REAPER Daemon

REAPER Daemon is one of those tools that makes you wonder why no one built it sooner. It's a local file bridge that lets AI agents like Claude or Codex control REAPER—the legendary digital audio workstation—without any extensions, servers, or MCP complexity. The entire system is elegantly brutal: you drop a JSON command file into a folder, a Lua script inside REAPER picks it up, executes it, and writes the result back. That's it. No network, no sockets, no fuss.

The founder goes by wretcher207 on GitHub and runs Dead Pixel Design. This is open source at its finest—MIT licensed, works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, and installs in about thirty seconds. The Lua bridge runs as a defer loop, polling the inbox folder one command per tick, and every mutating command lives inside a REAPER undo block so Cmd+Z works like it should.

What can you actually do? Pretty much anything. Transport control, tempo changes, track management (add, delete, rename, volume, pan, mute, solo, arm, color), FX manipulation (add, remove, bypass, reorder, set parameters, write automation), markers, regions, media items, MIDI insertion, and there's a scan_fx command that dumps every FX and parameter in your project so the agent knows what it's working with. You can even save recipes—command sequences you replay on any project.

Here's the thing: every DAW developer is scrambling to add AI features. REAPER Daemon said "actually, let the AI control the whole session" and shipped it for free. For producers already running coding agents on their machines, this is the missing link between "AI talks about my music" and "AI touches my session." It's the daemon you let into REAPER—and honestly, you should.