Reason 8 - Official

[chk071]

But why would Reason need VST support? Are the internal devices too bad? Are rack extensions too bad? Are you dissatisfied with rewiring Reason into your VST host of choice? Basically, what i don't get is, when you want VST support, why would you need Reason then? The capabilities of hosts supporting VST are in many ways superior to those of Reason, so if you'd want to use VST, you'd be better off using these anyway.

Which shouldn't mean Reason is bad, i just think, if you want a host which supports VST, there are much better options. The implementation and handling within Reason would probably be quite maiden anyway. Tbh, i would even go as far as to say that it would be Reason's death if they would start to implement VST now, as they would have to restructure the whole Reason internals, and they would have to catch up on 20 years of development.

And to explain my point a little further, here's what i think you get when you buy Reason: You get a whole all in one solution with devices, content, everything in a box to get started to make music. What you don't get is the most sophisticaed and good sounding stuff ever. Which is what you could get when you have VST's. But, Reason costs only a fraction of what you would pay alltogether if you would go for the highest quality there is. And, as i said, you probably have everything you ever need by the snip of a finger. Which is also something you don't have when buying lots of stuff together. IMO, Reason has a completely different target audience than VST hosts. That's also why i think, if you want to work with VST's, you should go for other options.

[Mr. Fister]

And to explain my point a little further, here's what i think you get when you buy Reason: You get a whole all in one solution with devices, content, everything in a box to get started to make music. What you don't get is the most sophisticaed and good sounding stuff ever. Which is what you could get when you have VST's. But, Reason costs only a fraction of what you would pay alltogether if you would go for the highest quality there is. And, as i said, you probably have everything you ever need by the snip of a finger. Which is also something you don't have when buying lots of stuff together. IMO, Reason has a completely different target audience than VST hosts. That's also why i think, if you want to work with VST's, you should go for other options.

Great post, actually. It's nice to see someone who is practical about it and not emotional.

[sellyoursoul]

But why would Reason need VST support? Are the internal devices too bad? Are rack extensions too bad? Are you dissatisfied with rewiring Reason into your VST host of choice? Basically, what i don't get is, when you want VST support, why would you need Reason then? The capabilities of hosts supporting VST are in many ways superior to those of Reason, so if you'd want to use VST, you'd be better off using these anyway.

Missing functionality and missing preferences are reasons to want VST. Some of the Reason devices are pretty cool, and some of them are pretty bad, by modern standards. Some of us are using VST's that we really like.

I don't like that RE is a locked down format; that it isn't attractive to many devs and users alike; that if I stop using Reason, my investment in plugins goes out the window.

As I have said, some of Reason's devices are pretty cool, but they're locked away in a walled garden, away from the power of a modern daw. And the current state of rewire isn't very flexible.

Which shouldn't mean Reason is bad, i just think, if you want a host which supports VST, there are much better options. The implementation and handling within Reason would probably be quite maiden anyway. Tbh, i would even go as far as to say that it would be Reason's death if they would start to implement VST now, as they would have to restructure the whole Reason internals, and they would have to catch up on 20 years of development.

Reason is not bad, but it aslo isn't a full daw, by modern standards. Many suggestions have been made over the years, including: supporting vst plugins, allowing Reason devices to be used in a vst wrapper, allowing Reason to act as a rewire master. Any one of these things would allow for better flexibility than what currently exists. Stating that Reason would die if it supported vst plugins is over-dramatic.

And to explain my point a little further, here's what i think you get when you buy Reason: You get a whole all in one solution with devices, content, everything in a box to get started to make music. What you don't get is the most sophisticaed and good sounding stuff ever. Which is what you could get when you have VST's. But, Reason costs only a fraction of what you would pay alltogether if you would go for the highest quality there is. And, as i said, you probably have everything you ever need by the snip of a finger. Which is also something you don't have when buying lots of stuff together. IMO, Reason has a completely different target audience than VST hosts. That's also why i think, if you want to work with VST's, you should go for other options.

