14. Last minute up to podcasters and also people who create technology for podcasters about all things podcasting. And today we have a very special guest, we have Justin Frankel, who is the creator of the Reaper Digital Audio Workstation, which I think we mentioned in every single episode of our podcast. Because we produce everything we do in Reaper. Both I use Reaper and also our sound engineer, Misha, he also uses Reaper. So Reaper is our favorite tool, we use both from Music and for podcasts.
But one thing I didn't know about Justin when I, so basically I wanted to invite the founder of Reaper to our show and I was researching how to find Justin I found his website. And then I had this old shit moment, like Justin is the creator of Winam, which I had no idea about. So yeah, we are gonna talk about Winam as well today. And I think our show is still pretty small, right? Ilya, it's like in the hundreds of people
range right now. I'm pretty sure that every single person who is listening to it has used Winam extensively because they're either our friends or some sort of a connection and we basically grew up with that through engineering colleagues. Well, they are not representative of the greater population, but that's pretty cool. I don't think kids today know about Winam, but there was a time, yeah. That's actually right, it's DeLorean, back to 90s. What was listening to
music like back then when you were starting working on Winam? I grew up in a small town that for a long time didn't have a record store. Getting music was always difficult. When I was a teenager, I was always playing around with downloading music. You know, sometimes it would be from like FTP sites in Europe and there'd be AU files that were like 8-bit ALAR, ULAW, whatever that was.
And at that point I didn't even have a proper sound card. I had a resistor network that plugged into the parallel port and so then I wrote software to play things back from there and drove people in high school crazy listening to the same songs over and over again testing that. But it was a lot of fun. It was always an interesting thing of being able to listen to music in
different ways. This is back when you were in Arizona, I believe? Yeah, when I was growing up in Sedona, when I was in high school and programming for DOS using TurboC or Turbo Pascal before that. What was your favorite music at that time if you remember? I really liked the first Pearl Jam album. I listened to that a million times. Also, the Red Hotchley Puppers Blood Sugar Sex Magic,
which is still very good. The lyrically doesn't really hold up as an adult, but I can still do some pretty terrible karaoke renditions of Circe Ico-Sexy, given the opportunity. I was listening to the 1991 albums. I listened to Pearl Jam, I listened to Metallica, Black Album and a few others. Pearl Jam album, it holds up so well. Every single song there is just great. I love the album. Black is probably my favorite song or ones. They're all really good.
That is a fantastic album. I listened to one of your interviews and I think you said that you were frustrated with the experience that other MP3 players had back then. So you decided to write your own MP3 player to just solve your own problem. Yeah, I mean, it was something I was interested in anyway. It wasn't that I was really frustrated. It was more that I'd already been playing or writing music players for Goss. Suddenly, there's this new format that actually sounds really good.
You can download things in a reasonable amount of time. Then it was like, well, I had a friend who made a Mac port of AMP. After seeing that, I was like, well, I should do one for Windows because I don't use Macs. What was AMP? AMP was this open source MP3 decoder that was written by a guy in Croatia. It was written by a bunch of people. It started by a guy like
Thomas Lavu-Sleck. Probably mispronounced him. Sorry, Thomas Lavu-Sleck, wherever you are. It was like an open source free implementation of MP3 decoding that was otherwise somewhat proprietary. There was like an ISO standard and stuff, but there wasn't an implementation that people could actually use that was reasonable. You rewrote that, erote that for Windows Hands Win AMP.
Yeah, I ported it to Windows and made a UI for it and stuff like that. It did the audio, hardware, output, and then I went to there, all the little things that you wanted to to make listening to music on your computer better than it would be elsewhere. I think I may be misremoring, but in these early days of Win AMP, it didn't read any of the metadata from the file itself. We had hundreds of thousands of pirated, but in those days it wasn't called pirated. Music in our hard drives.
I mean, in India, there was no other way to get these songs. I just passed on from hard drive to hard drive, but I think I remember having to label them basically each and every song individually, who's the artist, what's the track, and all the metadata yourself. I think initially there were all sorts of standards people would use for using the file name to have descriptive names and things like that. And then pretty early on, though, there were someone made ID3 tags. I remember the first
player that supported that, I think was probably Mewzark. I might be misremoring up, but I'm pretty sure it did. So then we were like, oh, we should support that too. It was a very, very limited 128-by tag. For some reason, they just wanted to be really small. So when you said it took a reasonable amount of time to download the file, so let's shock our younger listeners how long was the reason of all back then?
Well, you know, like if you had a 28-8 modem, it would take 20 or 30 minutes or something like that. And I think this is in the US me growing up in India. I would basically find a source and started and go to sleep. And next day, hopefully it has completed. Well, how fast of a modem were you on at that point now? I don't even remember, but it was one of the... Or was that for an album? No, no, just one song. Yeah. You would start the download of the song and then next day morning,
you wake up and see if it ever completed or not. Yeah, I have a similar experience. Maybe not another full night, but an hour or so from local BBSs, from Napster. I mean, Napster, it goes all the way across the world. So there is all sorts of network latency along the way. So yeah, it was long and very, very expensive too. But I remember we were able to get some bootleg concert recordings that I just couldn't buy in the city where I was growing up. It just was not available.
