Lets Discuss: The Complete History of Reason Clones

[EnochLight]

Wow - I had no idea that Synapse Audio's Orion was that old! I'm just glad Richard and the gang stuck it out to do Dune 2, because that's a bad ass synth right there.

To the OP: that mysterious Reason-clone that never saw the late of day was called Realizer (which the devs ripped off from Propellerhead, as that was one of the original names they considered calling Reason).

[pc2000]

Interestingly, Reasons was released in 2000, while Storm was apparently released in 1999. With this in mind, which product is the real clone? I actually remember seeing Storm in a Guitar Center buyers guide before Reasons some years ago! As far as Cakewalk's Kinetic... it was based on Roland's Groove boxes-so I don't see any clone connection there, besides it had no rack setup like Reasons and Storm.

What about 'Air Rack' by Maizesoft? It has a rack setup. Also don't forget trackers like Buzz and Psycle as far patching goes!

[v1o]

Orion was released before Reason so at least that one isn't actually a clone

Recent software in sort of this vein that hasn't yet been mentioned: Korg Gadget. It's a nice one.

I've been digging for more info. Seems like Orion and Reason both came out in 2000. Reason 1.0 came out in December. Orion had an incomplete 0.9 release that was available in May that year but in not sure when the final 1.0 version shipped. So yeah Orion and Reason are both the grand daddies.

Anyway here is nice overview of Orion with plenty of info
http://www.dancetech.com/item.cfm?threadid=391&lang=0

[swatwork]

Reason was developed from ReBirth, dating back to 1996:



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReBirth_RB-338

[Tux]

Yes I can attest to how long Orion has been around. I started using Orion Basic v 0.9 or something like that back in 2001. I remember when I discovered it. I was about to go for Reason when I saw a screen shot of Orion in an episode of Future Music (I think it was).

Up until that point I had been wrestling with a demo of Reason that timed out after 20 minutes and I couldn't get a sound out of it.

I then went to Synapse's website (or should I say Sonic Syndicate as they were known back then) and downloaded a demo copy of Orion and straight away we clicked like soulmates.

Fast forward to 2017 and I'm still using the last version (8.6) that was released in 2015 and I will probably continue to use it until I can't run it any longer. There just isn't anything out there that works in the same way.

I could go for overpriced bloatware like Ableton or BitWig, but they're overpriced and bloated. And I'm hooked on Orion's built in sound modules. So I and many others over at the Synapse forum are sort of stranded on 'Orion Island' but I'm happy enough for now.

BTW, we 'Orionaughts' always considered FruityLoops as more of a rival than Reason. Fruity and Orion both shared some same synths (The Wasp for instance) and at the time Reason couldn't run VST's.

[Schmidi]

Cool thread! I never realized there were this many DAWs with that style of interface. Makes me feel old looking at those screen shots.

[ENV1]

Phrazor would fall in that category too.

Simple but extremely effective.

Also nice as a multitrack midi sequencer within other hosts since it comes in both VST and VSTi format too.

(Good addition to VSTHost for instance since VSTHost has no tracks of any sort.)


Not totally sure if EnergyXT would fall in that category as well but id say its probably more a yes than a no.

A shame there is no real progress there anymore because its a nice little DAW and sophisticated enough for the creation of whole songs.

[Jace-BeOS]

Caustic 3 certainly fits this category, and I think Mulab could as well if we aren't too picky.

http://www.singlecellsoftware.com/caustic
http://www.mutools.com/mulab-product.html

If we are including iOS apps like Gadget and Caustic, then we can also include Nanostudio.