Fruity or Reason

[tony tony chopper]

Other beatslicers can create rex files but not Rex2 files which can be stereo. I use Zero X BeatCreator which can create rex files

they can technically, but barely legally. Peter (BeatCreator, the only other tool that will write to REX 1 to my knowledge) had to guess their REX1 format and they weren't too happy with that.

[headquest]

There is a flaw in your logic Carbonboy.

A product is "broken" if it does not do what it claims.

Not so Fruityloops. If the regular - alomost daily - complaints from Fruityloops users on this forum are to be believed, FL regularly crashes, is full of bugs, and has serious problems.

Trust me, FL Studio core program is STABLE. It's all the poorly writen (usually free) 3rd party plugins that cause trouble. This is one reason why 'reason' is stable. If FL only used the native plugs it would never crash either.

I use FL Studio in an audio production business, so I hammer it 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, no problem. If it was as buggy as you say I would have dumped it years ago.

Carb.

Ooops - I got sidetracked and forogt to reply to this one - sorry Carb!

Firstly, like several others who have posted in this thread I never got beyond the demo of FL (4 and 5), so I can't offer the same insight on FL as you can. And I'm pleased to hear it is working well for you. I had no specific intention to criticise FL as a program, because I've heard great music created in it and know of many musicians I respect who use it.

However, your post saying Reason is "broken" seemed to me provocative and needed comment! The Props go out of their way to ensure that their releases are free of bugs, even if this means that release dates are put back. Indeed, Reason 3 was hoped to be out by now (well, NAMM I believe) but until they are convinced it is bullet proof the public beta continues. (well, actually... )

Point being, Reason is not "broken" at all. As I pointed out, it does everything it claims and it does it without crashing, without bugs, without so much as blinking most of the time I notice that you were unable to comment on this point before, or take back your words about it being "broken".

Image Line take a different position regarding releases, as exemplified in a comment made by Jean0Marie Cannie in an interview in Computer Music 80 (winter 04) in which he said:

"We all have to release now if we want the products in the shops by Christmas, as that's still the period that people seem to be spending the most on software"

This raises two important points for me:
1) Image Line are primarily targetting a consumer hobbyist market, not the pro one
2) Getting the product out asap - bugs included - is a higher priority to them than sorting out the bugs first.

The outcome so far as I can tell is that
1) I tried the demo again... and it crashed just like the demo to v.4. Perhaps the problems are sorted out now in v.5.1, but for me it is too late. I tried it when it was released and it was... ahem... "broken"
2) These forums have seen a liberal sprinkling of registered FL users posting serious problems they have had in FL5. And I'm not talking about problems with freeebie VST, but major problems with FL itself crashing, freezing, not rewiring properly to Live 4, not being able to handle audio files longer than 3 minutes without grinding to a halt, etc.

As I said, I respect FL because of the good music I have heard done in it. The problem is probably with Image Line's marketing and release strategy, which on the evidence of J-M C's comment seems to put generating profit higher than producing a stable product that meets their customers needs striaght out of the box the first time around.

For me this is an important reason why I would choose Reason over FL any day.

[headquest]

An interesting thing about having this debate is that this weekend I am delivering a two-day course on Reason to a group of seven of my students aged 11 - 17.

Yesterday (Saturday) we covered (in a five hour session with breaks) the overview of the program, its history and position within Music Software, prcatical sessions learning DrRex player (and ReCycle), ReDrum, and playing the other synths and samplers.

Today the students will all record their own complete tracks in Reason 2.5 and burn them to CD to take home.

As you can imagine, the kids doing this course are simply blown away by the capabilities of the software. This weekend will literally change most of their lives.

I think that here we can become a bit jaded at times and forget just how amazing the tools we have at our disposal.

One of the things that has been particularly great has been to see them each MIDI in their electronic keybaords (they are all keyboard players) and start jamming using, for example, the Orkester sample of the principal flute player of a major european orchestra! And then exploring - seconds later - the awesome textures of the Maelstrom graintable synth.

Obviously we could run a great course in FL too. But for keybaord players I believe that Reason has much more to offer right now... and even more so again in the forthcoming v.3.0.

[Cordelia]

sidhu,
To answer your questions directly, if MIDI sync is really important to you, FL might not be the app you need. I believe it sends but does not respond to MMC, and does not send or recieve MTC. Please someone correct me if I am mistaken.
The Video Player is in it's infancy right now. It simply plays back video in sync. That is, you push play and the audio and video start together. Having said that, I just completed a soundtrack using FL. The fine editing was done on a Mac, though. The film is playing at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC tonight and I can't be there to see it
I'll cast a vote in this Reason vs. FLStudio thread for FL because I love it and Reason pissed me off in exactly the same ways my hardware gear always did. I just felt it followed that paradigm a bit too closely.

[braj]

When FL has crashed my computer, I wasn't using third party anything. I barely know how to make a sound in the whole app. I test software for a living and I would never have given the build they released to the public a GM seal of approval. It's more like Beta 1 IMO. If it crashes for multiple users on different computers in just the demo, it needs more work. And I can attest to marketing departments having extremely more sway over deadlines than QA departments. Unfortunately that's the norm in software development. Again, Reason has never crashed on me or acted up, I have never seen what I would call a functional bug in all my use of the app. It's an impressive bit of coding IMO. That doesn't mean FL isn't great or anything, but it definitely is buggy. Supporting 3rd party plugs adds to that, I'm sure. But the bottom like is Reason is far more stable an application.