So just a quick TLDR for our younger listeners who are maybe younger than 40. Or so, so back in the day, it was mid 1990s, you had to listen to music on your computer because there was no iPhone or anything. You had to buy a sound card, which is a special thing. You put into your computer so that you can play music. You can just plug your headphones. You had to use a sound card and you had to download files for hours in order to listen to them. I mean, cassettes and discs
were there, but they were not available everywhere and they were expensive. You could copy tapes from friends. And that's actually how I listen to a lot of music too. And sometimes it would be a copy of their copy too. And so that you'd get these degraded quality. But it didn't matter, like, because a really good album, it holds up through the dubbing process. Eventually you hear the CD of it and you're like, whoa, this is even more amazing. I remember listening to like one of the Jane's
addiction, nothing's shocking, which also holds up really well. A lot of Jane's addiction songs too, yeah. Yeah, but that album, like, listened to that a ton on third generation tape. So imagine, like, Ilya and me downloading like one song every night, something like that. And then when I landed up in engineering school, all the computers are connected on a land and you get this. I don't know, 1,000, 100,000 songs. Amazing. Now I have to like basically write label every piece of song everywhere.
We probably spent like a few months easily doing all that, yeah. I get an email from Spotify yesterday, which was very interesting. It says something like, you're a top listener of Metallica. So we give you a special thing from Metallica. So they release a new album in April, which is cool. And I go in a world tour, but they also are going to sell it on a cassette. So you can buy a cassette for $16. They have limited numbers of them available. I suppose people will be buying those, but not
listening to that. I haven't had a cassette player for maybe 30 years at this point. It might be more like a collector's item to show it rather than actually play it at this point. Yeah. Because the cassettes also, the quality would not hold up over time, because it was magnetic tape and then maybe a year or a couple of years and then it all goes to shit. Yeah.
I don't think I even have like an actual CD player anymore. I have an old computer that has a CD burner that I could use to rip CDs, but I don't have an actual CD player or cassette player. I haven't for years. Yeah, I don't even have a CD reader. Even my car, my like a car doesn't have a CD anymore. So like if I were to get a CD, I would never be able to play it anywhere, unless I bought an external CD drive or something. So I wanted to ask you a question about
VNAMP. So when you started VNAMP, I think for the first time, it would play that small audio file. VNAMP Vips LLAMAS AS. Thank you for the answer this question a thousand times, but what was the origin of that phrase? Well, the origin for us was that someone emailed saying that. The whole VNAMP Vips LLAMAS AS is a Wesley Willis quote. I think from one of his shows, recording he was like talking about something and now I really went to LLAMAS AS. Okay. So what I'm curious about is how you
made this decision to put this into a piece of software. So imagine if you opened iTunes today, and it says something like iTunes Vips LLAMAS AS, Apple would be just canceled because of you know, it's not political correct these days, I suppose. So when you were doing this in the 90s, did you think about the adult? I think you could totally do that now and they could do that now. I don't think this little cancellation thing is really a thing. It's only a cudgel used for people to try to
distract from their own failures. The people who get canceled, like comedians who get canceled still end up selling our shows and having shows and doing all sorts of things. So I don't think there are actual instances of people getting canceled. There are people facing consequences for things when they do things really terrible. But anyway, would Apple do that today? No, probably not. But you know, when you're a small niche company or whatever you can do things like that,
we could do that for Reaper, but it wouldn't make any sense. For a long time, we had a demo project that it would load with, which was a Brad Sunk song, which was good. But eventually, it's like how many times do we need to make people download that? By the way, I posted on my Instagram and also in other channels. I'm like, we're in talking to Justin Frankel, send us your questions. So I got two pages of questions in a Google Doc, of which most we will not ask because they're like super
technical about Reaper's. They're just not suitable for this podcast. We could always do like a lightning round of those questions. If you want to, I think that would be a good goal is to like answer them as quickly as possible just near the end or something. Actually, if you have time, at the end, maybe we could just randomly pick a few. No, no, we should do every single one. I'm sure the answers won't be like comprehensive and they may not meet the needs of the person
asking it. But I think we could do every single one. Let's try it. I'll have to translate most of them from Russian into English. But yeah. So one story that came actually from my friend who, you know, both he and I, we went to school together. So he said that back in the Windows 95 days, you had to reinstall Windows 95 so often because it would crash every weekend, wouldn't
put again. And you had to install all the software with it. And Winamp was one of the pieces of software you'd have to install first because that was the thing that we used the most on our computers. And you'd hear that Wipz Lamazaz every time. So that's why it just saw him ingrained in his head because he was hearing it so much because he had to reinstall Windows 95 so much. And that brings me to the next question about your company. So your company was named NoSoft. Is it reference to
Microsoft? Yeah, it was just kind of a play on that of being non-existent as opposed to because Microsoft was this massive company making massive Windows 95 or whatever, which is I don't know if you've looked lately, but Windows 95 is tiny. Like you can run it in your browser now. But at the time, we were like, oh, this is so bloated. But yeah, so it was trying to be cheeky on that. And yet they were like Microsoft. So you went for like nothing soft at the peak. How many people
did NoSoft employ? It's complicated. Before we were acquired, it was like six people or something like that. And then after we were part of AOL, then there was this gray area of who works for what because you're just part of AOL. And so there were more people, but they're probably a dozen who were like really working for the whole Winapp NoSoft thing. But everybody ends up doing things. There were people who would do some work for Winapp and other parts of the company and stuff like
that. Where they all pretty much in the programming space or where there are different rules and people. Before or after do you mean? Before let's talk about before. No, at that point I was probably the only person programming on WAP and then Tom Pepper was like, you would do more of the backend programming and things like that. The shout-out cast directory which we had and things like stuff. He was the server guy and I was the client,
ultimately. And the other four people were in some kind of business function? Yeah, pretty much. Maybe I was even four or three other people that were doing like figuring out opportunities and putting me in a position of constantly having to be like, ah, I guess.
