Reason 13 Announced- Sequencer updated!

[jlgrimes11]

It's like in soccer: In some cases it's really just the coach that needs a replacement .... even if he is a good coach and a good soul. So it is not the money or the capital investments group that provide good inventions, management and communication. Reason Studios management was already wearing very strangely before the investor came on board.

The issue with this is...Even if someone replaces a "coach" who is making all the wrong decisions over there. It would take them at least a year of adaptation, restructuring, and then delivering.

All the year in other players can come up with an advantage or someone new with some invention could jump in.

So it is a bad situation all along from the get-go.

They will have to endure a storm for a few years.

Optimistically speaking, it is probably not as bad as it sounds.

One carefully planned DAW Rich upgrade would excite an already tired userbase.

This along would bring back some folks who left. Or even get new users from word of mouth praise of current users.

And whose to say other DAW developers will continue to make good decisions.


One thing that will hurt Reason is what they have been seemingly doing, ignoring the problem.

[jens]

This along would bring back some folks who left.

I'm really not sure... it's been quite a while since I last started a project in Reason...
so at least my muscle-memory has become kind of weak in the meantime.

My main DAW now is Samplitude which will soon get a major update and I have high hopes it will be stellar. I still miss Reason's in my eyes gorgeous GUI and I also miss Blocks and some other great stuff, but Samplitude makes up for it with other great features I start to rely on more and more. So even if they would add the three things I miss the most in Reason (slip-editing, ARA and a way to create a project-version without having to also duplicate all audio-files (lack of which is the most insane thing ever)), I'm not entirely sure I'd switch back to Reason - it might end up being too little too late.

Time might be frozen in Stockholm, but outside the world keeps moving on. I don't think there's at this point many disappointed users left who hold their breath for them to finally get their heads out of their arses.

And then there's this: would I be able to overcome the loathe I have for that smug, vainless dude who goes by the title of product manager enough to give them any more money?
Would that not be some kind of endorsement? If I think a person is a) completely incompetent and b) yet so complacent as he is and c) I am personally affected by it, then there's just no way in the world I wish that person anything but the most dramatic and complete professional fail.

[two_tone]

Yes, and any intense and harsh criticism that would make Reason Studios management think twice about their terrible ignorance is regularly censored in this "Reasontalk" forum by some strange moderators. It feels like some stuck users running this forum who would even support this company uncritically if they made Reason a 100% subscription software product overnight. Or maybe it's the company itself which runs reasontalk....I have no clue.

I'm pretty sure they aren't a part of the company.

My guess though is they still won't go too hard on them for fear of retaliation and/or the missing out of perks of providing a big service for Reason.

Play nicely along with Reason, they probably get inside company news or even company tours, event invites etc.

If they go too hard, or allow too much criticism, they would get viewed as Anti-Reason and be left out of the loop.


To me I never understood why they got rid of their old company forum.

It can't be that expensive to run. Reaper has had a forum for years, I doubt that is their biggest expense and probably pays for itself with having a place for technical issues without calling/emailing tech support.

I'd imagine it is hard reading alot of anger venting post some of which probably from unstable folks but at the same time it is good to read the venting because those are actual accounts from real users most of the time posting real life issues. And nowadays a bad forum post is alot better than a bad YouTube video. I hope it is not that some people prefer to keep their heads in the sand.

They deleted the old props forum and were ahead of their time in terms of petty corporate behavior because they actually went to the trouble of making legal threats to force the Internet Archive to remove it as well. You know, because throwing a temper tantrum and going the extra mile to ensure that years of knowledge sharing and community building around your own product is permanently deleted from the internet is a normal and appropriate adult reaction to extremely well-earned criticism in an internet forum...

For reference see the fact that they only decided to support VST plugins after their refusal to do so forced them to sell a controlling stake in Propellerheads to the current PE owners in order to survive about 7-8 years after it was painfully obvious to literally everyone but ENB that they would either support VST 2 or fail. Based on the current management's track record so far it seems unlikely that we'll get any such 'better-late-than-never' course correction on the refusal to modernize the sequencer.

From what I've heard no one at the company really understands what makes their sequencer out of date for 2008 and no one in the small circle of oddball, mostly hobbyist musicians they solicit feedback from is using it for professional tracking or mixing (for obvious reasons) so they literally don't understand the problem or talk to anyone who does. There was some hope that they had realized that and hired someone specifically to work on modernizing the sequencer a while back when they hired a 3rd party RE developer called Robotic Bean that made a decent piano roll RE but we would have seen at least some fruits of that labor by now if that were the case.

Just stop giving them money and it will sort itself out sooner rather than later. Hopefully Reason will eventually get a fresh start in some form with a new owner as there's a lot to build on, but I wouldn't put it past these folks to fail so hard and so aggressively that it just goes away.

