Would you consider switching to Propellerhead Reason as your main DAW?

[quincy]

I had an old NFR of Reason 6.5 and I upgraded for about £80 which is not a lot of money - much less than many premium VSTs cost individually.

It's not a perfect piece of software but the modular paradigm is still interesting and despite what many people say, it can't be emulated in most DAWs. Yes - other DAWs have some modular capacity and there are VST that are more flexible in such hosts, but it's typically much less flexible than the native devices and RE in terms of the ways that things can be patched. The sequencer still has it's irritations for me but the clip-based automation is great and once you get handy with the keyboard shortcuts it's actually pretty easy to navigate between the mixer, rack, sequencer etc.

There are some really interesting sequencing and modulation devices (native and RE) that would be hard to imitate in most other DAWs. I've found a few that are very cheap but very fun - it's a box of toys that can inspire some very interesting sound design and experimentation. There are some great eurorack-like devices that create, mangle and process note or audio data in interesting ways and do things like multi-channel arpeggiations and polyrhythmic or algorithmic sequencing. Granular processing, modular synth components etc.

It's not a one-size-fits-all tool, but then none of the DAWs are!!

As for the fact that REs cannot be sold - this isn't perfect by any means, but it goes back to the old argument that's been kicking around here for years - if you buy something for the value it gives you at the point of sale and you can get a 30-day trial on every single RE then it's not so bad - you're not going in blind. I even think the subscription model makes some sense - €9 per month is not a lot of money. If I paid that for about 4 years then I'd catch up with the €400 worth of value I can get with it. That doesn't seem greedy or unreasonable, and it gives me flexibility to try new things.

I think people sometimes have unreasonable expectations with music software!! It's never good enough, whatever it is!!

[fwsuperhero]

Yeah, the subscribtion model is great, the RE and its price not so much... But
Ive subscribed Gate64seq and ive get best workflow with Launchpad i can dream of
only Renoise + Launchpad StepSequencer or Reaper + B-step sequencer can be compared

[Greenstorm33]

There's no way to make the playhead automatically return to the point it started from when you pause playback, right? For that reason alone I would never consider using Reason as my main DAW...having to constantly click stop or do the shortcut for it after every pause would drive me nuts. However, I do like some of the instruments and effects, and the CV system seems neat, so I did end up buying it in the current sale. I'm planning to rewire it to Studio One and do all my sequencing and mixing from there to avoid the playhead issue and some of the other clunkier-seeming aspects of the program.

[EnGee]

There's no way to make the playhead automatically return to the point it started from when you pause playback, right? For that reason alone I would never consider using Reason as my main DAW...having to constantly click stop or do the shortcut for it after every pause would drive me nuts. However, I do like some of the instruments and effects, and the CV system seems neat, so I did end up buying it in the current sale. I'm planning to rewire it to Studio One and do all my sequencing and mixing from there to avoid the playhead issue and some of the other clunkier-seeming aspects of the program.

Try Shift + Return after you pause with the space bar.

[Greenstorm33]

Yeah, but that's still an extra two keypresses to get the behavior I want pretty much every time I stop playback. Fortunately, I was able to create an AutoHotKey script that makes Reason act like other DAWs (every other press of the spacebar triggers spacebar rapidly followed by Shift+Return). Even with the script I still wouldn't use Reason as my primary DAW because I find I can generally do things faster in Studio One.

[Giova942]

Nope.

[Frantz]

Would you consider switching to a horse and buggy as your main transportation?

[Greenstorm33]

Would you consider switching to a horse and buggy as your main transportation?

Hey, the Amish do it

[antic604]

Would you consider switching to a horse and buggy as your main transportation?

If it gets the job done, sure!

This is BTW a wrong question (the OP's), because it very much depends on use case. If someone's running a professional studio recording bands, scoring for film, running a mixing & mastering service, etc. the Reason is likely much further down the list of preferable software. If however we're talking about semi-professional use at home or a small(ish) studio, especially for electronic music or hip-hop, then Reason is perfectly adequate choice IF the looks & workflow appeal to the potential user.

[fwsuperhero]

There's no way to make the playhead automatically return to the point it started from when you pause playback, right? For that reason alone I would never consider using Reason as my main DAW...having to constantly click stop or do the shortcut for it after every pause would drive me nuts. However, I do like some of the instruments and effects, and the CV system seems neat, so I did end up buying it in the current sale. I'm planning to rewire it to Studio One and do all my sequencing and mixing from there to avoid the playhead issue and some of the other clunkier-seeming aspects of the program.

Yeah, this is and no freezing is PITA...

[jens]

It's 2018, not 2008 - why would you nowadays use freezing?

[Hink]

It's 2018, not 2008 - why would you nowadays use freezing?

I prefer to mix all audio tracks and have a copy of a project with all audio tracks so if one day in the future I wish to revisit the song and I no longer have the plugins I still can, but I also want the original project saved with midi. Now I use Samplitude not Reason, but samp's freeze is indeed just a great bounce in place that can also be saved with the ability to undo the bounce in place (unfreeze). As it saves the freeze data simply as wave file I have both with midi and with just audio saved in one project efficiently.

[VariKusBrainZ]

It's 2018, not 2008 - why would you nowadays use freezing?

Quick way to save audio for use in other programs
Eg Bitwig which doesnt have ReWire

[EnGee]

It's 2018, not 2008 - why would you nowadays use freezing?

I prefer to mix all audio tracks and have a copy of a project with all audio tracks so if one day in the future I wish to revisit the song and I no longer have the plugins I still can, but I also want the original project saved with midi. Now I use Samplitude not Reason, but samp's freeze is indeed just a great bounce in place that can also be saved with the ability to undo the bounce in place (unfreeze). As it saves the freeze data simply as wave file I have both with midi and with just audio saved in one project efficiently.

Me too, I like to convert all midi to audio before mixing and keep them under the midi files.
Anyway, there is "Bounce in Place" function now (I don't know when they added it). This is more useful for me than freeze, which I haven't used the last 10 years to be honest!

[jjpscott01]

Yeah the "Bounce in place" function gets tons of use here too. I always felt like track freeze in other DAW's had problems anyway so I'm glad it was implemented in Reason the way it was.