If you have people whose job it is to like do business things and you're the person who's focused on the product, then you're always at odds because there's often things that would be good to do for business and for money that are not really necessarily good to do for product or they're paying in the ass to do for as a programmer. They're like, why am I wasting my time on this? Usually it's both. But you were the boss, right? So you could actually decide what to do.
I was, but at the same time, I liked to work with you. How old were you when you found that WNAMP and also one was the acquired at BIO? I think I was 20 when we were acquired and when I started working on WNAMP I would have been 19, 18. That's very impressive. So one thing that I found really fascinating about WNAMP now in retrospect after having worked in tech for so many years. It was a Windows application but it was also a platform. You could create skins for it which was after the amazing,
I love the fusion skin, like the energy skin. I still have phone memories of it that I can't find a screenshot of it anyway, but anyway. And you also had plugins. So you basically opened up your application for other people to extend on. How did you decide to do that? As opposed to like having a closed ecosystem so you decided to open it up a little bit. Skins were a result of people hacking X, mutable to change the resources for the images out. People would do that and it was cool and
we're like whatever. But every time we would update the program then the people would have to go and deal with this process of replacing images again. So it was just like, well why don't we make that easier for people? And then we don't have to worry about people using old versions and then complaining about bugs and turns out there using the old version because it's got their customized images and stuff like that. WNAMP was kind of my first Windows application that I
really made. Before I did that I dreamt of being a demo-seeing coder and to fill in the younger audience. You know there were people who were in the 80s and 90s writing demos that would push the limited hardware of the day to limits and do impressive things. Sort of by any means necessary. And they're still doing it today but today it's completely different game. And people do it today now for the original IBM PC and push that to the amazing limits which is impressive too. But I was
never very good at it. So I made some demos. One of the demo groups was like cubic team and they made cubic player which was like a mod player. Also as a explanation mods were these files that were like a bunch of samples and instructions of how to play the samples at different times and things like that pattern base. I think they originated on the Amiga but they ended up everywhere. So the cubic player was this mod player. It was great and it had all these great visualizations in it.
I was inspired by that to make Winapp do more of those visualizations and in doing so it made sense to just make a plugin system so that I could do that and not have it be like necessarily built in but just so I could go and experiment and build things on top of that. And then other people get to but I mean for the most part we did a few and then there were a few other plugins but there were never that many visualization plugins. There were the Ryan Geissies amazing plugins and then
maybe a couple others but that was mostly it I think. And did you have like well not a API I guess but did you have documentation about how to write the plugins and all that? How did people discover all that? Because this is very early on now it's very common to do this but not in those days. We published a very simple SDK that was pretty sparsely documented but have the interfaces are really good which were very very simple. Now we have to ask what language was
we now been written in? I was in C. And which ID did you use back then? Was it COC++? It was C back in the day and I think I started it on VisualC 4.2 or something like that and then maybe by the end it was VisualC6. I used VisualC6 up until maybe five or six years ago which is really old I think it's from 1996 or seven or eight or somewhere in there. That was I think the
first thing I programmed into VisualC. Yeah. Well I started with Turbo Pascal and Portland Pascal later on but then I used to VisualC Studio a bit as well or Visual Studio was I think was called that and I remember there was a documentation packet it was like four CDs of just a documentation. You had to like swap if you need to look something up that's on CD3 but you have
CD1 inserted in your CD-ROM you have to swap it. It was fun time. So in one of the interviews you had I think it was the Sonic Boom where you said with a guy the drum kit in the background. I think he asked you the name of person you're admire and I think you almost immediately said John Carmack. I love John Carmack I used to play it all the time in Doom and Quake and all that. I also read a book about him and John Romero called The Masters of Doom which is a great book.