[LaLivre]

Yes, and any intense and harsh criticism that would make Reason Studios management think twice about their terrible ignorance is regularly censored in this "Reasontalk" forum by some strange moderators. It feels like some stuck users running this forum who would even support this company uncritically if they made Reason a 100% subscription software product overnight. Or maybe it's the company itself which runs reasontalk....I have no clue.

I'm pretty sure they aren't a part of the company.

My guess though is they still won't go too hard on them for fear of retaliation and/or the missing out of perks of providing a big service for Reason.

Play nicely along with Reason, they probably get inside company news or even company tours, event invites etc.

If they go too hard, or allow too much criticism, they would get viewed as Anti-Reason and be left out of the loop.


To me I never understood why they got rid of their old company forum.

It can't be that expensive to run. Reaper has had a forum for years, I doubt that is their biggest expense and probably pays for itself with having a place for technical issues without calling/emailing tech support.

I'd imagine it is hard reading alot of anger venting post some of which probably from unstable folks but at the same time it is good to read the venting because those are actual accounts from real users most of the time posting real life issues. And nowadays a bad forum post is alot better than a bad YouTube video. I hope it is not that some people prefer to keep their heads in the sand.

They deleted the old props forum and were ahead of their time in terms of petty corporate behavior because they actually went to the trouble of making legal threats to force the Internet Archive to remove it as well. You know, because throwing a temper tantrum and going the extra mile to ensure that years of knowledge sharing and community building around your own product is permanently deleted from the internet is a normal and appropriate adult reaction to extremely well-earned criticism in an internet forum...

Unbelievable...

[jens]

they actually went to the trouble of making legal threats to force the Internet Archive to remove it as well.

Did they? TBH I doubt it.

a) because in 2014 they implemented the requirement of a password in order to access the forum, so webcrawlers couldn't and thus there were probably no archives of that time to begin with.

b) what was freely accessible is still avialable via the Wayback Machine.

[kmonkey]

I'm pretty sure they aren't a part of the company.

No, they are not though it has been a widely known fact that the owner of that forum (ReasonTalk) is closely tied and connected with them.

In fact, at the same place, he is even running (or he was) a subforum hidden from the public where RE developers discuss the RE platform. And that is fine no controversy about that. But now I think RS runs its forum for the devs.

https://forum.reasontalk.com/viewtopic. ... &t=7532650


So it's not like he is some weird 3rd party. And yes negatives even polite negativism was censored very often. When people started complaining here and in other forums, they eased a bit because at least the guy running the forum realized on his own that the forum looks bad by now with such censorship. But the damage was done.

[LaLivre]

The damage is done in every area and it becomes obvious more and more with every day. I tried this Reason 13 and oh man, nothing changed except some cosmetics and they praise cosmetics (and a couple of - TBH - good new devices) as an ultimate new workflow. This update is below average.

Example: When you record an effect automation (e.g. a reverb that is attached to a subtractor), the new sequencer track (reverb) that had been created automatically will still have an other color than main device's (subtractor) sequencer track. You do this with 2 synths and 4 effects and the whole sequencer is a mess and it will take you about 5 minutes to sort everything out. No workflow changes there since... Reason 5??

I mean, none of this is that big drama and you can definetly produce a hit, but when you add up all the little things that have been below mediocre over the years, it's just not good, to put it nicely. RS needs more customer centricity, but the guys there are capsizing the ship at the moment and have long ago stopped caring about their users.

It's somehow awful to be a customer with Reason Studios these days.

[LaLivre]

And one last thing: this forum thread about Reason 13 is not “toxic” at all. This here is just direct and realistic free criticism that they may not want to hear in their bubble.

[anttimaatteri]

ive just updated to 13 from 12. the only reason to do so was the abominable quality of resizing in the rack plugin.
other than that, the new browser is appreciated as well as the newly designed sequencer stuff.
BUT
the handling for someone who is used to the new ableton bitwig sort of ui, and that includes the master bus, is just simply outdated. they refreshed the look and feel but they didnt do anything structurally, unfortunately.
the sequencer/mixer/rack view is practrically unusable on a single monitor. theres hardly anything decipherable in the rack view regarding instruments and effects staples. its a rack just for the sake of a rack view.. why not split rackviews for each track. as simple as that.you click on master and u see the plugins stapled there in a view. you click a track and u see the isntruments and effects stapled there.
the way it is, is just a mess of modern daw gui plus tryin to emulate real studios for the sake of it. maybe im spoiled by the likes of ableton and bitwig.
at least the money was worth having a better rack plugin version, EVEN the implementation of the brwoser is quirky af. why no juist DOCK the brwoser to the right or make it floating beyond the rack window...
anyways reason studios doesnt make it easy to like their daw

[crimsonwarlock]

its a rack just for the sake of a rack view..

