ableton's racks -vs- Reason's combinator?

[headquest]

ableton racks sometimes crash, but you have more possibilities than PH combinators, due to vst support.

Although most people find Live 8 absolutely rock solid at this point, there are still a few who don't. However, I don't recal seeing any who attributed their problems to using racks. (usually it's a VST or AU that's at fault, or occasionally M4L...).

Do you have any specific knowledge of this, or is it just a guess? Are you a Live user?

propellerhead combinators never crash and are much more funny to build than ableton racks.

Given that Reason does crash for some users, and contains bugs, this is again rather difficult statement to show...

As for the *fun* factor, I actually find Ableton racks more fun for two reasons:

1) I hate the font colour and size in the Combinator programmer. Tiny grey and white text on a turquoise background is really hard on the eyes, for me at least (though to be fair I have an eye condition which may not help). It's a very eccentric choice.

2) I find it more fun to be able to create patches that incorporate my hardware alongside Reason and VST effects, etc. For example, such fun to use Ableton's Beat Repeat on KONG, with MIDI effects also thrown in. Very fast to make quite wild stuff

[myrna]

both answers are subjective: (1) live is full of bugs and crashes (at least... "under specific conditions" ), so it could be dangerous to build a rack without autosave. (2) on the contrary, reason is rock solid (or i've been lucky in 10 years of massive use: never had one single crash) and building combinators is funny, like playing with lego.

Regarding Ableton, I've owned and used Live from 2004 to 2012 (i sold it here). I don't like Ableton policy (but I can't say more, or I guess KVR will ban me or smth), so now Live Lite is more than enough for me.

[headquest]

both answers are subjective:

(1) live is full of bugs and crashes (at least... "under specific conditions" ), so it could be dangerous to build a rack without autosave.

When Live 8 first came out, for sure, but there have been so many maintenance updates that Live is now about as solid as any DAW I should think.

Thankfully if it does crash, it saves your work, restores your project, and even generates a crash report which it quietly sends back to Ableton for analysis.

(2) on the contrary, reason is rock solid (or i've been lucky in 10 years of massive use: never had one single crash)

That doesn't mean it is "rock solid". Nor is it a "subjective" statement.

The PH User forum shows that there are plenty of bugs and plenty of crashes. I have experienced several crashes in Reason, due to the poor drivers on the codemeter dongle leading to BSOD.

And the worst news: when Reason does crash, your whole project is list, no crash recovery in there at all. This has been discussed in depth plenty of times before, but perhaps you missed it? Also, worse still, it will often result in the "bad file format" error that requires you to reinstall the programme from scratch.

It's really time to get away from the Propellerhead Marketing BS that Reason is rock solid. They have to release bug fixes shortly after every new version, and there are still unresolved problems.

Can we therefore compare Racks and Combinators separate from this other misleading nonsense, but on their own merits?

[drez]

Can we just agree to state "assuming they don't crash" and go from there?

I think they both have their strengths. I agree with Myrna, the "lego" feel of Reason makes it fun. Things can definitely get to where they are more difficult to trace what you're doing, but its also something you can look at and get a great idea of what's in your combinator. You can't really see a holistic view of what's going on in a Live Rack. Plus you have CV routing that allows you to do things that you really just can't do in a Live Rack, or not in a way that I am aware of. In Reason, I can create a single LFO generator with Pulsar and have in modulate as many different things on devices that I want at different amounts because of the attenuation knob on the back of the devices. You just can't do that in a Live Rack.

Once you are IN a Live Rack, I like the left to right layout of what's going on in each layer, it makes it pretty straight forward. It is neat and tidy. I like how you can do Rack's in Rack's in Ableton. Makes it very flexible and a hierarchy that then allows you to control just the specific controls in your "Array" (that's how I look at it, to take a programming metaphor). Limiting the amount that things get adjusted, for example saying "this knob's values go from 40-80" can be done on both of them.

Dunno. They both really are great. I'd never make it with out them in either Host. But I always have more fun and create more interesting things in combinators because of CV and the ability to visualize the devices that I am "patching" instead of just selecting values in a screen that all look identical (generic knobs with the parameter and value),like they end up looking like in the Ableton Rack. I used to think I would get lost in Reason faster than in Ableton, but for me, Its just hard to tell what is doing what.

Reason just seems more holistic in its view, IMO.

[headquest]

Can we just agree to state "assuming they don't crash" and go from there?

Absolutely, as I said.

As a fan of the Combinator, how do you find those small grey and white fonts on the turquoise background in the programmer that I mentioned?
I curious to know whether this is just my eye condition causing the difficulty or whether others would prefer a different colour there...?

[myrna]

The PH User forum shows that there are plenty of bugs and plenty of crashes. I have experienced several crashes in Reason, due to the poor drivers on the codemeter dongle leading to BSOD.
It's really time to get away from the Propellerhead Marketing BS that Reason is rock solid. They have to release bug fixes shortly after every new version, and there are still unresolved problems.

OT: by the way i used to play reason massively from v2 to v5. I don't know really about 6, because I did not like their new policy and marketing direction, so I sold it (i hate dongles, no drag and drop, fanboysm and... wait... uhm... oh yes, now I remember: still no-vst support in 2012... ). So, maybe, the problems started with version 6? And, of course, for me it's more important having those features, rather than being proud of (wannabe?) iperstability (with which I don't make music...). REs are fine, but not an answer to my requests. As for me, I've built tons of combinators and never had one single crash or issue (but i am talking about Reason from v3 to v5).

[headquest]

Yes, it started with Record, much worse since Reason 6...

Back to topic...

[drez]

Can we just agree to state "assuming they don't crash" and go from there?

Absolutely, as I said.

As a fan of the Combinator, how do you find those small grey and white fonts on the turquoise background in the programmer that I mentioned?
I curious to know whether this is just my eye condition causing the difficulty or whether others would prefer a different colour there...?

I find it harder to read, but soft on the eyes, if that makes sense. I have horrible eyesight and don't have glasses because I'm stupid and won't just go get some (My ADD keeps me from doing the things that I should ). My big deal with ALL of these is that everything is just blurry

I don't generally have an issue with colors as lots of people do. Some people were freaking out about Polar's color scheme, but honestly I could care less as long as its not a big yellow block with white letters

So, yeah, it doesn't bother me too much, but I'm not too picky about things like that. Not discounting those that do have colors issues, that can be a real problem for some.

[drez]

Also, because you have the patching paradigm for CV controls "inside" a combinator, you can also patch things "outside" a combinator. So you can have "cross modulation" between combinators.

You just can't do that with Live.

Now you CAN take track audio output from a Live Rack and duplicate it to another channel, then running that through a separate set of effects, but just audio, no modulation source.

Kind of on a side note, the way that side chaining works in Live with its own instruments is pretty cool. If I'm recalling corretly, you can pick your sources from other parts of the project (things on different tracks). If they could somehow figure out how to do this with modulation sources life LFO, envelopes or whatever that live in a central place, that could get kinda crazy!