Reaper user - how to do certain tasks in Pro Tools?

[bhuether]

Hi, I am taking an audio post production course at Berklee Online that is being taught in Pro Tools. So I am brand new Pro Tools user.

I mainly use Reaper, and am trying to get myself situated in Pro Tools. Here are some of the most common things I do in Reaper and am curious what are the most efficient ways in Pro Tools to do similar?

1. Clip fade/crossfade handles. I see in PT that I can select a portion of time in a clip, hit Cmd-F. In Reaper I have fade handles on the clip itself and just drag freely. Is there a way to make PT behave that way?

2. Multichannel Tracks (not to be confused with multichannel in sense of surround sound, but instead for things like sidechaining). In Reaper, there is this wild routing scheme that I use quite often. For instance, consider de-essing vocals using sidechain compression, where an EQ'd version of the vocals is sent to compressor as a sidechain. In Reaper I simply add EQ and Compressor to vocal track as inserts. For EQ I set output track channel to 3/4, and in Compressor I set its detector input to receive this EQ output. Quite elegant - no need for aux bus, and dealing with bus muting, etc, etc - all is done via track inserts and internal track channels,.

3. Custom actions. I use these constantly in Reaper. For instance, I often use volume automation around some part of audio where I want to drop gain by, say, 4dB or whatever. In Reaper I select time region, hit my key command, and 4 automation points are added, with a drop of whatever dB I specify in the custom action.

4. Automatic track coloring. This probably sounds unimportant, but I find it useful. In Reaper I set up track color filters based on name of audio file. So if I have tracks named gtr 1, gtr 2, guitar 3, guitars 4, vx 1, vocal 2, vocals 3, the guitar tracks will all have same color and the vocals will all have their assigned color.

5. Track delay offsets. I just started using this feature after I started sending audio from Reaper to Logic and back, so I can use Logic plugins. Since there is delay from Logic, on the Reaper track where I return the Logic audio I just go into track routing and set negative offset. Pretty slick.

6. Resetting values to 0. This probably sounds not that useful, but I use this all the time in Reaper - for track fader, Reaper plugin param values. I just double click and value goes to 0.

Anyway, just curious what are the most efficient PT-ways that people do these sorts of tasks.

thanks!

[moshuajusic]

1) The smart tool does that. For cross fades, near the bottom of the clips. For fades, near the top corner. There might be another tool that does that, but I use the smart tool 99.99% of the time.

6) option-click (on mac)