Are you pissed off at Reason?

[myrna]

again: REs and VST are different things. In RSN forum you can still read enthusiastic fanboys threads, "dreaming" of vst instruments in RE format (funny, because they were the same users who were screaming "no vst" just some days before... ): "please alchemy", "please omnisphere" etc.

But I guess the truth is:
(1) Reason CANNOT support vst.
(2) RE are not vst.
(3) If you want vst use Rewire.

After all PH are clear about that: "if you use reason, you don't need anything else. It is complete. You wanted plugins? We give you REs". That's it.

(This does not mean I like that policy. Infact I don't)

[decalogue]

RE is just what it claims to be: an (optional) extension of the Reason rack. It's not a new plugin standard. Nor does PH market it as such. This needs to be pointed out more.

As a Reason "fanboy" (according to some people here at KVR), I simply love the product, and also give a nod to PH for walking in their own shoes. I'm quite productive in Reason, it's a great tool for coming up with ideas, although I would never use it exclusively or replace my HW synths (having collected them since 1981). I'm currently running Reason as a 64-bit ReWire slave to the excellent Renoise sequencer. Very powerful combination. I've used virtually every DAW on the market since Cubase in the 1980's, but never have I had so much plain FUN as with Reason+Renoise.

[headquest]

RE is just what it claims to be: an (optional) extension of the Reason rack. It's not a new plugin standard. Nor does PH market it as such. This needs to be pointed out more.

Most of the presentation that Ernst N-Boos gave when Re was launched was in fact a direct comparisson between Re and VST. And the majority of the Re currently on sale are direct ports of existing VST plugins.

So surely it's undestandable that those comparissons will dominate discussions about Re?

[Liero]

Unless I missed something, rack extensions don't offer anything new that VST's can't already do - please correct me if I'm wrong.

The reason environment still offers single click modulation routing, which is a very, _very_ good thing for anyone interested in workflow. How long and how many clicks does it take to route a modulator signal from a separate LFO generator to a separate synth in any other DAW? I'm guessing more than 10 clicks, not to mention having to create multiple extraneous channels you don't need for anything else, leading to huge channel counts and complex project files.

I know this doesn't sound like much on paper, but at least to me this is a huge boon.

[kae]

RE is just what it claims to be: an (optional) extension of the Reason rack. It's not a new plugin standard. Nor does PH market it as such. This needs to be pointed out more.

tomatos/tomatoes. Of course it is a new plugin type. But you're right, it will never be a standard since it's a proprietary format.
"Reason is not a daw, it's a rack of synths and effects with an attached sequencer..."

[Richard_Synapse]

Topic answer: Not really.

What pisses me off is Reason Extensions not supporting SSE CPU instructions so it's unlikely we can get highly optimized plug-ins.

This has already been addressed to my knowledge. Besides, I see performance as one of the lesser issues in REs. Probably few devs code directly in machine language, as the code porting and maintenance is way too tedious. So it boils down to the performance difference between the compilers used- this shouldn't be more than 30%, if there's a difference at all. Furthermore, the multithreading in Reason seems to work great, making this even less of an issue.

A bigger obstacle with REs than performance is ihmo that the work involved is pretty much comparable to starting a new plugin from scratch. Sure DSP code can be reused, but this can be a small portion of the work for UI-heavy/complex plugins. So developing a big RE instrument certainly means fully committing yourself to this platform. This may be very rewarding, or fail completely - a high risk to take for sure, where each developer has to decide whether they're willing to take it.

Richard

[trimph1]

I really do not see any 'reason' to be PO'ed at Reason...

I'm thinking that RE is more an extension of the VST idea but with PH's footprint on it. To me, it really is nothing more than another way to get things done..

[headquest]

Reason 6.5. Review on Computer Music, verdict: 9 out of 10. Peace.

I just read this, and for something they give 9/10 to it's a very critical review. Almost all their comments are negative...

They talk about "unnerving screen freezing, causing the kind of gut-twisting feeling of which Reason users have thus far been blissfully free". They point out that several of the Re devices introduce latency, saying that "this sluggishness will be a new experience". And they mention that it was easy to create "system overload" on their studio machine using "as few as 15 REs", concluding that Reason "urgently needs track freezing".

The next paragraph is given over wholly to bemoaning the fact that there is no more "universal project portability", and they think the 30 day trials don't solve this.

In spite of all this they do conclude that "despite our criticisms we're hugely impressed by the way Propellerhead have implemented Rack extensions... it looks like Propellerhead are just about getting the balance right".

