An email from Propellerheads

Quote:

Dear Reason user, Lately, we've been contacted by users who have sold or are planning to sell their copies of Reason 1.0 after they upgraded to Reason 2.0. Doing so is a breach of the license agreement and will forfeit all your Reason license numbers. We hereby ask you to take a moment to read the following text to stop you from doing something you might regret. DO NOT SELL YOUR REASON 1.0 LICENSE AFTER UPGRADING, IT MEANS SELLING YOUR ENTIRE REASON LICENSE! All your upgrade license numbers origin from your original license number. That's why it is absolutely necessary that you keep your old license numbers. Without all your license numbers, YOUR LICENSE ISN'T COMPLETE! Here's how it works: You bought Reason 1.0, that's your program license. You upgraded to 2.0 which gave you a new upgrade number. Now you upgrade to 2.5 and get yet another upgrade number. But your license number IS STILL your Reason 1.0 number. A new upgrade is NOT a separate program license, so if you sell your Reason 1.0 license, you sell your whole license. In that case don't forget to give the buyer all your license numbers, all your CDs and all manuals, because if you sell your Reason 1.0, you don't own the license anymore. That also means that you will not be entitled to any more upgrades of Reason, Reload and Refill Packer or any future Reason accessories. All these extras now belongs to the new owner! DID YOU SELL YOUR REASON 1.0 WITHOUT REALIZING THIS? In that case you better try to get it back fast, because when the buyer claims that they own that Reason 1.0 license and can prove ownership, we will transfer the registration of your Reason license to the new legal owner! This policy will be enforced starting June 1st. If you have sold your Reason 1.0 license, you need to buy it back before this date or you will lose your entire Reason license. PLEASE NOTE: The rules explained above naturally apply to later and future versions of Reason; users who initially bought Reason 2.0 cannot sell it after upgrading to 2.5. They also apply to our other products. /Propellerhead Software

Does this mean Reason 2.5 will be out June 1st

May 8th. There's a fucking great big countdown clock on their website.

Thanks I forgot they had a website

I just had a peek there (first for about a year)

I'll bet you anything it still doesn't have a tempo/meter map or work with VSTs! The two things everyone wants, that would be easy to implement, but that they're too stubborn to give us!

Laurence Kingston

release one day before reaktor 4 !

The tempo/meter mapping is one thing (which I wouldn't be surprised to see in v3.0), but don't assume for a second that 3rd party VST support is even close to being easy to implement into such a tightly integrated and controlled environment as Reason. Besides... Reason is an *instrument* (albeit a semi-modular one), with an interface called Rewire (as opposed to VST) to connect to sequencers, but it is not a host. This is an important distinction to keep in mind. The Propellerheads have never claimed Reason to be a sequencer, DAW or host. It's the users that make that incorrect assumption. Why is it that people who have no experience with software development automatically assume that "little" things like hard drive recording and 3rd party plugin support is somehow simple and easy to implement? The Props have flatly stated themselves that these areas are not their expertise and that it is foolhardy to simply assume that just because they are excellent in some areas, it automatically makes them skilled and experienced in everything else. They are a small company that are not willing to make that kind of leap yet and it doesn't fit into their design philosophy of the product anyways. Regardless, v2.5 is going to be a free update for all 2.0 owners, which dramatically improves Reason on several important fronts. Improved mixer EQs, stereo aux sends, new routing for audio and CV with the spider merge/splitters units, and across-the-board upgrades to it's effects department. They could have easily charged for such a broad and high quality update. It must be because they're just stubborn, mean people that don't like to give their users what they want.

-Tronam

Laurence,

Neither, I'm afraid.

Tronam,

Valid points, but no clock and no midi out (so we could rewire and keep all the sequencing in reason) is starting to look like sheer bloodymindedness. And I still think it's the greatest piece of software in the world.

Quote:

The Props have flatly stated themselves that these areas are not their expertise and that it is foolhardy to simply assume that just because they are excellent in some areas, it automatically makes them skilled and experienced in everything else.

