ReaDashboard

With over 400 REAPER projects accumulated over years of learning and covering guitar songs, navigating REAPER's native recent projects list had become completely unmanageable. ReaDashboard started as a personal solution — a project manager purpose-built for music producers who run hundreds of sessions. Inspired by solger's ReaLauncher concept, it was rebuilt from scratch in Lua using ReaImGui, a native Dear ImGui binding for REAPER that enables a fully custom, performant UI inside the DAW itself.

The dashboard provides two views: a visual grid of album art cards and a sortable list view with 10+ configurable metadata columns. Universal search spans project names, artists, albums, tags, and notes with AND/OR/-NOT operators and a pre-computed search haystack for instant results across hundreds of projects. A 3-tier storage system separates user data (project-tags.json), auto-cached metadata extracted directly from .rpp files, and transient UI state — ensuring tags are never overwritten by a scan. A built-in deduplication engine groups variants and copies, surfacing only the most recently modified version. Persistent mode keeps the script alive in the background, re-opening instantly via a single key press.

Released publicly via ReaPack in April 2026, it received immediate community engagement across Windows, Mac, and Linux. User feedback directly shaped the feature set: Guitar Mode hides all guitar-specific fields for non-guitarists, Statuses are fully editable, and recursive artwork scanning auto-discovers album art in project subfolders. The full source is on GitHub and the project is actively maintained.

• Grid and List views — album art cards or a sortable table with 10+ configurable metadata columns
• Universal Search — AND/OR/-NOT operators across project name, artist, album, tags, and notes
• Custom Tags — status, tuning, difficulty, strings, guitar, amp, genre, and free-text notes per project
• Auto-extracts BPM and time signature by parsing .rpp file headers
• Deduplication engine — groups copies and variants, always surfaces the most recently modified version
• Persistent mode — stays alive in the background for instant re-open via keyboard shortcut
• One-click install via ReaPack, compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux