REAPER (Version 6.75; Frankel et. al., 2023) is a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW). It can be used to record audio from instruments, input devices (like microphones), or digital instruments, and edit them using a plethora of tools and plugins. While this software has a paid license, the developers do not enforce purchase in order to use it.
REAPER can be a very easy, approachable sound editor to provide touch-ups on podcast recordings. It can also be as complex as recording and publishing a professional musical album.
This software comes with a multitude of plugins that allow you to alter sound drastically and improve audio quality.
Kenny Gioia, one of the developers at Cockos Inc. (the company behind REAPER), has created a multitude of how-to videos for using the software. He has named his YouTube channel REAPER Mania, and on the reaper.fm website, he organizes these videos into tutorials based on a person's ability level and familiarity with audio editing.
For the purposes of this assignment, I chose to stick mainly to the playlist of "Why and How to Use," which covered the five most common effects applied to sound, which are:
Other effects/features that I ended up using just to add a little flair to some parts of the track include:
Each of these effects is described on their own page, and the process of creating the track is described in Kim's Journey in the next section.