I'm a big fan of his. So I'm curious what is it in John Carmack that you admire? Can you share something that's related to the software? I don't know I mean it's the fact that he's pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the genre but also just in his ability to go and solve these problems and that's I guess the way you look to it someone who's like figures out what they want to do and then finds the way to do it which is impressive and it's inspiring I guess is the other
thing. Do you see any similarities with yourself? Maybe there's similarities there's differences. People sometimes ask on my question blog thing I have a site that I run where you can ask any question and I'll answer it and which is I think where you ask to if we can do this interview. But people often ask like do you ever like want to do something and then give up or fail or whatever.
It's an interesting question and there are plenty of things that I've given up on doing but it's not because I don't feel like I can it's because I just kind of lose interest or it's too much work
or it's too much you know the work to reward F ratio is too high. I feel like I'm different in that respect than he is like I think that there are plenty of things that I don't understand and I try to get chat GPT to explain them to me but lots of other people understand and I say explain like I'm five and then it does and then I'm like okay explain like I'm 12 because that was way too
simple. I feel like I'm much more limited probably in my capabilities but it doesn't stop me from doing things I wanted to it's just more like I choose the things that I wanted to based on that. But you know maybe he's that way too I don't know I don't know I'm going back to when I'm for a second is there something that you feel like you could have or would have done differently after having gone through the whole journey. I should have bought it back from AOL
when I had the chance that was the real thing. How much do you think it could have been worth when AOL was at its bottom and it could have just sold it back to you. I know how much it was so I can't really say or at least I know how much I could have approximately paid sorry I really
can't say. What did you want to do with that after that point if you were able to well that was the thing is I didn't really want to do anything with it and it was going to be a big pain in the ass so I was like the only thing I would do is open-source it and then which in hindsight I should have done. Just like Carmichael I think he put out the code of quick open-source after nobody was buying it
anyway because it was too old he could have done the same thing. They GPL all of their game engines pretty quickly actually I think all the game assets remain copyrighted and they'll make those free but making the game engines open-source is a nice practice. So going back to those early like null soft days before you were acquired by EOL the revenue stream was like you were not really selling with them right? It was shareware where you know you're supposed to pay 10 bucks or
more if you want to and a lot of people did like a donation kind of mechanism. Yeah I mean I was shareware I guess is the real thing which is I mean you can look at it as donation but a lot of people would get repreh licenses as that too so there was that and then at the time there we also had ads on the website and we had enough traffic of people downloading skins and things like that too that that was actually a very significant revenue stream too. And this is the revenue stream that
was funding the six people at that point before you got acquired. Five people actually. Five people yeah I keep going back to the four other but you mentioned already yes. I just actually counted it out but I'm like now that's how many there were so. One of the favorite topics we bring up with the most of our guests is working for big companies versus doing things on your own after you got
acquired by AOL. I think I was reading something about you all listening. My expectation was that you would stick around for like three months and then quit because going from a team of five with two programmers to this huge behemoth just for the record AOL back then was like Google today in terms of its status and all right but you lasted there for a few years. I was there for five years actually you know there are a couple things one is that I had a contract which meant that I
technically had two. Obviously people don't follow their contracts. I am not one of those people but the other thing was is I cared about the thing I at that point you know now I don't really care about it because I care a lot about Reaper you know I'm that kind of person where if I work on something I get invested and it's important to me and so if I sell it I'm gonna try to stick around
and make sure it doesn't get ruined and that's what I did. Also I think you know there were a lot of people had this thing like you can't give a 20 year old a bunch of money and expect them to stick around and do something like fuck you I'm gonna be here. Did you like basically end up working on Winemp or where you're working on other things too in the beginning itself? Did you have enough control over it to foresee it? You know I wanted to work on other things too so I did but I'm gonna
get to Winemp. At times like other people manage it and then came back got to me bossy at time. So I'm curious that experience from the team of five to a larger organization. What was the most I don't know if Shocking is right word but what was the thing that maybe surprised you the most or was maybe like least comfortable something that you really didn't expect and I was like oh my god I wasn't really surprised by anything that happened I guess I didn't really have any expedition.
I mean I was surprised that the whole thing happens to get that was the surprise that I was able to sell a company or even to have a company that was successful enough to pay for whatever we
needed to pay for that was completely surprising and amazing. You know I was programming for fun and it was something that I wanted to be doing I had thought about getting jobs places but I didn't feel like I was really qualified in any respects so to be able to just go from doing it for fun into being able to work on what I want to work on and make money doing that was really lucky.
And I'm very thankful for how many and that experience. Yeah you have mentioned luck in other podcasts and interviews that I listen to it's fascinating that you were able to like write cool things people liked and then you sent something to the universe and the universe gave it back to you and it's kind of I guess it's a definition of luck in your case. There's luck but it's also like if I hadn't worked a ton on it and I wouldn't have happened to either so but yeah it was all very fortunate.
So I want to ask last question about music before we go to Ripper on the Idro History Podcast that you did interview with Brian McCullough in New York I think nine years ago so by the way we had Brian McCullough on our show our second episode was with Brian McCullough so yeah but now we know we have both people from that episode on our show. Yeah so nine years ago you said that you still preferred to buy physical albums and you don't use any of the streaming apps is that still a case?
