How to Use Reaper Markers and Regions

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 all about Reaper markers and regions.
Reaper Markers and Regions

Using markers in Reaper is a great way to mark different sections of your project. You can insert markers by pressing M on the keyboard. If you have snapping enabled and you’re using the grid, your markers will snap to the grid. If you turn off snapping though, you can slide these markers wherever you want. You can also rename your markers if you double-click on them.
Markers can be a great way to navigate around your project, especially as it gets longer. There are some keyboard shortcuts which make that a little bit easier. The first nine numbers on the QWERTY keyboard will instantly move the edit cursor to the first nine markers, and that makes it super fast to get around your project.
Like I said before, you can set the edit cursor and then press M to insert a marker, or you can insert markers as a track is playing.
Region/Marker Manager

If you have a lot of markers and you want to go in and modify and rename them, double-clicking on each one can be a little tedious so I also want to show you the Marker Manager, which you can find by coming up to the menu, selecting View, and then Region/Marker Manager.
Rename Repear Markers

If you uncheck regions and check markers, you'll see all your markers in your project. You could rename these by double-clicking on the name and then using tab to jump down to the next name.
Change the Colour of Reaper Markers

You can change the colour of your markers, or set them to a random colour or colours.
Renumber Reaper Markers

If you somehow get your markers out of order, you can right-click and then choose renumber in timeline order, which reassigns the numbers in the order that they are in the timeline.

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Remove Markers in Reaper
If you want to get remove markers in Reaper, you can Alt + click on individual markers to get rid of them.

An alternative way to remove markers in Reaper is by making a time selection, right-clicking, and then choosing remove all markers from time selection.
Regions in Reaper
Another tool that you can use to help you manage and arrange your project is regions. Regions are like markers, but instead of identifying a single point in time like a marker, a region identifies a time range in your project.
With snapping turned back on, I'm going to set a few markers which will allow me to create a time selection more easily, because currently the grid is set to 16th notes, and that can be just a little bit fiddly to make an accurate time selection.
Sometimes what I like to do is drop a couple of markers and then make a time selection in between those two markers.

Once I have a time selection, if I press Shift + R on the keyboard, that creates a region.
Duplicating a Region
Regions are really useful for arranging and rendering your projects. Let's say that you wanted to increase the length of the verse section of your song.

You could duplicate a region by holding Crtl and then left-clicking and dragging. Essentially, what it does is duplicate everything within the bounds of the region and moved over. By repeating this, you can rearrange your song entirely.
Region/Marker Manager

Just like with markers, you can edit and modify your regions in the Region Marker Manager. This can be a lot faster for naming multiple regions, just like if you were naming multiple markers. You can also change the colour, just like you saw with markers. This can help you identify different sections of your project.
Regions to Render
You can also use regions to help you render your project and I want to show you that really quickly by switching over to a real-world project that I’ve been working on.

What you're looking at here is a nine-hour long audio book by John Maxwell. A friend recorded and edited this and then sent it over to me to master it and get it ready to be published on Audible.

Every single chapter in this book has its own region. We have the opening, dedication, introduction, and then it gets into the meat of the book with 16 laws. I can use these regions to help me render my project. I don't want to render this entire project as one audio file, I want to render each chapter individually.

What I can do is bring up the Region/Marker Manager again and then click Render Matrix, which opens up and docks down in the bottom left of the screen.
Region Render Matrix

If I open it you can see that I’ve selected the master mix for each one of these regions.

Then, if I go to render my project, by hitting Ctrl + Alt+ R, you can see that my project is going to render 21 files, which is every single one of those chapters because I have the source set to region render matrix via the master mixer.
Essentially, it's going to render each one of the regions via the Master Mix, which means that it applies all of my processing, and at the bottom you can see it's going to render 21 files.

The great thing about doing it this way is I can get Reaper to name all of the files however I want. In the file name section, you can see that I have a dollar sign and then it says regionnumber_$region. If you look at the file names, it's going to name all of those with the region number and then the name of the region, which saves me a ton of work.
I’m going to talk about render settings in an upcoming lesson, thanks for following along.
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.