And in their list of "for/against" they say "Proper mixing now a possibility", which implies that up to version 6.0 it wasn't, thus contradicting everything they have written about the programme for the last 10+ years!!

Overall it seems a fair review, offering balanced opinions and useful information, but the score seems completely at odds with the comments

Perhaps to balance that, they haven't given it a single award, which is unusual for them. (their customary awards are spread across five other major product reviews instead).

They also give some individual Re reviews:
Pulsar: 9/10
Polar: 8/10
Radical Piano: 7/10
Etch: 9/10

Sound on Sound is also out today, but doesn't provide a review of Reason 6.5, instead covering it in their Reason column at the back.

[myrna]

I guess they gave 9/10 because they've always loved it. And by the way they gave 10/10 to Logic Pro, even if everyone knows it is buggy. I, too, would give 9/10 to Reason, for all you can do - musically speaking.

[headquest]

I guess they gave 9/10 because they've always loved it. And by the way they gave 10/10 to Logic Pro, even if everyone knows it is buggy. I, too, would give 9/10 to Reason, for all you can do - musically speaking.

I would personally give Reason 8/10 at this point, though up to version 5 it would always have been 10/10 because it did everything it set out to do, and brilliantly.

[chk071]

Audio software/hardware magazines never give a rating below 7/10 points. It is because of the tight colaboration between the magazines and the industry i guess. It's a small market in which no company wants to be stomped in the ground so that they don't sell anything. Which would be bad for the mags as well, as it would pull away their livelihood. So it's sort of a give and take with no party to get hurt. You just can't expect a independent/honest judgement.

[headquest]

I find Sound on Sound fairly honest and balanced in all their reviews, but they avoid a score system. I've written the odd magazine review as a sideline before now, and if you need to give a score you spend the review justifying that score - take away the score system and you have a different, better focus.

[myrna]

Audio software/hardware magazines never give a rating below 7/10 points. It is because of the tight colaboration between the magazines and the industry i guess. It's a small market in which no company wants to be stomped in the ground so that they don't sell anything. Which would be bad for the mags as well, as it would pull away their livelihood. So it's sort of a give and take with no party to get hurt. You just can't expect a independent/honest judgement.

In a "very indipendent" world of course Reason would be rated 7/10, Logic 8/10, Diva 9/10 (not 10/10 as everywhere... as if the CPU burning factor was not important: on my core2duo macbook pro it is simply impossible to play Diva. So, ok for the "wonderful analog sound", "game changer" etc., but I'd like to play it, too LOL) etc. So, they give verdicts for the musicality, not for technical issues. In this perspective, they are fair. Of course I learnt something about "indipendence": it does not exist (... can't say more or I'll be banned again from here ).

[saturdaysaint]

Unless I missed something, rack extensions don't offer anything new that VST's can't already do - please correct me if I'm wrong.

The reason environment still offers single click modulation routing, which is a very, _very_ good thing for anyone interested in workflow. How long and how many clicks does it take to route a modulator signal from a separate LFO generator to a separate synth in any other DAW? I'm guessing more than 10 clicks, not to mention having to create multiple extraneous channels you don't need for anything else, leading to huge channel counts and complex project files.

I know this doesn't sound like much on paper, but at least to me this is a huge boon.

Dead on.

In addition to the usage benefits, RE is way smarter from a sys admin standpoint - if Reason runs on your system, your plug-ins (and, more importantly, all the projects that contain them!) will run. No worries that if some plug-in manufacturer is slow to the punch adopting a certain technology, you can't open an old project on a new system. No worries that if a two-man plug-in shop goes out of business or gets bought, your go-to effect becomes abandonware. No bouncing everything with third party plug-ins.

If Reason works, all of your old projects will run - Props is putting their hard-earned reputation for sterling backward compatibility on the line for this. I'm happy to throw my Komplete box out the window for that guarantee alone - it's the reason I've kept my plugin investments pretty limited despite a lot of initial enthusiasm.

[kae]

Unless I missed something, rack extensions don't offer anything new that VST's can't already do - please correct me if I'm wrong.

The reason environment still offers single click modulation routing, which is a very, _very_ good thing for anyone interested in workflow. How long and how many clicks does it take to route a modulator signal from a separate LFO generator to a separate synth in any other DAW? I'm guessing more than 10 clicks, not to mention having to create multiple extraneous channels you don't need for anything else, leading to huge channel counts and complex project files.

I know this doesn't sound like much on paper, but at least to me this is a huge boon.

So how many clicks do you do to get the multiple outs of your drum machines to separate mixer channels?