Reaper for Podcasters: The Complete Beginner's Guide

By Paper Edit Team — March 17, 2025

Reaper is the DAW of choice for a growing number of professional podcast editors. It's powerful, customizable, and — compared to the competition — shockingly affordable. If you've heard about it but haven't made the jump, this guide covers everything you need to know to get started.

What Is Reaper?

Reaper (Rapid Environment for Audio Production, Engineering, and Recording) is a digital audio workstation (DAW) made by Cockos, a small software company. It was first released in 2006 and has been steadily developed ever since, with regular free updates to paid license holders.

Reaper does everything you'd expect from a professional DAW: multi-track recording, non-destructive editing, MIDI sequencing, effects processing, mixing, and mastering. It supports VST, VST3, AU, and JS plugins. It runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

What sets Reaper apart is its combination of professional capability, extreme customizability, lightweight performance, and — most importantly for independent podcasters — its price.

Why Podcasters Choose Reaper

Cost

$60 for professional-grade audio production software is genuinely remarkable. Most podcast editors who switch to Reaper from more expensive alternatives cite price as the first reason, but keep using it for all the others.

Performance on older hardware

Reaper is a remarkably lean application. It installs in under 20MB and runs smoothly on machines that struggle with heavier DAWs. For podcasters editing on older laptops or less powerful machines, this matters.

Customizability

Reaper's interface, toolbars, and behavior are almost entirely configurable. Podcast-specific setups — custom toolbar layouts with one-click noise reduction, templates for common episode structures — are easy to build. The Reaper community (especially the forums and REAPER Resources sites) has extensive libraries of themes and scripts.

ReaScript for automation

Reaper supports scripting via ReaScript (Lua, Python, or EEL2). Podcast editors use this to automate repetitive tasks: applying a standard effects chain to every track, automatically fading music under speech, batch-processing files. For high-volume podcast editors, scripting can save hours per week.

Multi-track handling

After a paper edit, your Reaper project might have 40–80 individual clips on the timeline (one for each selected passage). Reaper handles this effortlessly. Large item counts that would slow down lighter DAWs are no problem.

Essential Reaper Setup for Podcasters

Create a podcast template

Set up a project template with your standard track layout (host track, guest track, music track, SFX track) and your effects chain already applied to each track. Save it as a Reaper project template (File → Project Templates → Save as Template). Every new episode starts from this template instead of from scratch.

Set up your effects chain

A standard podcast effects chain per voice track:

1. ReaFIR — noise reduction (comes with Reaper)
2. ReaEQ — high-pass filter around 80–100Hz, gentle presence boost — free, built-in
3. ReaComp — compression; ratio 3:1, threshold around -20dB — free, built-in
4. ReaLimit — brick wall limiter at -1dBTP — free, built-in

Learn the essential keyboard shortcuts

Configure loudness rendering

Go to File → Render → set your output format to MP3, 128kbps, stereo. Add a final ReaLimit plugin on the master bus with a ceiling of -1dBTP. Use Loudness (LUFS) mode in the render dialog to target -16 LUFS integrated.

How Paper Edit Integrates with Reaper

Paper Edit's export generates a Reaper RPP project file with all your editorial selections placed as items on the timeline. When you open it in Reaper:

• Each passage you selected appears as a separate item on the track
• Items are placed in sequence from left to right, with the correct start/end times from your source audio
• The source audio file is referenced (you need it in the same directory or Reaper will ask you to locate it)

From there, you apply your template effects chain, do a fine edit pass, add production elements, and render. The hard structural editing work is already done — Reaper is where you finish it.

For more on the export process, see our guide to exporting your podcast edit to Reaper.

Is Reaper Right for You?

Reaper is the right choice if you:

• Want professional features at an indie-friendly price
• Edit multi-track podcasts with complex arrangements
• Want to automate repetitive tasks with scripting
• Run Windows, macOS, or Linux
• Are willing to invest a few hours in learning the interface

It might not be the best fit if you:

• Just want to do simple audio cleanup with minimal setup (GarageBand or Audacity are simpler)
• Need a tight integration with an existing Adobe Creative Cloud workflow (Adobe Audition)
• Are primarily a video editor who also edits the audio (DaVinci Resolve's Fairlight is better for that)

For most dedicated podcast editors, Reaper is worth the small learning curve. It's the DAW we built Paper Edit's export around — and for good reason.