Yes, you can make music in Reason, out of the box, but can you make your music with only Reason? I think that might be more true for those who make electronic based music, but it isn't true for many of us who make band oriented music, in the box. It is obvious that Propellerhead attempted to attract users of the band oriented type around the release of Reason 5 and Record (I was one of them), but the walled garden has been too limiting for that to work out. They didn't poke a big enough hole in it.

[sellyoursoul]

It's nice to see someone who is practical about it and not emotional.

I agree. Some of these discussions turn ugly for no good reason. It's nice to discuss with people who don't fly off the handle.

[Tronam]

Do you think they do it a little bit differently than other Devs? Where they have a list of features that would usually go into one upgrade? But they add one big feature for each version number? Spread out among multiple releases?

Maybe, or it's more time consuming than we think to gut out 10 year old code and rebuild it. A lot of the stuff they've overhauled for Reason 8 goes back to version 3 and in some cases even earlier. It might also be more complicated since they're developing the RE SDK in parallel and app changes could impact current rack extensions in unexpected ways. I'm not a developer though, so I'm just speculating.

PH used to say they weren't interested in competing against full fledged DAWs in the market, so they stubbornly kept the sequencer lean and simple to support the rack. This has been a frustration point for a lot of users over the years, but it seems that attitude may finally be changing. R8 might not look like a sexy upgrade to users of other DAWs or even v7 folks, but it's a good step forward for those of us who like the environment and value these kinds of sequencer/workflow improvements. They have a history of throwing in little surprises as well, so they might not have revealed everything yet.

[Deisss]

The RE SDK has been updated recently, which takes time, especially the new 'instrument' system which is more than just code as it comes with fully new commercial product, with pricing and more, so much much time consuming.

On the other hand, the RE SDK is quite interesting, especially as it's really turned on stability, I don't know so much VST SDK, but the few I know seems to be really more messy in this area, which is probably the main point why they wanted to leave VST support.

In a technical point of view, the RE system is based on a tri-system:
* handling rendering
* handling 'motherboard' objects
* handling realtime

Each part do a specific things, for example realtime cannot create object by itself, which makes memory leak really harder to do, many things like this goes to, by default, a more stable code.
All of this run in LLVM inside a custom sandbox to protect host from external crash code.
Also, they provide rules for 'future'.
For example, GUI is build in 3D (threw a XML implementation), and then export in 2D, as today the rendering engine is in 2D, but they said it may becomes in 3D soon. Things like this are here for easy and reliable portable code...

So I would say: it's like Apple Store, RE is not just app like a VST, it's a fully featured environment -a full service-, with a store, copy protection (every download is signed), a guideline future for compatibility, and of course a 30% on every purchase

As i know, VST is really far from half of this...

[Flandersh]

But why would Reason need VST support? Are the internal devices too bad?

I personally think that Reason should have continued to be limited. RE is already a move from internal open programming to external closed programming. In this light the decision to have its own proprietar plugin format instead of VST has little logic attached to it. Of course there may be a logic connected to stability, market or such decision, but from a pure user perspective the need for RE has the same base as the need for VST.

The whole Reason in its old days was a limited solution; both in the quality of the internal devices and the seemingly possibilities. But these limitations was also what moved the real work from the technology to the enduser's creativity. The user had to be a master of his tools, instead of the tools being his master.

[Tren]

But why would Reason need VST support? Are the internal devices too bad?

I personally think that Reason should have continued to be limited. RE is already a move from internal open programming to external closed programming. In this light the decision to have its own proprietar plugin format instead of VST has little logic attached to it. Of course there may be a logic connected to stability, market or such decision, but from a pure user perspective the need for RE has the same base as the need for VST.

The whole Reason in its old days was a limited solution; both in the quality of the internal devices and the seemingly possibilities. But these limitations was also what moved the real work from the technology to the enduser's creativity. The user had to be a master of his tools, instead of the tools being his master.

This! Propellerhead seem to have forgotten what made Reason so unique and so appealing as a tool for musicians who just want to make music rather than endlessly install new stuff or be tempted with the offer of new 'plugins'! The limited closed system forced a creative process that is far more 'Musician' than it is 'Sound Engineer'.

