Ask Justin Frankel

justin = { main feed , music , code , askjf , pubkey };

Ask Justin Frankel
No reasonable question unanswered since 2009!

Suggested topics: programming, music, sleep, coffee, etc.

Note: please do not ask questions about REAPER features, bugs or scheduling, use the forums instead.

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[older questions]

Question: Have you ever used foobar? Is it true that I saw in the encyclopedia that the developers of Foobar are related to Winamp?
Asked by nvnv (129.153.24.x) on April 27 2025, 10:22am
Reply on April 28 2025, 1:35pm:

Yeah PP did some Winamp plug-in work back in the day. Never cared much for fb2k though, lacked a certain something for my taste... Comment...

Question: Smartphones have folders as categories, like "Media" folder has apps like Spotify, Music app etc. and "Tools" have apps like Calculator. I am doing similar thing with my laptop's browser's bookmarks. Now I wonder in which folder I should put the bookmark "askjf.com"?
Asked by Abhi (106.219.71.x) on April 27 2025, 9:18am
Reply on April 28 2025, 1:35pm:

oddities Comment...

Question: I'm using REAPER as 'sound module' (piano practice) on an old T420 with ASIO4ALL/Win11. Works fine as long R is in foreground. When in background though (e.g. watching YT piano tutorials) sounds starts crackling. Feels like it gets less priority or s.th. Any idea? (t=298075)
Asked by wasereb4 (95.91.77.x) on April 20 2025, 8:03pm
Reply on April 21 2025, 12:28am:

Try setting windows to not boost the foreground process (Windows system settings/performance, reboot)... replying in thread too. 1 Comment...

Question: Why REAPER use "Ctrl + Shift + Z" as default redo shortcut, instead of the regular "Ctrl + Y"?
Asked by Abhi (106.219.70.x) on April 20 2025, 4:43pm
Reply on April 20 2025, 6:52pm:

both seem pretty common 3 Comments...

Question: Pls answer from the perspective of one who is not developing REAPER. Is this hate speech or undeniable facts mingled with humour? reddit.com/r/Reaper/s/TLXCn7TEFh
Asked by Looool (102.176.65.x) on April 18 2025, 11:14pm
Reply on April 19 2025, 12:43am:

seems reasonably factual and humorous, not sure how it could be considered hate speech lol 1 Comment...

Question: Are you using shared_ptr?
Asked by Ruchira (175.157.16.x) on April 18 2025, 8:41am
Reply on April 18 2025, 4:58pm:

not really no Comment...

Question: During coding, how much do you find yourself looking things like functions, syntax, etc up in references vs. remembering it all off the top of your head?
Asked by seventhsam (75.6.181.x) on April 18 2025, 12:54am
Reply on April 18 2025, 4:59pm:

depends on what I'm coding and how familiar I am with the APIs in question. for working on REAPER internals, e.g. trying t o fix issues with the updated peak cache algorithm on this branch, almost no docs. When writing php/sql, constantly. Comment...

Question: Reaper version "So it Goes" is a reference to Kurt Vonnegut?
Asked by The Kurt itself (179.104.167.x) on April 15 2025, 3:09pm
Reply on April 15 2025, 3:14pm (edited at April 15 2025, 3:15pm):

I have most of his novels on a bookshelf by my desk Comment...

Question: Hey Justin! Would Reaper be interested in sponsoring AirCon25 this year? (with kind regards from the team behind Airwiggles.com :D)
Asked by sergio (83.50.71.x) on April 15 2025, 12:46pm
Reply on April 15 2025, 2:04pm:

Thanks for the offer but we don't really sponsor things so much 1 Comment...

Question: Hey Justin, have you/do you use 'memory arena' architecture at all, what are your impressions of them? I don't think they're very popular and they go by a lot of names, the general idea is passing around a block of memory and linearly distributing it, bit like a heap stack frame. Very simple, but using them primarily or even exclusively really forces a shift in architecture choices (for the better? not sure, but the code is certainly faster and classical memory management is kind of a non-issue). Thanks!
Asked by jack (146.70.134.x) on April 15 2025, 9:22am
Reply on April 15 2025, 2:03pm:

They for sure have their places but I can't say we use them a lot Comment...

