ReaPack is a free and open source REAPER extension made by cfillion, which allows you to download and keep up to date, right from REAPER, tons of community-made scripts and other resources like FX, themes, web interfaces, langpack and extensions. With more than 400 000 downloads, and thousands of accessible packages, we can say this project is one of the greatest success of the REAPER community. It even earns a link right on REAPER official website main menu, right after SWS extension. 🌟
The extension itself is pretty simple to operate and extremely light-weight. It can be operated by beginners without trouble. ReaScripts, for eg, are registered in the filterable Action list for direct usage after download.
Decentralized by design, anyone can create their own repositories, or any system they want (usually GitHub) to host their package which will be accessible via Reapack via a simple link. Out of the box, it has several registered repositories from which to download packages:
- repositories from ReaTeam, a GitHub team of REAPER users who aims to host content made by the team members or other occasional contributors (approx 1000 packages). Note that cfillion, MPL and I are administrators of the team.
- MPL ReaScript Repositories (approx 400 scripts)
- and my Free ReaScripts Repositories (currently approx 600 packages)
At least 30 other ones are registered on ReaPack website. You can grab all of them and download everything, in a single copy paste. There are also some unregistered repositories and some premium ones. I personally have about 5000 packages downloaded via ReaPack! This would have been impossible to do it manually without this extension.
Even with so many packages, your system will stay fast and efficient. These packages are just downloaded, they don’t run in background and don’t put anything on the interface after download. Also, it doesn’t take that much space on the hard drive as it sounds: my 600+ packages doesn’t weight more than 3MB. So it can be way simpler to just download everything, than to handpick in the ReaPack package browser only the package your need (but this feature if available if needed).
ReaPack is an impressive project, probably unique among any other DAW, thanks to cfillion amazing work on the extension design, and thanks to all package creators who have chosen to share via this extension as well. If you want to know more about it, links to tutorials, for user or for package creators, and extra features showcases, can be found on ReaPack website home page. I also saw more recent tutorials on YouTube, like the one by Let’s Talk About REAPER.
All reapack repositories are full of little REAPER actions and FX gems. Sometimes, you will find just a little action which does exactly what you wanted, sometimes it is way more advanced tools with GUI and all… Promoting these is one of the main goal of this website, so I invite you to subscribe if you don’t want to miss any new fancy release! 😎
PS: if you made some scripts, and you want to share them via ReaPack too, a nice way is to fork the cfillion’s ReaPack Template GitHub repository, so you have you own space for that, and then take a look at ReaPack-Index, and maybe this article I wrote when it was released. Good luck!