What's to stop them contracting in someone that is though

you know, if you don't know how to do something find someone that does

Although not my first choice to work in Reason works near flawlessly and with the gradual but significant improvements made in each release, 2.5 is free to 2.0 users, they did listen and within the scope of Reason as they define it, gave users what they wanted.

I don't mind an application that works well being cautious of adding variables that can potentially make it less stable or more of a customer service issue. With the NN-XT you have a good sampler and any number of inexpensive ways of playing VST instruments as sample data. Although not the most elegant way of working in the end it's still pretty good as within the sampler CPU cycles are saved and further timbral changes can take place.

From day one Reason has been it's own entity, it's not like the Props hid anything from users.

I kind of like the Props decision to keep it a "closed" environment. I can always rewire if I need more features, and its dead stable now.

S_A_P wrote:

I kind of like the Props decision to keep it a "closed" environment. I can always rewire if I need more features, and its dead stable now.

Agree 100%

I do NOT want VST support in Reason and will NEVER want it inside Reason. It runs superfast now and Low CPU usage withOUT VST. Its tuned for what it does and it does it well. I have NEVER had reason crash on me in almost 2 years of use. Heck, even the 2.5 beta never crashed on me. I don't think anyone else can say that about their VST Host. If you can, let me know what package it was and if it does rewire

Further, if they supported VST, then people would want RTAS, AU's, TDM, etc. Why should they reinvent the wheel and have to clutter up their program and add the support headache? By supporting Rewire, you can connect to Hosts that already do VST, AU, (and soon TDM with Protools 6.1's Rewire support) etc. and not have to worry about it. Then, all they have to worry about is Rewire and not 50 bazillion plugins not working because the VST coder can't code right and it brings down Reason. I don't need the instability.

Reason was created when the fastest PC's out were PII 400's. It was designed to run efficiently to get the most out of the hardware it supported at the time. Well, now that we have 3Ghz P4s, the props are starting to integrate better effects modules that are a tad more CPU intensive, but are still very optimized. I like the new Reverb, Vocoder/EQ, and Distortion units just fine...I don't NEED a different one inside Reason to do what I want. They are "tuned" to work in Reason specifically. To me the coolest feature of the devices withing reason are their CV abilities. You couldn't do this sort of things with VST's anyway because VSTs don't HAVE that capability. You couldn't hook up the CV gating from a Matrix in Reason to a Synth1 or Absynth VSTi because THEIR ISN'T A CV INPUT! To me, its like saying "why can't I take the LFO from this Reaktor Synth and control the panning of this Albino lead". The reason? You can't. It's not built that way. Reason IS built this way so the modules "talk" together nicely.

Also, the audio and CV spiders are an incredible versitile addition that no other software app has right now. Being able to have one module control another module (or modules) CV paramters is killer! The routing possibilities are indeed endless.

This will only get better and better with each release. I think the one thing the props have been guilty of is not getting their codebase up to date. I think they boxed themselves into how they were writing the app from the start and have been making steps to change to a component based architecture instead of tons of individual source files, so this should allow things to be developed in a more structured manner. Probably should have been done earlier, but at least its happening. Also, they will have to figure out how to make the rack modular and get some sort of "virtual" cable management. Building 100 devices in a rack and having to scroll through them is becoming painful...but at least I can HAVE 100 devices and not kill my CPU.

If you want VST support, go buy tracktion for 80 bucks and have fun.

/drez

drez,

All good points but I'd still like a clock. And midi out wouldn't break their all-in-one paradigm. I love the Reason sequencer (particularly the get user groove function) and midi out would allow rewire to work using just one set of lanes.

nuffink wrote:

drez, All good points but I'd still like a clock. And midi out wouldn't break their all-in-one paradigm. I love the Reason sequencer (particularly the get user groove function) and midi out would allow rewire to work using just one set of lanes.