In their efforts to experiment with a fully fledged DAW in Record and then adding this in to Reason, they have made the product an also-ran and have lost what was unique about it in the first place.

I'd love them to 'reboot' Reason and make it closed and more like the original concept than this whole DAW thing that tries to compete with Logic, Cubase et al.

[Dazed Veins]

It's a refill thing, innit?

[AstralExistence]

It's a refill thing, innit?

the days of going online and buying the latest/greatest refill or even better getting a great refill for free made me smile from ear to ear. r.i.p. propellerhead/inferior daw

[EnochLight]

This! Propellerhead seem to have forgotten what made Reason so unique and so appealing as a tool for musicians who just want to make music rather than endlessly install new stuff or be tempted with the offer of new 'plugins'! The limited closed system forced a creative process that is far more 'Musician' than it is 'Sound Engineer'.

In their efforts to experiment with a fully fledged DAW in Record and then adding this in to Reason, they have made the product an also-ran and have lost what was unique about it in the first place.

I'd love them to 'reboot' Reason and make it closed and more like the original concept than this whole DAW thing that tries to compete with Logic, Cubase et al.

The problem with maintaining that approach is that there would be little area to expand, though. If Reason had just remained a rack of instruments and effects that everyone bought to ReWire into another DAW, what more could be done to placate the ever hungry user-base that doesn't use another DAW to ReWire?

It seems to me that they made the best choice that they had in order to expand. Regardless of the criticisms (and believe me, I have quite a bit of my own), it seems to be working well for them. People are buying their RE's, users are getting features that they have long requested, and Reason slowly inches forward to advance itself as a product. All the while, people can still ReWire it and use it just like they did 10 years ago, and it works as expected.

I can't really see how they would have survived as a company had they not taken an approach like that, IMHO.

[saturdaysaint]

And to explain my point a little further, here's what i think you get when you buy Reason: You get a whole all in one solution with devices, content, everything in a box to get started to make music. What you don't get is the most sophisticaed and good sounding stuff ever. Which is what you could get when you have VST's. But, Reason costs only a fraction of what you would pay alltogether if you would go for the highest quality there is. And, as i said, you probably have everything you ever need by the snip of a finger. Which is also something you don't have when buying lots of stuff together. IMO, Reason has a completely different target audience than VST hosts. That's also why i think, if you want to work with VST's, you should go for other options.

The "out of the box" appeal is part of the explanation, but not all IMO - I own Live 9 and Komplete, and Reason is still my go-to. In a nutshell:

-rock solid stability, even on .0 releases.
-the Rack is an intuitive and fun way of doing pretty sophisticated routing and modulation. For me, there's also something weirdly satisfying about working in a virtual hardware space.
-ingenious, intuitive stock devices that strike a great balance between being powerful and easy to use/understand. People often reference their "classics" (Thor, Kong, RPG8, etc.) but I'm continually impressed by newer stuff like Synchronous, Audiomatic and Pulsar.

For all the missing features and gaps, it mostly comes back to the fact that I find myself having fun and cranking out musical ideas really quickly when I open Reason for a few minutes.

[chk071]

True, whenever i tried Reason, it seemed very stable, and extremely low on CPU too. I must admit that with newer versions, i felt a bit overwhelmed though, compared to the simplicity of the older versions. Glad to see that they reworked the transport bar at least now, it was very corwded, and the buttons and functions were very tiny, in version 7.

[ObsoleteAcc99]

[DELETED]

[basslinemaster]

Look at this copied from their website: They say the devil is in the details, and Reason 8 packs a slew of small improvements to the workflow. Double-click to add notes and double-click notes to delete them. Resize from both edges and duplicate notes with a quick command. Tracks are named after the patch you load.

You have to double click to add or remove notes? How stupid is that? Am I missing something here? As an FL Studio user, I am lucky, having the best piano roll editor ever made, to play with. It still amazes me that no other DAW developer seems to care that their piano roll is decades behind FL Studio's, and their users just put up with it. I haven't tried Reason for years, but is the piano roll still as bad as it was before? Or have they attempted to improve it?