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Blog archive for December 2013

Getting *.reapeaks files out of the way

December 29, 2013

For the past few years Reaper has been my favourite DAW program, due to its superior support for surround sound processing. One minor gripe with the program has been that any folder with sound files gets flooded with *.reapeaks files. These files are used for fast display of sound file waveforms, but I find that their presence a bit of a distraction when navigating folders for sound files.

Thanks to this thread I found a way to resolve this. In the General/Paths pane of Reaper preferences I first set an alternative location for *.reapeks files. I chose to create a new folder for this, located at ~/Music/Reaper/Reapeak-files:

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The next step was to ensure that this path is actually being used. That is done in the Media pane of the preferences:

Screen_shot_2013-12-29_at_14

Over time reapea files will accumulate in this folder. As I am constantly battling to keep some free space at the main internal hard drive of my laptop, I used Automator to create a folder action that will look for *.reapeaks files in this folder, and delete them if they are more than 30 days old:

Screen_shot_2013-12-29_at_14

The benefit of all of this is that for projects that I’m currently working on, the reapeaks files will probably already exists, and if not, Reaper doesn’t take long to recreate them, in particular as the internal disk is a pretty fast SSD disk.

The Automator folder action can be downloaded here. If you want to use it, you’ll need to unzip and adapt it to your folder structure in Automator, and make sure that it ends up in the “~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Folder Actions” folder.