Yeah, I guess so. All I know is that Tracktion has MIDI out, and I believe it will have the user groove function in the future. I'm beginning to really like Tracktions sequencer, as I'm kinda a Reason Sequencer bigot myself

/drez

drez wrote:

To me the coolest feature of the devices withing reason are their CV abilities. You couldn't do this sort of things with VST's anyway because VSTs don't HAVE that capability. You couldn't hook up the CV gating from a Matrix in Reason to a Synth1 or Absynth VSTi because THEIR ISN'T A CV INPUT! To me, its like saying "why can't I take the LFO from this Reaktor Synth and control the panning of this Albino lead". The reason? You can't. It's not built that way. Reason IS built this way so the modules "talk" together nicely.

Yep, very good feature... You can also do this in Pluggo VST/MAS/... and it's great.
Reason is great like this, no need to implement VST support - Rewire is the open door.

nuffink wrote:

drez, All good points but I'd still like a clock. And midi out wouldn't break their all-in-one paradigm. I love the Reason sequencer (particularly the get user groove function) and midi out would allow rewire to work using just one set of lanes.

Midi out? Come on man, Midi is over 20 years old! Its time to move on

I also want a simple clock I don't need true midi-out, just midi-out clock for synchronizing external equipment (arpeggiator ) and possibility to send midi messages via rewire, so I could use Reason's sequencer to control VSTs in the host. At this time it can only recieve midi...

AD80 wrote:

Midi out? Come on man, Midi is over 20 years old! Its time to move on

Fair point, what do you reckon I should use given that I'd like to drive vst synths which only take a midi in?

Heh, the day FL Studio get's a sequencer clos to the one in Reason, I'm moving, and a Refill Exctractor........
That day I won't be needing Reason anymore

nuffink wrote:

AD80 wrote: Midi out? Come on man, Midi is over 20 years old! Its time to move on Fair point, what do you reckon I should use given that I'd like to drive vst synths which only take a midi in?

I guess we're all stuck with Rewire for now. I like the way Sonar2 handles Rewire because as soon as you choose it within Sonar it opens Reason automatically. Very solid. Now if it could remember the song you were working on and save it along with the Sonar song that would be perfect! I hate having to open/save two different songs all the time. Its very annoying. I wonder why Cubase doesnt open Reason automatically like Sonar does.

It really must be difficult for developers sometimes - there's a trend for users to demand everything in one package irrespective of what it is they've bought....Reason is a good case. As already mentioned - it wasn't designed to be a host (although you can make complete tracks with it).

For those of us that have been doing the music thing for a good few years, the products now are bloody awesome. It's not that long ago that everything pretty much was hardware and each unit was specialised for its own purpose .... AND it was a bloody expensive hobby to have. For the price of one top notch reverb unit I can now buy a whole PC, soundcard, host and god knows how many VSTis and FX, that will equal the quality of a whole hardware studio at a FRACTION of the cost of a hardware studio.... I know ... I built one up over years and years and spent the equivalent of maybe a year's wages on it overall.

I consider it great to be able to buy all these cheap goodies with pocket money (comparatively) .... but I also learned the hard lesson that it is often actually a GOOD thing to have specialised units - they do what they do well without cutting too many corners - that's how companies like Lexicon came to make such good reverbs - they developed expertise in that field through many years of practice. The same goes for software ... do you want do-everything apps that only achieve "good enough" or specialised apps that achieve "excellence".

Be careful what you demand because you might get it ... and it may not always turn out to be a good thing. From what Reason users say, it is a very good app that is rock solid. If they do implement loads of extraneous gizmos into it, then maybe you'll end up with a do-it-all buggy app that crashes when you work it hard (like many other big apps) and loses vital work.

I dunno ... to me it's almost like hearing someone buy a LandRover than demand that it have electric windows, air-con, power steering, ABS, sunroof, navigation computer and while we're at it why not a V8 with a turbo. Then it wouldn't BE a LandRover would it?