Reason 13.1 Update feature discussion

[kmonkey]

Let me end (for my part) the discussion here. I do love the rack aspect of it. I hate many other things. I am a sucker for Reason. I have it from version 1 (I still have the carton box) and in my opinion, the thing regressed drastically over the years. In some areas they are fantastic like releasing Objekt, and other synths in other areas when it comes to DAW let me say I would love to be close with some of their staff members in a room and engage in a physical altercation. No amount of wannabe Viking posing wouldn't help them.

If I am forced to guess why everything Reason is such a drag queen, why they are not able to catch up with everyone else, and why they are so desperate my guess would be: that most of the current staff programmers inherited old code and can not make drastic changes without investing an absurd amount of time.

It is a guess, not a fact.

[hotmitts]

Hi. Has anyone encountered an issue in Reason 12.7 or Reason 13.1 where dragging an effect, instrument, or player doesn’t always allow you to add it to the rack ? Quite often, I find that I need to click on another device or somewhere else in the rack to seemingly 'unlock' the ability to drag and drop items from the device panel.

It’s a bit frustrating, as it disrupts the workflow, and I’m wondering if this is a known bug or perhaps something related to my setup. If anyone has experienced this or has a solution, I’d appreciate hearing your insights!
Thanks

Yes I noticed this too. Not at my PC right now but wonder if it's when you have the patch selector highlighted in the rack section ?

[crimsonwarlock]

Sorry about that. I apologize and won't be surprised if you never respond to me.

No problem, we all have a bad day sometimes. We good

[kmonkey]

Sorry about that. I apologize and won't be surprised if you never respond to me.

No problem, we all have a bad day sometimes. We good

yep have a nice weekend

[blumus]

Hi. Has anyone encountered an issue in Reason 12.7 or Reason 13.1 where dragging an effect, instrument, or player doesn’t always allow you to add it to the rack ? Quite often, I find that I need to click on another device or somewhere else in the rack to seemingly 'unlock' the ability to drag and drop items from the device panel.

It’s a bit frustrating, as it disrupts the workflow, and I’m wondering if this is a known bug or perhaps something related to my setup. If anyone has experienced this or has a solution, I’d appreciate hearing your insights!
Thanks

Yes I noticed this too. Not at my PC right now but wonder if it's when you have the patch selector highlighted in the rack section ?

I'm not entirely sure what you mean, but for me, this issue occurs whenever I try to place an effect, sample, instrument, or similar item in the rack. It doesn't matter whether there's already something above, below, or between the existing devices. The way I manage to solve it is by releasing the mouse button, clicking on another device (sometimes even on multiple other devices), and then going back to dragging the originally selected item. Only then am I able to place it in the rack. And this happens every time I work with Reason, since version 12.7.4 as far as I remember

Thanks

[two_tone]

it makes many simple tasks a nightmare to do...

Like what?

- editing and sequencing midi in general, Logic is the model, that's your competition
- looping and comping midi (in a 'DAW' that only recorded midi for about half it's life span and has an excellent audio looping and comping system)

- editing and sequencing audio in general. Cubase, Reaper, and Pro Tools have all developed usable modern audio sequencer paradigms, you don't have to reinvent the wheel here

- using external midi control surfaces which should be a strength given Reason's knob per function mixer but instead is unusable short of a pretty heavy diy lift because they half implemented mackie HUI twenty years ago and then never touched it again. it's actually hilarious if you try to use it

- bouncing / freezing tracks or busses to preserve hardware resources for higher track count projects (like the vast majority of contemporary commercial work). this is especially important because the rack environment has a way of getting you to build twenty device, three combinator rube goldberg contraptions for a basic pad. this inspirational potentional (along with the knob per function mixing for many old heads like myself) is what's so special about Reason and if they would only marry it to a commercially viable editor/sequencer i think Reason could make a comeback. i'm not holding my breath.

- using any type of composition aid / effect plugin that relies on midi IO despite the fact that this has been the fastest growing segment of the plugin market for years (captain plugins, scaler, et al). i believe they've intentionally omitted the io part of the VST spec for both VST2 and VST3 in order to keep Reason a walled garden for their 'player' midi effects.

the lack of VST midi IO is a particularly short sighted decision because it cripples Reason's appeal as a creative or 'idea starter' environment that they've chosen to focus on (according to Mattias) almost to the point of completely abandoning any attempt to be a full fledged DAW. like midi looping and external control surfaces there are workarounds but not ones that 95% of the least technical portion of the market that they've bizarrely decided should be the target audience for a legacy program based around skeuomorphic modeling of a hardware era that ended two decades before any of that audience was born are ever going to try. anyway...

