I know Reason and Komplete 8 are pretty dissimilar in a lot of ways. Mainly, I'm wondering how the presets for FM8, Kontakt, and other NI products included in Komplete 8 holdup compared to presets included w/ Reason.

Well, FWIW, I'd still be a reason die-hard if it wasn't for reaktor. With RE, many of the original quality concerns, e.g. the reverb, are being addressed.

nothing wrong with the reason reverb - i have heard alot and i mean ALOT worse native vst plugins. (nomad, waves, stillwell, redline, to name but a few)

It's actually quite usable.

Now with tsar though that's it.. no need to ever want again for those who just didn't like the props one.

I think reason is an amazing massive rompler TBH!

Sure, that's what I'm saying, I don't think that the built in reverb RV7000, or whatever, sounds very realistic. A few bits from the RE shop will close the quality gap for almost all sound related complaints for the average user.

Reason is a bit of a mixed bag. Many of the presets are still built around ancient devices like the Subtractor. Also, there's no dedicated FM synth in Reason.

They've been very slow to add new devices to the rack, especially instruments. All they've added in terms of instruments since version 2 (2003) is really the Thor synth. I think as a small company, they don't have the resources to develop dozens of high-quality instruments, in addition to keeping the Reason core program up to date (new sequencer, audio recording, user interface, effects, multi-threading etc.). I think that's the problem they're trying to address with Rack Extensions.

I use Reason for drums mainly, and as a giant sketchpad for new songs.

well... predator is coming, and korg

Are you asking about [Reason via rewire] vs. [Komplete as VST]...?

...because otherwise the first question is whether you enjoy working in the Reason environment - it's sequencer, mixer, etc. Or do you prefer working in a different host?

Reason has some great devices, but Komplete seems to offer exponentially more.

The biggie is the sampler. Reason's sampler ("NN-XT"] was last updated when Reason 2 came out more than a decade ago

Kontakt is of course in a completely different league, and that's reflected in the fact that many of the top sample libraries use it as a container. Very few good sample libraries are even released as Refills for Reason these days, and there's a huge hole in what is available (e.g. no decent orchestral libraries at all!!).

But a few bits from the RE Shop will quickly cost you more than the cost of Komplete... not even counting the cost of Reason itself. So...

The NN-XT had an update with the introduction of (IIRC) Reason 5. Unlike many so called samplers, it can record samples now.

Personally I think Subtractor still sounds good. The strength of Reason comes from building combinators with it. A good instrument never gets dated.

But yeah U-he will be on board soon.

NNXT is still competitive with the Samplers that come bundled with most sequencers. I use Logic, and the NNXT can hang with EXS24 easily. It's great for basic sampling and also for playing multi-samples, I've sampled alot of hardware into it.

But of course stuff like Kontakt and Halion are a different ball game. But this is reflected the cost of paying for these upfront.

With Komplete you get all you'll ever need in terms of virtual instruments, IMHO. It's really complete. Reason, I'm not so sure.

Ah good point - they added one button that allows for the real time sampling, and on their other devices too. Nice feature for sure

However, the core engine and way it handles samples is unchanged. So it has none of the sample compression, scripting, etc that you get on a modern software sampler. And I guess those are some of the reasons that far fewer companies are releasing decent refills for it... it's not up there as a professional sample device with kontakt etc any more.

A modular synth in a modular host
Holy ****!!!!!

via rewire into ableton.

i'm mainly just wondering if komplete's presets are better than reason's.