I don't use the streaming apps still I don't buy physical albums though I just buy MP3 albums from bandcamp or whatever because streaming services just completely fuck over artists the artist get just nothing and the way their structure is the labels are the ones who make out like bandits.
So if you buy the albums the artist get most of it if you pay five ten bucks a month or whatever it is the artist you're listening to depending on who the artist are is probably not really getting anything I mean they might get a few cents but they get a fraction of a cent per listen or whatever
but the artists who are really popular they get a better rate because of how the money is portioned and if you pay money to a streaming service and you don't listen to very much then your money is going to the people who have millions of listens anyway the people who are already getting paid
by all and the people who you do listen to don't get shit so I'm very firmly against all the streaming services I think they're just a bad deal for everybody buy albums everybody buy albums do you also feel like the listening experience itself is fundamentally different why I bring that
up is when I used to listen to albums I would actually concentrate and listen to the album and to that artist and kind of read about the history and everything about those songs whereas now it's just randomly going from one song to another completely different artist maybe similar or genre
you can still listen to albums on streaming services but I mean I like to listen to albums too but back when I was making winning up a lot of what you would do would be just playlists that were not albums too so I can get behind both ways I just think the streaming services are really pulling a
fast one on people because people who think oh the artists are going to get compensated you know the money's there but unless you're listening to really really big artists your money's not really going to the people you're listening to so you buy the MP3 albums and then what do you listen them on
with them I don't use what I'm putting more no I actually made like a win-amp clone as a plugin for Reaper called Replay I think it was called Replay but sometimes I'll listen to them on the media explorer and Reaper I listen to them on my phone a lot because I even if I'm typing on a computer
I'll just put headphones in listen that way a lot of what I listen I'm walking around too and then also I made a web-based player that I use so that if I'm anywhere I can pull it up and then I can listen based on that and it's really ugly and doesn't have any of the aesthetics of what I have
but it does have play listing functionality so before we go into Reaper you mentioned your website where indeed I ask you a question but your favorite win-amp version and also because yeah I need to go with something that's related to win-amp and then I'll ask you if you want to do an interview with
us and yeah you graciously said yes so that website it looks very much like it was created 20 years ago and it also has Clippy on it that can play music for you so first of all I use nostalgic for those
times I don't know if I'm really nostalgic Clippy is I mean an icon that needs no explanation the website looks like it was created 20 years ago because it probably was and I don't spend a lot of time doing CSS or things like that so what I guess the real thing is that website is not the same as the
question science like my blog but it's like a feed of all of the creative output that I have the non-programming output occasionally there's program related things but there'll be pictures and drawings and music and things like that so it's purely functional what does it build in what language PHP and your framework or is it raw PHP that I just play in PHP I really like PHP actually as a language anytime I want to do text processing I write that in PHP because it's just a good language for that
despite its flaws yeah at some point I switched to PHP as well maybe in 1085 2001 from C when I first came to work to Amazon like PHP was just blank at band for use in any projects because of security and that's when I started to develop that I don't know to like PHP I guess but yeah PHP was a great
well it still is a great language no denial for that and I think in Amazon we kind of switched in that time to Pearl and then later on to Ruby and stuff in a way what you're saying you do text processing those languages really shine for those kind of things on the command line you quickly
want to do actually my PHP is evolving to be pretty much entirely using Pearl regular expressions anyway I should probably just switch to Pearl at some point but there's enough barriers to read it never fully get comfortable in Pearl so let's turn the page in your experience and go to
Reaper so what brought you to create a digital audio workstation what was the motivation so I started playing around with recording music in like 2004 somewhere around there when I was still working on Winapp and soon after so I was playing around with playing music and recording it then
I think the route that it took was that I started playing around making this guitar effects processor the idea was to have an effects processor that you could program on the fly and I kind of built this hardware prototype which was called the Jesusonic Crucifix 1000 it had like a mini ITX
motherboard and then like think that version it might have originally had like a via you know x86 CPU and then later it had like a Pentium M there's a lot faster and it booted Linux and then it would run this custom software that you could then program on the fly and the language that
was used for it was this expression evaluator that one of the guys who worked on Winapp and who worked on VVS which was the one of the way visualizers Francis he made this expression evaluating library that would compile to machine code and then execute and so I've used that as like a starting
point and we had open source VVS and that is part of it so I used that as a starting point and made this Jesusonic software it was kind of fun it was never really very good but I kept playing with it and around that time actually as I started working on another piece of software called
ninjam which still is around today and ninjam is an internet jamming software idea about that was that you could play with other people using audio but instead of trying to synchronize and dealing with latency issues because if you're playing music with other people over the internet you need to
have it be synchronized or it just doesn't sound right because if it's a hundred milliseconds late then it's not going to sound good it'll mess up your plane so with ninjam idea was that you would delay what you heard from other people by a measure or two measures or whatever and you'd have a
metronome so that everyone would be playing the same tempo but when you would start the measure you'd play along with other people's previous picture they would play along with your previous measure so ninjam was a thing and it was fun and interesting and very quickly determined that it
