Trim Audio to RPP referenced audio only
By Yamuna Jivana Dasa

In this article, I discuss how to trim a project’s audio to only referenced audio data by your project, keeping all items intact in the project file with correct referencing in place.

First, let's look at why this is useful, uhm, let's whet your appetite. I'll give you two cases:

Case 1. Let's say you went out and recorded a whole day's event, using Reaper.
Your recording was five hours long.
Back in your studio, you edited the events down to the only needed parts of the audio, but now when you hit Control Windows J or double-pressed it, to check project length, you learn that the new project length after your editing spans at just over 30 minutes!
Hmmm, you contemplate, 5 hours - I won't need to keep the whole thing after editing this. Besides, I'm low on disk space!
Yeah, you could simply render that to audio files for each of your tracks recorded, but what if you do not want to lose access to your separated items for editing or for mixing or even rendering individual items later.
"I would prefer to keep the project with all its separated items Etc" you realize, "But how do I do that without keeping this whole bloody five hours of recording!" you mutter to yourself.

Case 2. You  need a special forest ambiance live recording which you have to import from a 3-hour-long Wave file, to fit a sweet spot or two of around 30 seconds of your music production. Now you've imported that audio, copied just what you needed from different segments of the forest recording onto sections of your timeline of your forest track (remember to keep ripple off to not mess with your other tracks' audio [that's Alt Shift P]), and you've aligned just what you needed, applied your gentle fades in and out, and trimmed out the rest. Great. The sound matches just what you felt the song needed here. But now it's time to save the project. But wait! Now this means your Reaper project has to keep that massive three-hour audio file of the forest, even though this project ownly needed around 30 seconds of it? You already have the forest audio archived on an external disk in a "Special effects" folder of your own collection, and you don't want to have this project looking there,. You just want this project to keep its own needed stuff in its own neat little project folder. Ok, so just copy the three-hour forest file into the Reaper project folder before referencing it, right? No way! That's a disk-drive space waster for sure!
"Hmmm! Would sure be nice" you think to yourself, "if I could have Reaper save only the parts of the forest audio that I reference as part of its project folder audio!" This allows you to later backup that project folder nice and efficiently without losing any referencing but also without keeping huge audio files in duplicate just for that project to have its own folder.

Do you see some real need here? Ready? Let's go!

Mac users, please bear with me, I'm discussing from a Windows perspective, but having studied the excellent demos already provided by our more experienced team, you know the drills with navigation alternatives on the Mac so this should not leave you out hopefully. In summary, The Control key means Command, Alt means Options, and the menus are driven by Voiceover commands you have come to know by default I would think, in most cases.

So, Your project is now loaded in Reaper. Hit Save project as (Control Alt S).
Select the following checkboxes:
Create subdirectory for project, checkbox checked
Copy all media into project using, checkbox checked.
Convert Media, checkbox checked.
No need to press the format button here and Reaper will create the original file format outputs.
Trim media tail size: I left this unchecked and it still worked, but it is safer to check it in order to preserve audio tails, then leave the 500 Ms tail lengths default for most situations.

Press Alt+N to reach the File Name edit field. Give the file a new name here to force it to create a brand new project folder with all RPP, Media folder, peaks Etc. in it.
Hit Enter to process. Wahlaa! You should now have a project with no more audio in it than you have referenced by your Reaper RPP project file.

Now to test that it has worked:
Browse to that new folder and look inside the Media sub-folder. Notice only the audio items from the project data is here. Simply play those Wave files in your default Audio playback software: Winamp? Windows Media Player? VLC? Whatever!, to listen to the raw audio files: Each audio file should actually be the individual takes from your project. Means we are successful. If not, well … I’d be interested to know.

Now remember we had to change our Reaper project file name and therefore folder name also? To get your original project folder and reaper project filename back, just go into the Reaper Media folder, rename the original project folder to something else if you need to keep it, otherwise delete it if you know it is too large and you really don’t want it (but do read me in full here below first before you do that).

Go to the new reaper folder name based on the new name you saved the project as earlier. Rename it back to the original project name.
Go into that folder, find the RPP file and rename it back also to the original project name, of course, keeping the rpp file extension.

The RPP project folder and file, even after being renamed in this way, will still reference the media files inside correctly.
For conformity with the Save As, “Create Subdirectory for project” function though, I would say be sure that the folder name matches the .RPP filename exactly.

Now to test the project:

Open Reaper. If it loads your last project by default whatever that might have been, hit Control F4 to close it. Up and down arrows should report "No ttracks". Now hit Control O to open and load the new RPP project file. Notice everything is where they were, all items on the timeline are preserved in the project, and as we saw while browsing the folders earlier, only the project-referenced items are being used.

Remember I said earlier to read me in full first? Here's why. Before you delete your original Reaper project folder and its associated .RPP project, test your new consolidated Reaper project to ensure the following:

1. Check that any effects on individual items are still being preserved.
2. Check that all other tracks' audio that were processed into the new project are safely referencing only the audio that the Reaper project needs, no more but more importantly, no less!

Since we're talking about maximum but safe consolidation of audio here, I might as well also mention takes.
If you've recorded multiple takes and made a desired composite of just the ones you need, then before you do all of the above project audio consolidation procedure given above in this article, you can also maximize the trim-down of your project's audio by hitting Alt Shift T which will crop to active takes in items. First though remember to select all the relevant timeline/takes or complete tracks to which you want this takes consolidation to affect.

Finally, just to complete the discussion of project audio consolidation, remember that Reaper has another function: "Clean current project directory". It is the second-last item of the File menu on the menu bar. While this is useful in removing unreferenced audio data from the project folder in general, if you have not yet specifically told Reaper to not reference an audio file, this "Clean current project directory" procedure will not work for the above two cases we have discussed in this article. It will only clean up anything Reaper sees as completely not  referenced at all. However, after applying the method I describe here, and after testing your new project folder satisfactorily, you can apply this procedure last, when you're ready to store away the project folder for generations to come, in case someone wants to reserect and revamp that great song after you're long gone from this world!

Please E-mail any corrections and updates that deserve my attention to  ykhandoo@gmail.com. Reaper is always transforming, so is Osara and SWS and the Snowman scripts for Reaper. For as long as I too remain actively alive, I'm ready to fix anything I have said here to satisfy future conditions, and also to correct my own human frailties. After all, at the time of this writing, I'm a complete newbie using Reaper. I'm just being very bold and presumptuous given my audacity to attempt an article of this magnitude so early in my journey with Reaper. If anything hopefully this might earn me some new friends and much needed constructive critiques in RWP land. Both are most welcome! <smile>

Keep well everyone. I hope it's useful.

Yamuna Jivana Dasa

[Last updated: 11 October 2025]