Lockdown boredom, Reaper to the rescue...

andy_k

So far this week, I have 'built' a tele partscaster from a few bits that fit together- came out good, it will be my back up for when I get back to gigging.
I then had a go recording some stuff with it, I have been putting some stuff together with midi, backing tracks for out singer, the newest one is the new guitar--


I started that over the easter weekend-but have run out of ideas for now,
So anyway, then I had a go at a Fuzzdog Noisy Cricket that I have been meaning to get done, managed to give myself a great solder iron burn on my thumb, but it came out as good as I expected, can't believe how good they sound through a 4x12, 
Anyhoo, today I dug out a 15 year old laptop that needed re-install of OS, I found the disc that I made when I did the first setup, Windows XP recovery.
What a pain in the ass winXP is, it seems to boot up fine, and looks like it is running ok, only 1 gig of ram, so I was interested to see what it can do.
I still have a Toshiba Libretto from 95, that is a fun little thing-it has a lot of games and some old music software on it that works well, Hammerhead is a fun little drum thing that sounds great for trashy drums.
The XP laptop is ridiculous, couldn't get online with the built in windows explorer, wifi will not connect, so when I used a network cable-and got a version of Firefox to work I thought I was good to go.
For a giggle, I thought I would see if I could get an old M box 2 to work, I found some drivers before that got it running on a Win10 machine, which was amazing considering I had never managed to get it to work before-guess what, Reaper recognised it, and it worked fine.
So I thought the same would work on this XP machine--I nearly got there, but what did amaze me, was I downloaded the latest version of Reaper6 today, and it works fine on the Win XP machine, with 1 gig of ram, 
It was the only thing I could get to work on this 15 year old machine, I have some reference sessions with about 10 tracks, stem mixes of stuff like Moonage Daydream and Miracle man, and they are playing back fine with about 50% system resources.
These same mixes play back on my 16g ram Macbook pro using about 5%, so the XP machine is only good for playback I guess, but even Audacity wouldn't work, Foobar 2000 crashes, and I can't even get a CD to play.

It has been a busy week, but I guess we have time to spare now.