wasn't something that would be a business to be in because there's just not that many people who want to use it and it's also kind of quirky so I open sourced that and then I started playing around back with the jesus sonic again and playing around with doing multiple layers of things so you could set up essentially different tracks where you'd have like one layer would be like you could set up you know doing loop sampling and like record guitar loops then switch to another layer to do a solo
part because it's programmable why don't you do all these things and so between these two things I was sort of like at a point where I was like oh well these are just kind of turning into like a recording thing I mean you know these separate tracks and you have mixers and you have to mute and
solve the things and so I was sort of like oh you know maybe and I halfway here maybe I should just go and make something that's useful as for recording and editing stuff too and at the time I was using Vegas 4 for recording audio so that it was largely it was very influential in terms of
the design choices that I made it's by sonic foundry right yeah and later so me and then later whoever sold you okay so that was at the time when there was already pro tools I believe and logic probably also was around yeah I played around with logic on the pc too for a little while
and I never fully understood what I was doing with it so I'm curious how you launched it was like yeah you have this formidable competitors like pro tools that the whole industry uses and you start building your own thing from scratch so at what point did you ship it and what was the
functionality and what was the the project manager I guess I'm just curious how that kind of process of ship went there wasn't really thought into that though it was more like I was making it from my own use and it was interesting and then at a certain point once it was sort of usable then
I started posting it to the internet and I think it version 0.42 in late 2005 and that it was getting posted and then people started playing with it and giving feedback and it was free at that point because it was just an experiment really and then as more people were using it I got more
feedback and improved things and added functionality eventually when it got more mature probably in like mid 2006 then there was like a 1.0 kind of situation at that point it became shareware evaluation period sort of thing did the people just by yourself where you had somebody else help you I think
one of my former co-workers from a well Christoff was working on it with me too this is after you left a lot after the five years that's right I left in like early 2004 and this was late 2005 so I spent a year and a half played her out with Jesus on it jam and things like that so I checked
co-cars which is an MFA company that owns Reaper the Wikipedia page says that you only have two programmers is it true just two people yeah the people who work on Reaper now are me and John Schwartz or Schwah he's been working on it since 2008 2007 so he's not like one of the founders but
like he's been pretty much there the whole time he's also really really talented and really responsible for so much of a good stuff it's in Reaper so how many programmers did you have at the peak like was it all built by just two people all the way or you had more people at the time and
then just like downsize at various points there have been three there was also Jeff O.S. who worked for us for a few years it's fluctuated between two and three the third being a French person it's very gradual given just how massive piece of a software Reaper is there are like probably
I don't have thousands of hours of videos on YouTube explaining how to use Reaper I mean obviously you had 20 years to build it but still it's impressive because if it was built somewhere at somewhere else they would have like five hundred people working on this so yeah it's very
impressive oh thank you I guess a lot of what we do is focus on making our jobs easier we do everything with a focus on that you know if there's ever a decision of what to do on a design decision it's going to be what's going to be the easiest to deal with in the future if possible and it's also
incentive to keep things small and so like we want to make it easy to make bills for people to test we want to make it easy for us to test it ourselves we want to make it easy to rebuild everything it's all about optimizing the environment so that we can work most efficiently too is it also written
in C now it's C++ but it's like very very non-modern C++ it's a very strict sort of or not strict but a very specific subset it's cross-platform right so it works in windows and Mac and also in Linux we have three code bases or single code base now it's one code base to enable that we basically
write windows code that's a subset of win32 and then we have this library that is open source called swell which is the simple windows emulation layer for losers or something but it essentially on macOS it maps like eight wins to MSVUs and so it's very lightweight in that respect and on Linux
it actually re-implements on top of just using gdk for x-wondo windows as like a primitive so it's also pretty lightweight in that respect but heavier than on macOS or you can just run it in windows 95 in your web browser yeah so I thought about actually making swell target windows but emulating
all of the things that are windows isms because you know like on windows you can only have a finite number of each wins if they're user objects and they're limited initially when I started working on Reaper it was like oh just make everything in each one you know just have your button on your track
panel it's just gonna be an h-wind that's just a button and then you start realizing oh you know when someone has a hundred tracks and each of these tracks has ten buttons there's a thousand of these objects and oh you only have like ten thousand to work with the system so gradually as time
goes on we've had to sort of remove all this use of native win32 and replace it with a brighter weight things and one of the things windows is really difficult with if you have multiple win H wins is dealing with flickering and reducing that what is an h-wind and h-wind is like the type that is used
to represent a window on win32 h-wind is just like a handle to the window so h for handle wins is wnd it's like the primitive windows system object that's for visual things so the question I wanted to ask about again kind of similar to what I was asking about win-amp I see Reaper as essentially a
platform and an orchestration software because yes it has this functionality where you can add tracks and you know you can solo and mute tracks and adjust the volume etc but that's very basic right where the true power comes is where you start using all of those plugins where you have
a 15 plugins on each of your tracks and all of that works and you have the SWS automations and you have all the shortcuts so all that stuff that the Reaper enables I guess other developers to plug into so that a person created music can choose from an infinite amount of different tools so almost
like Reaper is like a toolbox in that sense actually I've never used any other does I'm so committed to Reaper I actually I've never tried the other ones but also all of them are pretty expensive Reaper is much shipper so I'm curious was it like that from the very beginning or was it something
