They seem to be on a bit of a streak of new releases without deliberately breaking compatibility, at least I can’t see anywhere that anything’s been deliberately broken on this one.
I recently updated after probably more than a year stretch of not updating and was surprised to see Realimit in there. It is very usable and a good replacement for the jsfx limiter. I still wish the cramping in Reaeq would be fixed and oversampling in Reacomp. And Reasamplomatic5000 is still in an infant stage after many years, and I don’t know why it is still even included. And yay, the ffmpeg audio rendering on linux is hopefully fixed. It was kludgy to do half the job in Reaper and half in ffmpeg.
Yeah, I don’t know why people get all moist over RS5k. I also understand why they don’t do anything with it, although it’s nice to have a mutisampler built in like with other DAWs.
I didn’t know ffmpeg audio was broken on Linux, the last I checked Reaper video export had some warts on Windows but can’t remember if that was ffmpeg.
Rendering video with ffmpeg in Reaper on linux would end up with no audio. My workaround was to render the video with audio (although silent), render the audio separately, then use ffmpeg on a terminal to replace the audio. It wasn’t a big deal since I had already learned basics of ffmpeg on a terminal, but it was still annoying.
RS5K could have potentially been a nice little sampler with just a handful of basic features added, which was endlessly talked about on the Reaper forum at some point. But Justin didn’t seem to have any interest in sampling, so it seemed pointless being included in the installer, serving more as a reminder that it would never get any attention. The attraction was lack of a good stable multi-sampler outside of the likes of Kontakt. Most users didn’t want another Kontakt, mostly just an easier to use RS5K without the big kludge of stacking a bunch of instances and without the velocity layer round robin logic for which no one knew how it worked for years simply because Justin thought it would be neat or something to add a puzzle into RS5K instead of something straight forward to use, along with some other basics added that probably would have eaten barely any development time to address. Lots of people saw the potential in RS5K, and some people were willing to work on sample sets and presets (community was the biggest potential), but it was just too kludgy for the average person to use as well as missing a few simple things to make it really useful for more than just very basic drums and one shots. Damnit Justin. Definitely dropped the ball and let it deflate on that one.
I get this now when I download Reaper lol
Windows is the problem. 
= Potentially unwanted app.
Don’t get me wrong, Linux can be a pain in the ass at times, but it ain’t Microsoft either. Ha ha.
If it’s not in the Store it’s unwanted by Microsoft these days.
Microsoft has an exclusive license for GPT-3. Maybe you can talk to it and ask it what’s up with that?
I use RS5k for the toms of the SM drumkit. I think Suleiman Ali set it up, did it well, plays fine. That setup is all over the tracks I’ve posted here.
For kickdrums and snare I run separate instances of Sforzando.
For percussion, crash cyms, ride cyms etc. I find MT Power drumkit 2 to do the job well; don’t need to eq them much.
I remember using some freely available samples to make some multi-sample track templates and posting them to hopefully explain how RS5K works and trying to spur more interest in RS5K so that it might get some more dev attention, but it was just too much of a pain in the ass as is to work with for most people I think. I gave up on that dead horse long ago, ended up buying the Naive Instruments package that included Kontakt and proceeded to never use a damn bit it for anything. 
And when I uninstalled all that stuff to put it up for sale later (which I also never did), NI was such a pain in the ass to deal with.
I sort of had the tx16 sampler worked out enough to use it, but then when I went to a later version it messed up or I messed it up so I ditched it. Separate instances of Sforzando using individual sfz files works good and is pretty much failproof, since I’m generally not doing sound mangling of the drum voices.
I remember using all the free samplers back in the day. I created sampled instruments in all of them at some point. They all had pretty big issues. And no devs ever really did step up in that niche. A good featured and easy to use sampler for rolling your own sampled instruments and sharing with others and other creative uses, that also didn’t cost an arm. There was one which I forget the name of that was designed for essentially one-shot drums that hung around for a while, and the price was like $50. But it sounded pretty bad and was missing enough to only make it useful for electronic style drums and one shots really. A lot of people just wanted to tinker a bit with some sampled instruments without spending a chunk. And some people wanted to actually sample various sounds, as in the old days of samplers, not romplers. I wanted to do a bit of both. And the likes of Kontakt was a buzz kill to a diy mentality.
I had the free Kontakt 5 player and was using it for strings, keys, bass, drums, on a bunch of projects. If someone reading this does that, don’t forget to print your MIDI to Audio bc if your computer crashes you might not get the sounds back bc NI authorisation is a pita as BW said, and that’s IF the same thing is still available.
If you print the audio of a project 90% done then it’s likely a bit of surgical grafting can get it finished.
Yeh I’ve had it with all that authorisation, except for Sgear, still a bit of bother but Mike Scuffham is a good guy, I’ve had three authorisations on the same license.
He personally offers help if there’s any issues, haven’t had any real dramas.
I definitely have some issues with the sound of Sgear and the invasive authorization scheme, but I do like smaller devs who treat their customers like real humans. Toontrack was always good like that too.
If the sampler can make a drumroll sound decent, and pitchbend a bass note reasonably well, then it’s good enough for me atm
Nothing beats a real kit at sounding like a real kit of course but if there’s enough noise going on, and in my tracks there generally is, it sounds real, nearly
I generally just try to tweak something that fits the mix, it’s easier to do that with sims, in my case at least.
Electric guitars are always kinda noisy, no matter what but yep the sound of an actual AC30 honking away is hard to mimick without an actual AC30
This update aside, any cool new features added over the last year that any of you remember?
I haven’t paid much attention. The changelogs are too noisy imo with little fixes to documentation etc in among the feature stuff. It’s okay when you’re following it, but not so good if you’re not.
Yea, I skimmed through the changelogs, and it is pretty noisy. I guess I could grep through it if anything specific comes to mind.