Question: EDIT: What kind of setup would you recommend fo building crossplatform REAPER extension that supports everything? Intel Mac, Sillicone Mac, older OSX versions, PC. Which VS and compiler, which XCode, what build system, which hardware machines, which OSes for dev env?
Asked by nikolalkc (80.216.15.x) on April 15 2025, 6:34am
Reply on April 15 2025, 2:03pm:

Linux: anything with gnu libc and gcc 4.x (eg debian)
macOS: if you want to support older (pre-10.15), then Xcode 9 or so, and any OS that supports that
macOS: if you want to support newer 10.15+ and arm64, Xcode 11+, and an OS that supports that
Windows: any VC version that supports the OSes you want to support, we use 2005 with ICC, but 2013 should be fine. Probably want to static link the runtime to avoid a dependency there.

Comment...

Question: say for any chance in the world both of you couldn't code Reaper anymore for any reason, would you trust some or any of your forum mods to help and maintan the project alive if they wanted to? or just open source it straight?
Asked by john (187.213.10.x) on April 15 2025, 2:45am
Reply on April 15 2025, 1:59pm (edited at April 15 2025, 6:05pm):

That's a pointless hypothetical. If we both couldn't code REAPER anymore it would likely mean we'd been sent to an El Salvadorean prison or something, so in that case we wouldn't really have much choice in the matter. :/ 1 Comment...

Question: What kind of setup would you recommend fo building crossplatform REAPER extension that supports everything? Intel Mac, Sillicone Mac, older OSX versions. Which VS version, which hardware machines, which OSes for dev env?
Asked by nikolalkc (80.216.15.x) on April 14 2025, 10:34pm
Reply on April 15 2025, 12:54am:

I'd go mac -- what you get depends on how old of macOS systems you want to support. Comment...

Question: I know I'm not supposed to talk about Reaper here, but my birthday is on 14th, and the latest Reaper update from 12th had one of the bigger update to midi i've came across in sometime, thanks for the birthday gift Justin.
Asked by Rano (45.250.49.x) on April 13 2025, 4:34pm
Reply on April 14 2025, 2:02am:

Hah hope it works well for you and happy birthday tomorrow! Got some more related fixes coming soon too. 1 Comment...

Question: which AI sites/tools you currently use? Anything else interesting you use other than Chatgbt etc (if you even use that). For anything. Thanks
Asked by Intelli (89.38.224.x) on April 13 2025, 2:03pm
Reply on April 14 2025, 2:02am:

I don't use any at this point. And Google often gives me results that are just wrong. Comment...

Question: Hi! Some of your answers here suggest that graphics in reaper is "Mostly just bitmap blitting" I curous about how that works for more irregular, dynamically changing stuff where you need to draw a different thing on every frame, like EQ curves and frequency plots? Or are there some other techniques involved here? Thanks
Asked by daniel (89.134.29.x) on April 13 2025, 8:01am
Reply on April 14 2025, 2:03am:

There's software rendering of lots of things, using LICE (part of WDL). Which is a software 2d drawing lib, primitives like lines and convex polygons and rectangles and such... also there's some software 3D rendering (using Plush2, also part of WDL) in ReaSurroundPan. Comment...

Question: Few years ago, a known company released an audio monitoring plugin that people were excited about, I too was. However, it's smallest size was still too big for me. Though a novice in jsfx coding, I decided to create same plugin in jsfx with the assistance of AI. I made it. The jsfx plugin doesn't have a fancier gui but it gave same results as all other vst plugins that does the same thing. Is it really that easy to code plugins in vst format, or jsfx is quite more easy because I made it in less than 3 mins?
Asked by Deee (102.176.65.x) on April 11 2025, 10:31pm
Reply on April 11 2025, 10:48pm: