headfone setup

How does one (a newbie)set up the headfone feed in Reaper and at the same time enable the control room monitor feed? I just abandoned Sonar for the last time, yes, the last time. I am evaluating Reaper and so far, I'm very impressed with all it's vast features however; seeing how to set up both headfone and monitor feeds is not obvious to me. Thanx in advance, Stevereno

Welcome to the Reaper forum....I'm sure you'll get your answer here from someone. I always use headsets for recording, final mix is done with ears & speakers. My set up: Soundcard out > CD IN on a stereo receiver with a bunch of speakers connected to it. Headset ---> headphone jack on receiver I can turn the monitors on/off. As long as Reaper is using the correct sound device in the preferences it is good to go. Is this what you are asking? cliff

Welcome to the Reaper forum. You'll need an audio interface with enough hardware outputs to feed phones and studio monitors (2 each for stereo). As there are no such thing as group channels in reaper you simply use a regular track, name it f.ex. 'headphone mix' and create sends from other tracks to this. Hardware outputs og your own choice. should Same goes for a monitor mix track. Workflow wise there are several ways to go about it. I often use the routing matrix. I heartily recommend the user guide . It's full of routing examples. Be patient. It's rewarding. And just ask again if need be. Lotsa helpful people here.

I should have mentioned my soundcard is an Alesis Multmix8 Firewire with headphone, monitor, studio and tape outs on it. cliff

Many Thanx 

Mucho gusto to all my new friends here at Reaperville *S*. This is one of the many featues of migrating to Reaper from Sonar (and there a plenty o' reasons ). The community here is simply the best. Thanx to all who responded. Your suggestions are clear and easy to implement. I hope that after I get some Reaper under my belt, I'll be able to help others out as well. Again thank you guys, Stevereno

Replies above are good to go for creating feeds to headphones and other outputs when you want to send different mixes to various outputs. In addition to that, one elegant feature that could be useful would be to always have the standard project output mix available for any and all of your outputs headphones, monitors, tape, etc, ready for use whenever you might want to use. Here's how to set that up: Open a new empty REAPER project. Click menu View - Master Track. The Master Track appears at the top of the track window. Click the io button on the Master Track Control Panel. The Outputs for Master Track window opens. In that window click the dropdown list "Add new hardware output" Select one of your outputs. Repeat for all hardware outputs that exist on your sound card. Still in the same window, click the Mute (m) button on each of the extra hardware outputs you have just added leaving, say, only your normal monitor output un-muted. Close the Add new hardware output window. This is still an empty unsaved project, with no recorded content. Click menu File - Project Templates - Save Project as Template and enter a suitable name to save such as "All outputs enabled" Close the project (there is no need to save it) Then when creating any new project in future, start by clicking menu File - Project Templates and select your "All outputs enabled" template that will now be listed on the menu. Now, to use any of your outputs, simply click io button on the Master track and unmute any of the Master track hardware outputs. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Also, as you learn more about REAPER you will certainly come across many other options and features you would like to have setup in a Project Template. Repeat the procedure above to create new templates, or continue to develop the "All outputs enabled" template. (Open a new project using that existing template, make some changes or additions to the new project, then do Save Project as Template again and overwrite your existing template.)

Awesome *S* 

Hey Andy. Thanx a mil for the excellent help to get me started in Reaperville. I'm very interested in using buses and your help was easy to understand and is greatly appreciated. sincerly, Stevereno

I personaly mix only on phones. That is my main paradigm. I do not have monitors and almost never used to listen any records on a hi-fi or wahtever monitors different from phones. And I'm still alive if you wonder. But mixing (and listenign, monitoring) on headphones is another universe by itself. Stereo-field "in" headphones is way, way different to create compared to stereo from the monitors in front of you. Here we are dealing with the fundamental conception of percieving the sound image in our minds via the ears. Many "monitor"-mixes still sound to me as mono when I listen to them on a headphones. I think that nowadays the majority of listeners in almost 80% of their time listen the recordings on headphones.