REAPER Audio Workflows

How to use REAPER's Media Explorer to audition and import beats and samples

By StudioRescue Editorial

Published October 18, 2026

Most people meet the Media Explorer by accident, decide it looks like a worse version of Windows Explorer, and go back to dragging files in from a folder window. That is a fair first impression and it costs you the only thing the Media Explorer is actually for: hearing a file properly before it becomes part of your project.

That matters most when you are working with other people's audio. A beat you downloaded, a pack of forty snare samples, a folder of takes from last week. Dragging them in one at a time, listening, then undoing, is slow and it clutters the project. The Media Explorer is the audition booth.

What it is, in one paragraph

The Media Explorer is a dockable window that browses your drives and plays what you select. REAPER's user guide describes it as a tool to preview and import items into your projects, and to help organise and manage media files, including creating databases and editing file metadata. It handles audio files, MIDI files, automation items and even REAPER project files. Folders you create inside it are real folders on your disk; databases you create inside it exist only in the Media Explorer and mean nothing outside REAPER.

The controls that actually matter

The toolbar runs left to right as Insert item in project, Auto play, Start on bar, Detect pitch, and a Media information box toggle, followed by the Tempo match options, a Preserve pitch toggle, and the dock toggle. Below the file list sits the preview area with its own transport. Here is what each of the useful ones does.

Audition like you mean it

Hear the sample through your own track

This is the part most tutorials skip, and it is the single most useful thing in the window. By default the preview plays straight out to your hardware, dry and unprocessed. Click the Route button and enable the option to play through a track selected in the arrange view, then insert a new track and keep it selected. Preview audio now runs through that track, so its volume, panning and FX are all in the path.

Tempo match, and why it sometimes does nothing

With Tempo match on, the tempo of the selected item is matched to that of the project, and there are half and double options for when a loop reads at the wrong multiple. That is genuinely useful, and it is also the control people most often report as broken.

The mechanism is the thing to understand. Tempo matching needs tempo information attached to the file. REAPER's import preferences, under Preferences, Media, Import, include settings for how media with embedded tempo information is handled, and the official changelog for version 7.79 is explicit that when importing from the Media Explorer with tempo match enabled, media is stretched automatically when the file contains tempo information. A plain WAV exported by someone who never wrote a tempo into it does not carry that information, so there is nothing for REAPER to match against and the control looks dead. This is not new, and it is not only you: Cockos forum threads reporting Tempo match doing nothing go back years, including one from 2017 about MIDI files and one from 2024 about loops failing to sync during preview.

Also remember that matching a loop to your tempo is a time stretch. Small moves are usually inaudible. Large ones are not, and they are more audible on recorded instruments and vocals than on a simple drum loop. If you need the beat itself to stay untouched, the honest answer is to move your project tempo to the beat rather than stretch the beat to your project.

Getting the file in

Select a file and either use the Insert item in project button, or right click the file name and choose one of these:

• Insert into project, on the currently selected track, at the cursor position.
• Insert at time selection, stretching or looping to fit, when a time selection is active.
• Insert on a new track, at the cursor position.
• Insert into sample player, on a new track or reusing an existing sample player.
• Insert in selected item, as a new take, replacing the media source, or replacing the source and stretching or looping to fit.

Whichever of these you use most can become your double click. Set it under Options, Default action (double-click or enter key). The defaults are to insert media on the selected track for media files, and to open projects in a new tab for .RPP files. You can also set it to Do nothing if you keep inserting things by accident. The Media Explorer has its own section in the action list, reachable by right clicking its title bar and choosing Show action list, so you can give any of these a keyboard shortcut.

Replacing one sample with another across a whole song is the same idea: select the new sample, hold Ctrl Alt while you drag it onto the item you want replaced, and REAPER offers to insert an overlapping item, add the source as a new take, replace that item's media, or replace every occurrence of it, with a separate choice about whether to adjust the item length, stretch the source, or loop it to fit.

What carries over from the preview

By default, the pitch, rate and volume you set while auditioning are preview settings only. They do not follow the file into the project unless you say so. The Options menu has entries to apply preview pitch and rate to inserted media items, and to apply preview volume. There is also a Normalize preview volume option, available once peak volume has been calculated for a file, with a matching option to apply that normalized volume to inserted items. Peak volume and loudness are calculated from the file's right click menu.

This catches people in both directions. Some expect the sample to arrive at the level they heard it at and are surprised when it does not. Others nudge the pitch knob while browsing, forget, and wonder later why an inserted sample sounds a semitone off. The safe habit is to leave these off and make level and pitch decisions on the timeline, where you can see them.

Shortcuts, databases and search

Two organisational features are worth ten minutes. Right click a folder in the main panel and choose Add to shortcut list to pin it to the left panel, which saves re-navigating to your sample drive every session. Right click a folder and choose Make database from folder to build a database, which appears in the left panel prefixed DB: and can be scanned later for new files or cleaned of missing ones. The filter box at the top filters the displayed file list, and under Options, Search you can choose which fields are searchable and whether the search updates only when you press Enter.

What the Media Explorer will not do

• It will not improve the audio. A badly recorded beat or a clipped sample sounds the same after it is imported. Auditioning only helps you choose better.
• It will not find a tempo that is not there. If a file carries no tempo information, Tempo match has nothing to work from.
• It will not make stretched audio sound unstretched. A big tempo change is a processing decision with an audible cost.
• It is not a tagging library. Databases are folder based with metadata editing. If you want ratings, tags and similarity search across a large library, that is what dedicated sample managers are for, and REAPER does not pretend otherwise.
• It will not reconnect missing files. If the project has already lost track of media, that is a different job, covered in what to do when REAPER says media offline.

If it still is not behaving

1. Nothing plays at all. Check the Route button first. If preview output is pointed at a device you are not listening to, or through a track that is muted or has no output, you get silence with everything else set correctly.
2. Tempo match does nothing. Test with a file you know carries tempo information, such as a loop from a pack that advertises it, or one you rendered from REAPER with tempo embedded. If that one matches and yours does not, the file is the difference, not the setting.
3. The loop drifts against the project. Turn on Start on bar, and consider the Options entry that waits for the next measure before starting the preview.
4. Inserted files arrive at the wrong level or pitch. Check the apply preview volume, apply preview pitch and rate, and normalized volume options in the Options menu.
5. Files arrive with fades you did not ask for. Imported items get the default fades from Preferences, Project, Item Fade Defaults. You can change or disable that there.
6. You want this on a folder of files, not one at a time. Conversion and normalising across a whole folder is a different tool. See how to batch convert and normalize a folder of audio files in REAPER.