Reason Studios recruit Beta Testers!

[aquilyzer]

For anyone who is interested:

This is our continuously ongoing Beta program.
Signup and run this instead of the official release
to get the latest bug fixes and features before they hit the official release.
You'll get access to our Beta community platform with forums to discuss the latest updates.
Please note that the Beta is not guaranteed to be stable so don't use it for your critical projects.

Link: https://www.reasonstudios.com/beta-test/signup

[middle_color]

Correction: Reason Studios recruit volunteers Beta Testers!

[future-bit]

Unfortunately, I've only had negative experiences with Reason support. They are able to solve only very simple questions. They don't understand examples and problems. No matter how much I tried, they didn't solve any problem completely. They now have a new way of communicating with the user: they do not solve the problem, but six months later, silently closing the ticket.

I wasted a lot of time communicating through tickets, and I don't understand why I should now be wasting my time on beta testing.

[Eclectrophonic]

Unfortunately, I've only had negative experiences with Reason support. They are able to solve only very simple questions. They don't understand examples and problems. No matter how much I tried, they didn't solve any problem completely. They now have a new way of communicating with the user: they do not solve the problem, but six months later, silently closing the ticket.

I wasted a lot of time communicating through tickets, and I don't understand why I should now be wasting my time on beta testing.

What never got solved then, can you remember?

Is this why lots of features are vacant from Reason? they do leave things out a lot. Take the recently implemented curved automation, most daw's have 4 or 5 curve shapes + linear, Reason - 2, curved or linear. Same with the recently implemented audio auto-crossfades, 1 curve type and no verticle allignment.

[bjm4tt]

Reason 10 and 11 has an automation bug with Dune 3, when automating multiple parameters (4-5+), Reason crashes. Reported it last December, reproduced with the logging version, it was never fixed, no ETA, nothing, ticket marked as "solved". I could not reproduce it with any other DAWs, or other plugins in Reason, so it's a misfortunate constellation, or smth. I have switched to Cubase and use the RRP, no biggie, but it's not a good support experience, or at least i don't trust the DAW development from Props.

[jens]

I applied for the beta-test but apparently was too late (I received a reply a couple of days later that they had put me in a queue). So I know nothing and am free to speculate.

I think it's a pretty safe guess that is is going to be a big update i.e. 11.5 and I wonder what is in there. Given the fact that the bulk of the ReasonVST related stuff is done by now and that 11 came with a bunch of new effects my hope is that this time the DAW-related stuff gets its turn.

I certainly hope they will keep improving working with audio. The crossfading was already a good step in that direction.

(It would be fantastic if they managed to implement something like Melodyne DNA for the pitch-editor. But that's probably too big a feature for a 0.5 update. But if and when it comes, it can serve as the basis for a chord track.)

Also it would be about time they'd finally imprement MIDI take-recording.

[jens]

Reason 10 and 11 has an automation bug with Dune 3, when automating multiple parameters (4-5+), Reason crashes. Reported it last December, reproduced with the logging version, it was never fixed, no ETA, nothing, ticket marked as "solved". I could not reproduce it with any other DAWs, or other plugins in Reason, so it's a misfortunate constellation, or smth. I have switched to Cubase and use the RRP, no biggie, but it's not a good support experience, or at least i don't trust the DAW development from Props.

So it's the same with 3.2 as it was with 3.0.4?

[bjm4tt]

Reason 10 and 11 has an automation bug with Dune 3, when automating multiple parameters (4-5+), Reason crashes. Reported it last December, reproduced with the logging version, it was never fixed, no ETA, nothing, ticket marked as "solved". I could not reproduce it with any other DAWs, or other plugins in Reason, so it's a misfortunate constellation, or smth. I have switched to Cubase and use the RRP, no biggie, but it's not a good support experience, or at least i don't trust the DAW development from Props.

So it's the same with 3.2 as it was with 3.0.4?

I have reported it with Dune 3.2 and with both Reason 10.4 and 11.1, so I don't know about 3.0.4. The problem still exists with 11.3. If I had to guess it has something to do with Dune 3 having a lot of automatable/controllable parameter because of the 8 layers and Reason gets overflooded with the amount of modulation data at the same time. Maybe if Dune had a similar configurable automation/remote feature like Kontakt/Reaktor where the user can explicitly expose the desired parameter to the host, this bug wouldn't exist. But on the other hand it does not crash Live/Cubase/FL/Reaper.

[jens]

I was just wondering why they marked your ticket as solved if they in fact did not solve it, and I thought perhaps a newer version of Dune might have fixed it without actually mentioning it directly. But if that is not the case that question still remains.
Perhaps they nonetheless found out it is something Richard has to fix on his end (I assume they are in relatively close contact with him, considering he is one of the prime 3rd party RE developers), but then their ticket-system may be slightly flawed if it does not pass that information (which could well be considered crucial from the user's perspective) on to you.

If you knew that (assuming this is in fact the case, which of course we can only speculate on), it would also make it less likely that you would bug them in the future about - even if at the same time it might mean you'd start to bug Rich instead.

[bjm4tt]

As far as I know there was a bug(?) in their ticketing system months ago, which automatically closed a lot of tickets without follow-ups. I remember some were complaining about that at Reasontalk, some reopened their tickets. I did not, I gave up monitoring the ticket after 2-3 months of silence, and the mass closing happened after that.

It is a very good question if this is a Dune or a Reason bug, or both, but I am leaning towards the latter, since I could not reproduce it with any other DAWs. I still think the problem is and unfortunate combination of Reason's VST parameter handling's and Dune's gazillion parameters, and the rewrite/fixing is way lower on the roadmap, then for example the high resolution GUI which has been requested for years and by many users, unlike this edgecase. Fortunately the RRP combined with another host saved the day.

[vertibration]

Why would anyone want to join their beta testing program? They dont reward active testers with an NFR, nor do they even offer upgrade discounts to testers who are extremely active. Its not really worth anyones time. Literally every other company provides at least something as a thank you for taking the time to produce bug reports

[zvenx]

Why would anyone want to join their beta testing program? They dont reward active testers with an NFR, nor do they even offer upgrade discounts to testers who are extremely active. Its not really worth anyones time. Literally every other company provides at least something as a thank you for taking the time to produce bug reports

Amen. Lesson Learned for me... at Least a discount if not an NFR..
rsp

[jens]

Why would I not? I love the company and the product and get to play with a new version a little earlier and on top of that it gives me the opportunity to help with an attempt to make the initial release bug-free. All it costs me is to report a bug if I found one - but the SNR is of course much lower than with the normal support system so the chance that it gets fixed quickly is a lot bigger!

So what's not to like? And why do so many people feel they need and deserve some kind of reward for every f**king little thing they do?

[antic604]

Why would anyone want to join their beta testing program? They dont reward active testers with an NFR, nor do they even offer upgrade discounts to testers who are extremely active. Its not really worth anyones time.

You get to see & use new stuff earlier and you don't need to rely on anyone else's opinion when deciding whether to upgrade or not.

And it's not like you're forced to actually perform specific tests. You just use it like you'd normally do and if you encounter a problem you either let Reason send the bug data by itself and/or write a report others can corroborate and that will definitely be read and replied to by actual dev.

There's literally no downside to being in beta, unless you're bitter and resentful person, in which case you have better things to worry about indeed

[antic604]

Literally every other company provides at least something as a thank you for taking the time to produce bug reports

I think you're confusing closed and open betas, where the former is almost like a 'job'. I never got anything - other than satisfaction - from participating in open betas from Ableton or Bitwig.