[two_tone]

You can use vcas, groups, buses or folders in Reaper. Using folders is one of the easiest ways to group in Reaper, and other daws too. Track Manager is very flexible too. These options are some of the nice things in Reaper. But it's all preference. People are going to enjoy what they want to. Crimson (he knows this stuff about Reaper) did the opposite as me, he used Reaper then went to Reason. I came from Reason and went to Reaper and felt no reason (no pun intended) to go back. I personally don't care about the ssl and rack stuff albeit cool, I find too much. Prefer traditional plugin inserts, and I'm not an engineer nor care for it. I'm glad others do. After reading what Reason is missing it wouldn't help me going to Reason unless I was very excited about it and its workflow. Professional producers use Reason and I learned how to mix in Reason from them. It's the first main daw I used besides Cubase which I fired up, and looked at, and didn't know what the hell was going on back in 2001 (my copy was probably a 90's version). People probably not to interested in my musical past but it's fun to talk about. Also enjoy defending Reaper lol and talking daws, learning more and what not- just hope that Reason users get what they want...

Correct, Reason has plenty of usable options for organizing tracks and busses hierarchically and blocks is a good system too if you need it. What it lacks is an easy way to toggle 'bounce in place' or 'freeze' for a track or buss and the associated rack devices to recoup the hardware resource until / if further changes need to be made.

Watch them decide that the knob per function mixer, manual routing, and skeuomorphic design are the problem and completely recode Reason from the ground up with a flat 2d interface to 'fix' the things that are the only reason people still use Reason..

[crimsonwarlock]

- editing and sequencing midi in general, Logic is the model, that's your competition

I have no problems at all editing and sequencing MIDI in Reason.

- looping and comping midi

What makes it impossible for you to loop MIDI in Reason? And I never missed MIDI comping, there are enough options to combine MIDI parts.

- editing and sequencing audio in general.

Also not impossible to d n Reason.

- using external midi control surfaces which should be a strength given Reason's knob per function mixer but instead is unusable short of a pretty heavy diy lift because they half implemented mackie HUI twenty years ago and then never touched it again.

I kind of agree here, but then again, it can and does work. And when setup correctly, it is vastly superior to other DAWs. But yes, it is a pain in the butt to get it working.

- bouncing / freezing tracks or busses to preserve hardware resources for higher track count projects

This is a result of the modular approach of Reason. You cannot freeze an individual track because it can have interactions with entirely different parts of the project. It's a simple fact of life for a fully modular system.

- using any type of composition aid / effect plugin that relies on midi IO

And yet there are many people who use the rack plugin in other DAWs specifically to get access to the Reason player ecosystem. That should tell you something.

The bottom line is that there are things to wish for, like in any other DAW, but calling it a "nightmare to do things" seems rather hyperbole to me.

[crimsonwarlock]

By the way, you can actually bounce any track to audio, but it won't disable/remove the devices of that track for the reason I mentioned before.

[two_tone]

Reason had a good thing going had they stuck to their guns.
No vst support, just Rack Extensions and Refills.
Only one problem, not enough developers worth a dime were willing to tag along.
And for those that did tag along (like Korg), they came up with subpar extensions.
Let's face it, propellerheads were never going to get a Massive rack extension.
Or any Arturia rack extension.
Unfortunately - because Thor and Subtractor just don't cut it versus said VSTs.

Korg catching strays over here for Monopoly and Poly6 which both sound great now and sounded even better when they came out. Corporate contributors abandoned the RE format for the same reason everyone else in the industry stopped working with RS (they're arrogant and difficult to work with) not because of any inherent shortcomings of the format. Recent Arturia stuff like pigments sounds fantastic but their modeled stuff has only recently caught up and was several steps beind the Softubes and brainworxs of the world till recently. they were late to the real component level modeling of analog hardware party by a decade and it was obvious if you put their stuff side by side against the newer dsp.

If there's one problem Reason does not have it's a dearth of great sounding and unique instruments. I'll take the Legend over any moog model Arturia has ever done (but pls don't pay $170 for the hans zimmer version tho lol...) and antidote is a modern classic at this point as are subtractor and thor. Even as they have profoundly mismanaged everything else in recent years RS has continued to put out some of the coolest software instruments on the market. Even just including stuff made by props/RS i would not trade Reason's stable of synths for anything else available at any price. If you know your way around a synth and have not really dug into Grain, Europa, Algoritm, Friktion, Complex-1, etc you are really missing out. Some of the older first gen props REs are great too and don't get me started about secret weapon RE instruments from incredible small shop devs like blamsoft (viking I and II are the VA synths that made the arturia stuff look silly a decade ago and the Expanse might still be my favorite wave table synth to date period), Lectric Panda (Nostromo might be my single favorite instrument in the rack), Jiggery Pokery, Pink Noise, Chris J Griffin, etc. That said they to let anyone sell anything in their shop so these gems are floating in a sea of half-assed mediocrity and homework assignments.

[two_tone]

- editing and sequencing midi in general, Logic is the model, that's your competition

I have no problems at all editing and sequencing MIDI in Reason.

- looping and comping midi

What makes it impossible for you to loop MIDI in Reason? And I never missed MIDI comping, there are enough options to combine MIDI parts.

- editing and sequencing audio in general.

Also not impossible to d n Reason.