[Sidhu]

Thank you all for the help. I will now start playing with FL.

Sidhu

[soulkraka]

but with Combinator in Reason 3, I don't see a reason to use much else.

drez,

Is the NDA over yet?

Even if its not I'm very curious about the sound quality of 3.0. Does it sound great? Have you tried any of the combinator patches from the FSB?

[Wavelogix]

personally i use both reason and fl5 ... and i surely think reason 2.5 is much more stabler and faster compared to fl5 ...fl5 often causes problems due to some plugins that cant load ... and then next time you try to open the .flp , it gives an error .. there was some error loading some plugin and all that crap ... which technically means u lost all your work , coz some plugin couldnt load .. this is one major con of fl5 , but the beauty is you can use all the amazing vsti in fl5 ....

the pro of reason is its very stable , fast and sound quality also isint that bad after all ... but what all can u make using just 2 synths ? its very easy to get bored in reason using just the subtractor and malstrom time and again ... again reason has no audio support , so how is one even expected to bounce , when the cpu is running low ??
mixer isnt that great either , so i think rewiring is the best option to use reason effectively ...

so wat i think ultimately is fl5 is good , but reason + nunendo / sx can break hell loose ..

[JMC]

Image Line are primarily targetting a consumer hobbyist market, not the pro one

It's not about who you target. We're talking about stores like Guitar Center & Sam Ash that stock most of what they sell in September. We have the choice to be there or not. It's an economic reality.

Getting the product out asap - bugs included - is a higher priority to them than sorting out the bugs first.

FL Studio has become a massive product that supports 1000s of Midi controllers/VSTis/DXis/ReWire Clients & Buzz plugins. There will always be the inevitable 0.1 update a couple of weeks after the release. I don't see any difference with the other products I own (Photoshop, Delphi, 3DS Max, ...).

The difference is that we offer lifetime free updates. Please check out here what our users have been getting over the last 6 years :

http://www.e-officedirect.com/FLStudio/ ... s/103.html

to put generating profit higher than producing a stable product

I hope you noticed that we mailed out FL Studio 5 absolutely free to our 60.000 registered users. There was absolutely no profit generated at all.

See ya,

jmc (FL Studio)

[braj]

The difference is that we offer lifetime free updates.

I totally respect your position, but free updates don't help much when your latest version crashes my system.

Regarding dealing with the economic realities of getting products to stores in September, I have to say I respect developers who won't ship it until it's ready more than when it is economically desirable. Your old version could still be on the shelves and selling. This seems like the ethical thing to do IMO.

[Carbonboy]

However, your post saying Reason is "broken" seemed to me provocative and needed comment! ...Point being, Reason is not "broken" at all. As I pointed out, it does everything it claims and it does it without crashing, without bugs, without so much as blinking most of the time

The outcome so far as I can tell is that
1) I tried the demo again... and it crashed just like the demo to v.4. Perhaps the problems are sorted out now in v.5.1, but for me it is too late. I tried it when it was released and it was... ahem... "broken"

You are right I was being provocative. I also said Reason was very cool. By broken I meant in concept not practice. I believe that the only future is in open platforms. But that's just me.

I'd love to know what you were doing when FL Studio crashed. IL have well over 60,000 registered users, and 100,000's of Warez users banging away...not surprising that you hear of the odd crash

Carb.

[Carbonboy]

The difference is that we offer lifetime free updates.

I totally respect your position, but free updates don't help much when your latest version crashes my system.

Have you reported your problem to tech-support?

Carb.

[BONES]

How in the world did they get a bigger marketing budget in 1994, when they just started out? How do you know that they had gobs of money to spend in 1994! The company was formaly announced 1 month before they released recycle. Did money fall out of the sky and say "market with me". They were 3 guys with an idea. They made good business deals with the right people at the time...Steinberg. That's just smart business.

Where did I say they had "gobs" of money? $1.50 is probably more marketing money than WaveSurgeon had. They had a great business plan, that doesn't convince me they make great products. If you want another example of what I mean, look at Micro$haft. The great unwashed just assume that their products are the best because they are the biggest. What do you think? Apple are another good example and they all try to corral their users with proprietary formats and Propellerheads are no different.
I was personally duped by their bullshit market perception - I bought ReCycle, buying into the hype, only to disccover that it didn't have one single advantage over WaveSurgeon and development was at about 1% of the pace so that 6 months after I bought ReCycle, I gave it away because it was comparatively useless next to the current WaveSurgeon. $500 down the drain because I was a gullible twat.

[r2101]

to answer the initial question...

you can make music with both applications

fruity loops is a very nice program & reason too

matter of taste...

[JMC]

free updates don't help much when your latest version crashes my system.

Indeed ... but having delayed the release until 5.0.1 wouldn't have helped you either apparantly.

If you're still having problems with 5.0.1 it's probably something specific to your system or drivers.

What kind of crash are you experiencing ? Did you try a "Start | program files | FL Studio | Advanced | Reset settings" ?

I have to say I respect developers who won't ship it until it's ready more than when it is economically desirable.

As I can only repeat : FL Studio has become a huge project and it's hard to impossible to try it out on every possible system using every possible plugin out there. We can only do our best to register the incoming bugreports, fix them and put a new release online.

See ya,

jmc (FL Studio)