that was introduced later from the beginning it was just designed to be an studio really that you could set up whatever you want inside it and giving you all the flexibility to do whatever you want it to actually it's a good analogy with like a physical studio where you bring all your gear
and you plug cables and yeah do you folks have a UX designer also working with you or the two people programming it are also coming up with the UX itself I mean the answer to both of those questions I guess is yes we do have white tie who does a lot of design for us but we also do a lot
of work on our own so both of those things do happen but at the end of the day we ultimately do what's the most efficient ultimately I guess there are both things happen yeah there's design considerations that are talked about and discussed at length and things that are experimented with
and then there are other design decisions that just get made and then get talked about years later and is the original inspiration that it needs to be like a physical almost like a studio kind of environment right does that still no I think it's not about it being physical in any way it's just
about it being flexible and being something that if you want to do something there should be a way to do it it should never get in your way of doing it it might make it more complicated than it needs to be but you shouldn't be like oh there's no way for me to figure out how to do that worst case I
guess you could write a VST plug in yourself if you found nothing else to do it for you but what you're saying is it's designed to be plug and play well it's like to give you an example like the decision about there's not like a midi track and an audio track right we don't have track types so
if you want to mix audio and midi on a track and have interactions between them you could do that you don't have to figure out like oh am I gonna structure this you could just stick them there together and then see what happens if that makes sense whereas you know if you this another dev audio or stations are for like what kind of track do you make do you make multiple tracks like how do you coordinate these things right so how a few questions about the future of a Reaper some of
those came from that doc that I was raising one thing is there is a lot more video content these days and a Reaper actually supports video it's not like front and center but you can quickly chop a video file which I am doing every now and then do you have any intention to go into more of the
video production routes so that you can do more with video we don't really have like an official roadmap there are some interesting things that we're doing video wise I mean Reaper actually does support a lot of video effects processors that you can just write in code which you can also use
presets of and so you can do a lot of really interesting things we're doing some stuff to help people who are working doing video but things scoring things to video and doing some improvements there something I would like to do is to make more of the video processing use GPU rather than CPU
which is on my list of things to do eventually but the big project so put that off cool another thing is is there any place for AI in the Reaper I don't know it's not something that we're looking at at this point let's bring in a thing here ilia you use Reaper and then you also use
de script quite a lot and having those two things integrated into one thing would that be something helpful for you ilia as a user just have a heart of de script de script to those I have it no de script is a piece of software that lets you edit audio podcasts and also video content with
speech it transcribes it for you and then you can cut and paste or delete text and it automatically edits the audio for you so it's very neat to edit like three hours of recorded speech to just like chop things and one of the thing that it does okay what could have been better it shows you the
audio tracks with text on top of those so you can actually visually let's say cut out you don't have to listen to you you can read and you know that this stuff it just has to go you can be more effective at that but de script main feature is not that it's like you edit text I guess it could
have been what better and as I was thinking about it I'm like I would prefer Reaper or any other digital audio workstation to be honest to have the text transcription on top of the audio tracks so that I could use all of the power of Reaper and edit my podcast right there while also
playing all of the effects as opposed to what we do right now so we do the edit in de script because it's more efficient for us to cut text so we do the editorial pass in de script and then we export all of the tracks and then we edit them in Reaper I mean we do some more like breath reduction
and kind of equalizing and all these other stuff you have to do to make a good sound audio so yeah we have to transition these files back and forth and it's it's a bit yes can it export the text with timestamps I think it can yeah in one of the standards sub-level formats I believe
because you should be able to like do something where you export that and then do some a little bit of text mangling and then it have that imported in your Reaper project and then you could just but you like being able to just edit the text and have the audio follow is what you're saying
I would define with just like seeing the text and then edit the audio just like I usually edit it if you can export text with timestamps and your programmer like Reaper's project formats are text-based so you should be able to just have it converted to a Reaper project that you open and has
the media with like markers in the take that have each word or something like that we should look into that so we have just a few minutes left let's do it lighting round that you proposed so let's be quickly pull up that message from Misha let's say hi to Misha because he is a big fan of yours
he was very excited he's our sound engineer hi Misha so this person is concerned that the architect of the project folders loads the CPU more than the architecture of SENS yeah I've heard that there are some patterns where some structures perform better than others
largely due to scheduling on different threads and or cache usage yeah you know if one thing works better than another than use the other thing next okay do you have any agreements with research centers and art centers agreements I don't know the meaning of this question but
it doesn't make the bell for you but I don't know no other than our license agreement which they may use so what motivated the current business model with the very accessible trial and low cost across the board even for pro licenses the motivation is to make a system that's fair for people to
use and to reduce our customer service issues like we don't want to make people pay things before they test it so the idea is you let people test it and then have them pay once they've determined in these their needs and we don't want to spend her time working on copy protection and the more you
