Reaper Quick Tip – Creating New Tracks With Surrounding Folders

I’m going to start posting a series of short, more advanced Reaper tutorials geared towards game audio sound design workflows. The first involves automatically creating a group of new tracks with a surrounding folder track. This is great for quickly making groups of tracks and keeping everything neatly organized.

Firstly these are cycle actions, and creating cycle actions requires the Reaper SWS/S&M Extensions. If you’re an advanced Reaper user you’re probably already familiar, but just in case you can download them from here: http://www.sws-extension.org/

To find the cycle action editor, open the action list and type ‘cycle action’

• Run the action: Open/close Cycle Action Editor
• Now you need to create a new cycle action by right clicking in the left pane and selecting ‘Add cycle action’
• Right click on the right pane to add New Steps
• Type in the Commands manually, or find them in the action list and add them to the cycle action editor. If you have mistyped a command the description field will read ‘Unknown’

If you don’t want to type in the commands manually, I’ve exported the two actions and you can download and import them. The link is at the bottom of the post.

Here are the steps for the cycle action Insert and Name Tracks With Surrounding Folder Track

Often, you will already have a group of tracks and want to add a folder track around them. Instead of creating a new track, naming it, then adding the child tracks, you can simply select the tracks you want to be included in the folder and run the following action:

Here are the steps for the Cycle Action Insert And Name Folder Track Around Selected Tracks

Once you’ve added the Cycle Actions, they will show up in the Action List where you can assign a hotkey to them.

You may have also noticed I have set my folder tracks to auto-color and auto-assign a track icon. You can do that from the menu in Extensions->Auto Color/Icon.

Download: SS_FolderTrackCycleActions