Welcome to reapy’s documentation!

reapy is a nice pythonic wrapper around the quite unpythonic ReaScript Python API for REAPER.

Installation

See the Installation guide for installation instructions.

Usage

reapy has two main features: it allows nice pythonic code, and interactions with REAPER from the outside. Instead of creating a new ReaScript containing:

>>> from reaper_python import *
>>> RPR_ShowConsoleMsg("Hello world!")

you can open your usual Python shell and type:

>>> import reapy
>>> reapy.print("Hello world!")

ReaScript API

All ReaScript API functions are available in reapy in the sub-module reapy.reascript_api. Note that in ReaScript Python API, all function names start with "RPR_". That unnecessary pseudo-namespace has been removed in reapy. Thus, you shall call reapy.reascript_api.GetCursorPosition in order to trigger reaper_python.RPR_GetCursorPosition. See example below:

>>> from reapy import reascript_api as RPR
>>> RPR.GetCursorPosition()
0.0
>>> RPR.SetEditCurPos(1, True, True)
>>> RPR.GetCursorPosition()
1.0

reapy API

The purpose of reapy is to provide a more pythonic API as a substitute for ReaScript API. Below is the reapy way of executing the example above:

>>> import reapy
>>> project = reapy.Project() # current project
>>> project.cursor_position
0.0
>>> project.cursor_position = 1
>>> project.cursor_position
1.0

The Translation table matches ReaScript functions with their reapy counterparts.

Performance

When used from inside REAPER, reapy has almost identical performance than native ReaScript API. Yet when it is used from the outside, the performance is quite worse. More precisely, since external API calls are processed in a defer loop inside REAPER, there can only be around 30 to 60 of them per second. In a time-critical context, you should make use of the reapy.inside_reaper context manager.

>>> import reapy
>>> project = reapy.Project() # Current project
>>>
>>> # Unefficient (and useless) call
>>> bpms = [project.bpm for _ in range(1000)] # Takes at least 30 seconds...
>>>
>>> # Efficient call
>>> with reapy.inside_reaper():
...     bpms = [project.bpm for _ in range(1000)]
...
>>> # Takes only 0.1 second!

Although this method should be sufficient in most cases, note that optimality is only reached by making use of reapy.tools.Program (see documentation here).

API documentation

Check out the API guide and the Translation table for more information about how to use reapy.

Contributing

For now, about a third of ReaScript API has a reapy counterpart, the docs are far from great, and many bugs are waiting to be found. Feel free to improve the project by checking the contribution guide !

Author

Roméo Després - RomeoDespres

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License - see the LICENSE.txt file for details.