No, its a rack to support a specific workflow, and most people that use Reason as their main DAW (including myself) use it specifically because of this workflow.

anyways reason studios doesnt make it easy to like their daw

I like their DAW, as long as we are talking R12.

[Winstontaneous]

I know she made a post on the Reason forums asking about Soundfonts no longer working in the browser. I hinted at that being a feature that probably got quietly removed going to 13. I'm sure that's not the main reason but I think lack of development, removal of features add up over time. Especially when removing a feature, you need an extremely valid reason to do so and even then you are going to piss off alot of people.

Is there a list of everything that was removed in 13? I'm on 12 and I upgrade every few years, partially in the hopes they will improve the DAW side. I open Reason/Record projects I started back to 2008 and have a lot of fun with it, I manage to get crazy rippling harmonic undulations from Reason that are unique. At the time they released Rack Extensions I'd rather they turned it into a plugin (took a while!) or really fleshed out the DAW functions (someday?).

I really wish they'd:
- Make it possible to EASILY capture and record any combo of audio output channels for realtime resampling (it's trivially easy to do in Live, Bitwig, Reaper, AudioMulch) - the Reason sampling input just isn't the same

- Release a filter upgrade for all the old devices, with a v1/v2 switch to maintain compatibility

- Create a quick & easy way to both automatically transform Mixer 14:2 routings to "SSL" mixer setups; and to easily "reduce" a full Reason DAW project down to say, a Reason Rack plugin patch with playable synths and the audio/MIDI rendered down to triggerable REX files or some Ableton Session-view like interface (if that makes sense). I don't tend to finish a lot of Reason projects in recent years because the DAW is lacking, but many of them started from happy accidents I couldn't manually recreate

- Partner with a hardware company to make a fully integrated controller. Or release mobile apps that are tools with a significant subset of Reason features, not just toys

- Give longtime customers a real deal on pricing - they always have bargains to lure in new users. But they rarely throw a bone to those of us who've kept them afloat since the smart people with propellers on their heads left HQ

[two_tone]

ive just updated to 13 from 12. the only reason to do so was the abominable quality of resizing in the rack plugin.
other than that, the new browser is appreciated as well as the newly designed sequencer stuff.
BUT
the handling for someone who is used to the new ableton bitwig sort of ui, and that includes the master bus, is just simply outdated. they refreshed the look and feel but they didnt do anything structurally, unfortunately.
the sequencer/mixer/rack view is practrically unusable on a single monitor. theres hardly anything decipherable in the rack view regarding instruments and effects staples. its a rack just for the sake of a rack view.. why not split rackviews for each track. as simple as that.you click on master and u see the plugins stapled there in a view. you click a track and u see the isntruments and effects stapled there.
the way it is, is just a mess of modern daw gui plus tryin to emulate real studios for the sake of it. maybe im spoiled by the likes of ableton and bitwig.
at least the money was worth having a better rack plugin version, EVEN the implementation of the brwoser is quirky af. why no juist DOCK the brwoser to the right or make it floating beyond the rack window...
anyways reason studios doesnt make it easy to like their daw

For the love of God please no. Remember these are the people it took 15 years to implement crossfades. We don't want them to redesign the whole thing from the ground up. The whole reason Reason people are *this* upset that they refuse to modernize the sequencer is because they love the rest of the program the way it is and want to use it as a full DAW.

They just redesigned the browser and it's much worse without delivering the two or three obviously lacking features that new users have been showing up in forums just to request dozens of times a year for years. Some people love the skeuomorphic knob per function mixer and they've already given you the option to mix entirely in the rack by making it's primary components rack devices. Instead just update the backend with modern component modeling; I'd pay a significant premium for Reason 14 if I could pick from the brainworx console channel plugins for the whole mixer or even on a per channel basis. They also need to finish the partial Mackie HUI support so midi controllers can be used without coding your own tool, it's currently less than 50% implemented and the part that has been implemented is mostly broken.

For the rack full VST3 support including midi in out is the most important missing feature. That's intentional because they don't want composition aid type VSTs competing with their midi effect player devices, an incredibly myopic, customer-hostile decision typical of the current management. Midi 2.0 or MPE is also going to get requested more and more every year till they do it. Updating Recycle with a modern GUI, including it with Reason, and fully supporting REX files in the modern rack devices would also be a smart long term move. Current management won't do any of this but maybe new management or ownership will read this thread one day right after global peace and prosperity spontaneously break out everywhere and decide to do all of it.

[LaLivre]

Is there still management existent at Reason Studios? It is so quit since ages, even befor R13 there was silence.

[aMUSEd]

Tempting but the atrocious new browser and loss of favourites is holding me back

BF is tempting - has the browser improved at all? I see there is a new beta?

[crimsonwarlock]

I see there is a new beta?

If you are aware of a new beta, you should also know if there are any improvements.

I've held off so far from updating to R13, mainly because they removed the device favorites, but I'm going to grab the BF sale now