Tiny download, unlimited tracks, an honest licence and an evaluation period that never nags. The learning curve is real and worth climbing.
REAPER is an oddity in a good way. It is a complete professional DAW, with unlimited tracks, full plugin support, deep automation, video support and scripting, distributed as a download small enough to fit on a floppy disk's worth of modern bandwidth, sold once rather than rented, with an evaluation period that keeps working after it expires and simply asks you politely to pay.
Two licence tiers exist: a heavily discounted one for individuals and small businesses under a revenue threshold, and a commercial one for everyone else. You decide honestly which applies. That approach has earned the developers a level of user loyalty that marketing cannot buy. Check current pricing on the Cockos site; both tiers cost a fraction of a year of most subscriptions.
Everything. There is no crippled tier, no track limit, no export watermark, no feature held back for a Pro edition. The evaluation version is the full version. On top of the expected DAW machinery you get:
This is where a DAW earns its complexity. Arm several inputs, record them all onto their own tracks simultaneously, monitor through effects with negligible delay, punch in over a mistake, record a second take on the same track and comp between them afterwards. It writes each track to disk continuously, recovers gracefully from crashes, and handles multi-hour sessions without complaint.
For podcasting with in-person guests, or for a musician overdubbing parts, this workflow is the difference between an evening's work and a week of it.
REAPER's defaults are neutral rather than welcoming. There is no wizard, no template gallery insisting you pick a genre, no colourful onboarding. You get a grey timeline and a lot of menus, and the customisation that experienced users love means the community's screenshots never match what you are looking at.
Nothing is hidden, and the manual is unusually good, but the first two hours are steeper than in GarageBand or Audacity. If you record once a month, that investment may not pay off. If you record weekly, it pays for itself within a fortnight.
The other genuine gap is bundled content. There is no loop library, no orchestra of sampled instruments, no drum kits. REAPER records and processes audio superbly; it does not hand you material to build with. Music producers who want that supply it themselves.
The best value in recording software, full stop. If you have outgrown Audacity and cannot justify a subscription, REAPER is the answer: professional capability, an honest price, and a company that treats its users like adults.
Try it during the evaluation period on a real project rather than poking at an empty session. That is when it clicks. If it still feels like too much program, Audacity or Ocenaudio will serve you better.