Reaper install is 13 megs. I have no idea how is this possible today.

Because they're good

can just swap electron for tauri for example

Or you know… build a proper app.

yeah, that's what i'm saying

Probably no big external dependencies or any assets. It looks like something full of handwritten code, down to the self-rendered UI-elements. Also it's written in C/C++ and assembler, so there is no unnecessary bloat shipped out-of-the-box.

And it's good. It also seems to have the most flexible plugin system of any DAW that has decent level of usage.

Now that I look at it, why is the arm64 that much smaller then x86_64?

36 vs 47MB

Just an educated guess, but perhaps there are optional dependencies missing in the arm64 version. Some programs are still broken or perform badly on arm64.

I think it has to do with arm64 not supporting plugins and thus not shipping with any.

On MacOS is went from 189mb->128mb for v3->v4 which is nice

How big are the project files these days? In the .aup3 format all source material was rendered into one big pile, so with lots of "raw tape" (e.g. for a radio show) the session files became huge. It was annoying to transport an 1.5 GB session file between two machines even via network.

Reaper and Pro Tools (and many other DAWs), in contrast, had the source material in one folder and the session file essentially just documented the edits. These small session files could be exported even via email.

The .aup3 format was one of the reasons why I decided to ditch Audacity3 for radio editing back in the day. And, it used to lag heavily when I had a project with several hundred cuts done via "ripple editing". All this was years ago, though.

I concluded that Audacity v1.2.6 was the high point of this software and, indeed, tried to go back into using that one for a while (in 2019 or 2021 or so)! It was fast enough, very simple, young, raw, robust, but it still had its early 2000s open source enthusiasm charm. :)

As a blast from the past, here's a 2002 publication by the original authors of Audacity on the original file format: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd/papers/RBD-papers%20renamed/A%20...