make something disable itself then you ultimately give people incentive to crack it and then you just spend more time working on copy protection and then next thing you know that's your job and that would be terrible next so why do Reaper projects save some of the environment settings
and the problem is that when you open somebody else's project those settings in the project file they affect your environment does make sense there are things in Reaper that are global settings and there are things that are project specific settings there shouldn't be things that are project
specific settings that affect the global settings but if you find one would like to know which one that is there are a few settings that are project specific that if you change one of the project specific settings it might change your default for new projects of the project settings I think
there's some like mixer flags that I noticed through that way and that shouldn't really be that way which we should fix but they shouldn't affect existing projects you have they would only affect the defaults on new projects and only if you change them while the project is open next where can people
report the issue to get you said if you know about something your child does I mean our forms are the best place if you don't have an account on the forum go to sign up for one but just give it a few days because we manually moderate new form users because of the prevalence of spam so just
join in be patient and then you can post there or you can also email that support at cockos.com it'll get read we might not respond to you but it will get read do you plan to have an official merge store from Reaper so people want t-shirts, mags and stuff like that it's not really what
the best use of our time but it would be nice but I think if there are people out there that have them we don't really care if you buy things you know so you already answered this question so the question is we are impressed with the frequency of updates from Reaper they must have a big team
and they ask how many people have worked on this so the answer will shock them actually that's a shock me because like a smaller team I actually can accomplish a lot more than the bigger team more of them not okay so how difficult is it to make up new features for Reaper how do you choose
which features to build next I think the real challenge is figuring out what not to do because there's just no shortage of things that need to be done I how do we choose for the most part it's a combination of balancing between the effort involved and the reward and how interested
we are in it and also what the impact will be for our future selves having to maintain the coding question a lot of times also there are things we want to do but things are not set up well for it so like there have been features that have been added or overhalls that have been done
where now when we do new functionality we can you know things that we can do now where five years ago we wouldn't have been able to so there's that sort of long term thing where you might have a feature that you really want to do there's too many things that would have to get done in
order for that to happen so you have to just put it off can you share any spoilers for Reaper version seven if you go look in the pre-release forum you'll see most of the things that are going to be in there okay so the answer to whoever asks question RTFM yeah you know we're not secretive about
very much so we have a public pre-release forum that anyone can go browse and a public website that you can go download development builds and so all of the stuff that's in development unless it's like new stuff in the last week that we're working on it's not ready yet all of that stuff is in
builds test the thing about those pre-release builds is that it's at your own risk I mean it's always at your own risk obviously but there are things that are not tested as well there are things that are there's functionality in them that may not end up in release so if you record a project with it
it might not work in future versions of Reaper whereas normally we try to have perfect backward compatibility and things like that so if you're playing around with it just keep that in mind but we definitely encourage people to test and give us a feedback about it too cool so thank you very
much for this open conversation maybe last question I'll ask is since you don't listen to broadcasts so what are you reading right now also maybe like what's your favorite book what would you recommend right now I just finished a book called Known of the Knife which is the third book in a
series by the New Zealand author Tamison Muir it's this weird sort of I don't even know how to describe it weird fantasy science section more fantasy I guess the first one was the best the second two are very very strange anyway the book I was reading before I started reading that was
the second book of the three body problem series which oh yeah okay those all three books are amazing in that series I like the first one I think the third one really ratchets it up but it also gets very very meta in a physics sense I also like classics like catch 22 and everything by
vaunig it one of the podcasts you mentioned a book there was like triangles stuck into squares and it's too deep plain flatland I think flatland that sounds interesting yeah so yeah that one I think I want to read I think you mentioned that it's like you know if you don't know what a 3d is like
you just can't comprehend but there is another dimension that exists so just like we humans we cannot comprehend like what if there is a fourth dimension here we don't have concepts to describe that this feels very much like the three body problem and the books the second and the third book yeah suggesting where can people find you if they want to read what you write are you on social media at all I'm not really except on the mass it on my handle there's just in it kakos.net but my website is
1014.org. 1014 what does it mean? No it's just a number. Cool well Justin thanks a lot for your time thank you for coming on Metacast. Yeah thank you for the time it was awesome thank you for having me thank you for listening to this episode as you could hear the quality was a bit choppy actually I'm really curious how it's gonna come out in post production so yeah I wish I will have the
opportunity to show his chops on this one using Reaper easy to reaper yeah and no plugins it's a bit mebba on the Metacast to me yeah actually in if he can't fix it we will just cut out that part that I just said yeah all right so yeah it was a five-story review share our podcast send us a note
all those things that make us feel good about our podcast like always you can reach out to us at hello at metacastpodcast.com that is our substack metacastpodcast.com where you can find links to all these episodes and previous episodes and there are links to our show notes twitter and lots of
things in there so go look it up and if you know any good podcasters you know in person black straight man notes and various pretty much anybody who has a really good podcast we would love an inter okay see you next week yeah next week