How to Use Reaper Folders and Groups

Reaper is a powerful, flexible and customisable audio application. You can use Reaper for music creation and production, podcasts, voice-over, sound design, audiobooks, live performance, mixing for video, mastering, and much more.



In our free Reaper course, you’ll learn the basics of Reaper with Dave Bode, and in this lesson you'll learn how to group tracks in Reaper, and about using folders in Reaper.
How to Group Tracks in Reaper and Using Folders in Reaper
Using track folders in Reaper is a great option when you want to process multiple tracks together. Let me show you how it works.
Track Folders

I’ve created a new track and moved it all the way up to the top in the Track Control panel. If I click on the plus button, this will cycle between making it a track, a folder, or the last folder in a track.
If I click it one time, every track in my project below this track folder will now be inside the track folder. Once I have that set up, the audio from all of the tracks will be routed through my track folder, which means I can process all of the tracks together.

If I open up my effects and I bring up the EQ I can now EQ all of these tracks at the same time, which is really handy for processing similar tracks like overheads, snare drum tracks, ten different drum tracks, background vocals, guitar tracks, and much more. This is also a great way to control the volume of multiple tracks at the same time.

If I adjust the volume in the track folder, it's going to functionally adjust the volume of all of these other tracks. I say functionally, because it's not actually controlling any of these other tracks.
The one thing to know about a track folder is what happens when you have sends and receives going in and out of tracks in the track folder. I'm going to take my Reverb Return and pull that out of my track folder, and I can do that two ways. I can just pull it down, and that'll make my MrTramp 2 track the last track in the folder.

Alternatively, I can click the plus icon folder button on the MrTramp 2 track, twice and that will also make it the last track in the folder.
If I pull the volume all the way down in my track folder, I can still hear the audio coming through the reverb return, because the routing didn't change. The drum track, for example, is still sending audio to my reverb return, so that's something that you've got to watch out for if you're using an effects return track and you have other tracks put in a track folder.
When you adjust the volume of the track folder, it's not going to adjust the sends going to the reverb return. The best way to handle this is to make sure that the reverb return track is inside the track folder.
Controlling Volume of Multiple Tracks From a Single Track

I'm going to pull all of these out of the track folder in Reaper, and I'm going to rename this track to Lead Track. Then I'm going to right-click, come down to Track grouping, and select Track grouping parameters.
With track grouping, there is a ton that you can control. I'm going to show you some really simple things.

To start, I'm going to select my lead track and then I'm going to assign all of the lead functions by clicking on the Lead button.

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How to Group Tracks in Reaper and Using Folders in Reaper Continued

I'll take all the other tracks and then click on Follow which assigns all of the options attributed to Follow. What that means is that when I adjust my lead track, it's going to control the volume on all of the other tracks, and it does that in a relative way. In other words, when I double-click the volume of the lead track and set it back to zero decibels, it won’t change all of the volumes in all of the follow tracks to zero decibels.
They're going to go back to wherever they were when I set them to follow, which means that I can adjust the volume of any one of these tracks and still control them relative to my lead track.

I can also click on mute and solo and that will mute and solo everything that's following and pan will also follow as well.
Using grouping like this is really good for toggling mute on and off in solo and making a few adjustments here and there. The one place where this becomes a little bit messy is when it comes to automation. Let's say you wanted to record some automation with your tracks grouped.

I'll set my lead track to Touch, and what you'll see now above, is everything that's following is armed for automation as well.

If I record some volume automation it's essentially just copying the automation from this track to all of the other tracks.

This means that if I go back and manually adjust the envelope for my lead track, as above, it won't update in any of the other tracks.
If I wanted to update the volume automation of what I just wrote, I'd have to do it live and it's kind of a mess, so let me show you another way to group these tracks that works a little bit better for automation.
How to Group Tracks in Reaper, Alternative Method

I'm going to select all of the tracks and then press Ctrl+G on the keyboard to bring up those track grouping parameters and with everything selected, I'm going to click None, which will clear out all of the grouping. I’m also setting all of the tracks back to Trim/Read.

This time, I'm going to select my lead track and instead of selecting all of the options, I'm going to enable VCA Lead, and I'm also going to enable Solo Lead, Mute Lead, and Pan Lead.

Next, I'm going to select all the other tracks that I want to control, set those to VCA Follow, Solo Follow, Mute Follow, and Pan Follow.
With the track set up like this, Mute, Solo and Pan work the same way. Pan updates on all the other tracks, but volume works much better when it comes to automation. As I move the volume, instead of controlling the position of the fader on all the other tracks, nothing’s happening, but if I play back my project and adjust the volume, it turns down the volume of all of the tracks.

If I bring the volume envelope up and freehand draw some automation in, all of the other tracks follow the volume envelope from the lead track without having automation written on them. This is great because if you already have automation or envelopes on any of your other tracks, it's still going to work just as it did before, but on top of that, it's going to follow the automation for the volume on the lead track. It's kind of like a volume on top of a volume, which seems crazy, but it gives you another level of control.
Group Tracks in Reaper

Before I wrap this lesson up, I just want to point out that you can have up to 64 different groups in Reaper and you can rename them so that you can keep track of which tracks are grouped together.
About This Page
This page was written by Marie Gardiner from the transcript of a course by David Bode. Dave is an expert on video and audio production. Marie is a writer, author, and photographer. The page was edited by Gonzalo Angulo. Gonzalo is an editor, writer and illustrator.