complex routing of audio or MIDI material, making possible such features as FX routing, channel splitting and parallel routing, audio ducking and more.
Stereo (by definition) uses 2 channels - left (1) and right (2). When you pan a track with mono media, you are determining how that track signal is balanced left-right between these two channels. By default, REAPER uses channels 1/2 for your audio, e.g. when sending audio to the master. These same default channels are used by the master to send audio to your speakers. More complex tasks might need more than just these two channels. One example is parallel FX processing: for example, which allows different FX to be processed independently of each other. We’ll get to this later in this chapter. Another example might be “ducking.” This is where the volume of one track manipulates that of another – for example, to prevent a guitar from jumping up above a vocal. Footnote: Your master has a virtual "switch box" (right click master volume fader). By default, channels 1/2 go outputs 1/2, but any combination of REAPER channels can be routed to any hardware outputs.