Append One Project to Another

By forum user Art Evans:

This is something that a few people I can think of need all the time, and most people perhaps don't. I had to combine two projects the other day so I gave some thought to how to proceed.

There's two kinds of project append scenarios - either you want to append one project beneath another (so project one and project two start at the same time), or you want to append one project after the other (to the right of it on the timeline, so that project two starts at the end of project one).

Although there's no built in mechanism for this (as far as I am aware...) it's pretty easy to do this in Reaper, for either scenario.

To append project two beneath project one, open project two, and copy all of its tracks. [Track > Copy selected tracks to clipboard]. Then open project one, and use [Edit > paste] to insert the tracks into that project. Save it - perhaps under a new filename, let's say "project three", and exit Reaper. Open project two in a text editor such as Notepad. Scroll down to the markers section and copy the whole section. Close, open project three - the new combined project - in the text editor, and beneath its marker section, paste the markers from project two. Save and close. When you open project three, you will see the markers for both projects. This assumes that you do want both sets of markers and that you don't mind some duplication of marker numbers - I don't think it matters to Reaper.

For the second scenario, do much the same, but to begin with, open project one, and note its total length. Open project two, and create a highlight from the start to the point you just noted in project one. Then right click on the highlight and choose [Insert empty space in selection] - this will push all the items in the project to the right, together with all the markers and automation. Save it perhaps under a new filename - say "project two extended". Now copy all the tracks as before, open project one, and paste the tracks in - the items in the tracks should all start after the end of the items in the original tracks. Save as "project three", close, and use the technique described earlier to copy the markers from "project two extended" into "project three" - they should end up after all the markers from the original project one, and should correspond to the right items from project two now appended after the items from project one.

I've not tried to combine two different master tracks, but I suspect that a little study of the project file syntax would reveal what would need to be done.