- using external midi control surfaces which should be a strength given Reason's knob per function mixer but instead is unusable short of a pretty heavy diy lift because they half implemented mackie HUI twenty years ago and then never touched it again.

I kind of agree here, but then again, it can and does work. And when setup correctly, it is vastly superior to other DAWs. But yes, it is a pain in the butt to get it working.

- bouncing / freezing tracks or busses to preserve hardware resources for higher track count projects

This is a result of the modular approach of Reason. You cannot freeze an individual track because it can have interactions with entirely different parts of the project. It's a simple fact of life for a fully modular system.

- using any type of composition aid / effect plugin that relies on midi IO

And yet there are many people who use the rack plugin in other DAWs specifically to get access to the Reason player ecosystem. That should tell you something.

The bottom line is that there are things to wish for, like in any other DAW, but calling it a "nightmare to do things" seems rather hyperbole to me.

We know, you've explained many times here and anywhere else someone offers a critique of Reason that you don't agree and don't personally find any of these missing features or functionality limiting. That's great, you're RS current target audience. What I was hoping to discuss in this thread was whether it would be a good idea for RS to consider attempting to broaden their target demographic to folks who do find that stuff useful or even necessary for THEIR use cases and whether the 13.1 updates might signal a shift in that direction (probably not). But thanks for your two cents (again).

[twal]

You can use vcas, groups, buses or folders in Reaper. Using folders is one of the easiest ways to group in Reaper, and other daws too. Track Manager is very flexible too. These options are some of the nice things in Reaper. But it's all preference. People are going to enjoy what they want to. Crimson (he knows this stuff about Reaper) did the opposite as me, he used Reaper then went to Reason. I came from Reason and went to Reaper and felt no reason (no pun intended) to go back. I personally don't care about the ssl and rack stuff albeit cool, I find too much. Prefer traditional plugin inserts, and I'm not an engineer nor care for it. I'm glad others do. After reading what Reason is missing it wouldn't help me going to Reason unless I was very excited about it and its workflow. Professional producers use Reason and I learned how to mix in Reason from them. It's the first main daw I used besides Cubase which I fired up, and looked at, and didn't know what the hell was going on back in 2001 (my copy was probably a 90's version). People probably not to interested in my musical past but it's fun to talk about. Also enjoy defending Reaper lol and talking daws, learning more and what not- just hope that Reason users get what they want...

Correct, Reason has plenty of usable options for organizing tracks and busses hierarchically and blocks is a good system too if you need it. What it lacks is an easy way to toggle 'bounce in place' or 'freeze' for a track or buss and the associated rack devices to recoup the hardware resource until / if further changes need to be made.

Watch them decide that the knob per function mixer, manual routing, and skeuomorphic design are the problem and completely recode Reason from the ground up with a flat 2d interface to 'fix' the things that are the only reason people still use Reason..

Not worth giving up freeze/bounce like Reaper has. If you're making song after song, this needs to be fast, steady, and easy.

Crimson mentioned blocks. Sounds great but haven't looked into. TBH I don't want to be drawn into Reason, it doesn't have things I need, I would have to learn another daw (which currently I decided not to do), and I might like certain things too much I would have to bounce around it then go to Reaper; and I'm with Bones on using just one daw..

Speaking of Bones, my attempt to convert him to Reaper failed miserably. That's ok, my reply to his last post to me will be interesting to say the least. Being able to save any amount of tracks with any amount of data, and any kind for that matter is monument worth exploring...

[LaLivre]

If only they would add the BASIC features like folders, midi comping, markers, freeze and so on, they could attract thousands of new users, but the seemingly incompetent managers don't seem to care.

[crimsonwarlock]

.. and don't personally find any of these missing features or functionality limiting.

That is NOT what I said. My point is that every DAW has its limitations, but calling it a "nightmare to use" is just silly.

I have used Reaper for over a decade. Over that period I started to dislike it more and more for several reasons. However, it was never a "nightmare" to use and I never went onto a forum to tell people it was a nightmare to use. I just moved to another DAW

[VOODOO U]

If there's one problem Reason does not have it's a dearth of great sounding and unique instruments.

It's all relative and dependent on what style of music one writes. I've listened to available audio samples on RS's site for most of the instruments and there is nothing that blows me away to rejoin the Reason crew. I'd rather stack up on vsts and use a way more capable DAW (in reagards to workflow) for recording midi and audio.
What Reason has going for it since it's inception is the rack layout and modular approach. Even better the idea of a closed system with refillls and rack extensions to have a rock solid app. It's a fantastic approach going to 3rd party plugin and sample.pack developers to create a format catered to your app. Love it. And now available as a VST, it's a great approach.
And yet business is business and they unfortunately are difficult to.deal with and are too influenced by Apple's business approach (quite embarrassing) where it's not worth it. Too bad.
I'm getting excellent results using freebies believe it or not where Reason, if I were to buy it again, would just be there as an addenda as opposed to a sole solution. Again, not worth my money. Especially in the department of supporting a company.