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Reason 13 has an average user rating of 4.60 from 10 reviews

Rate & Review Reason 13

User Reviews by KVR Members for Reason 13

Reason 13

Reviewed By robogone [all]
December 5th, 2013
Version reviewed: 8.1 on Windows

Reason seems to be one of those love it or hate it tools for most people and sits in a space that's not quite plugin and not quite DAW. Personally I love it, and have used it since version 4, and have seen quite a few changes in that time.

To me, one of the best decisions that Propellerheads made was to consolidate Reason and Record into one tool, as it made no sense to keep them separate. It certainly extends the range of Reason to give it audio capabilities, and it has a very good mixer.

While third party plugin use has never been a feature of Reason, the Props came to a compromise and brought RE functionality to the table. RE may have failed if third parties had not developed for the platform, but when you look at the respected developers creating RE's, you have to realize that Reason is taken seriously as a platform for them to develop for.

At the core of Reason is a variety of tools that can be routed to a mixer as in any other DAW, but with the advantage that you can easily flip your racks around to patch any device to pretty much any other device. If you have no experience of this on other hardware or software there's a learning curve for sure, but once you master this, you really see the strengths of Reason.

I won't go into the details of each instrument on the racks as it would take up too much space, but Reason certainly has a wide range of instruments, covering various types of percussion, synthesizers, samplers and effects. The Props web site is a good place to start if you want to read further into what is included.

A common complaint that I have heard on KVR is that Reason relies on ReWire to communicate with other software. ReWire is not for everyone, but as it is implemented in most major DAWs and is pretty simple to set up, I'm happy with it and have never really had any issues using Reason and Ableton Live side by side. A recent addition is MIDI out, so that really opens up more opportunities with external instrument triggering, and any other uses for MIDI out.

On the downside, Reason does have a very cluttered GUI if you don't have a large monitor, and gets very fiddly on laptops. I think it is a little difficult to learn coming from other DAWs or hardware, but as with any tool, you can learn it over time.

Solid as a rock as far as stability is concerned and very efficient in terms of processor use. Some of the tools might have a bigger processor hit (Kong comes to mind), but for the most part they are very efficient.

I think it is priced very fairly, and upgrades come in at a reasonable price too.

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Comments & Discussion for Reason Studios Reason 13

Discussion
Discussion: Active
liquidsound
liquidsound
13 February 2012 at 11:08pm

Yes. A great workstation. I'm amazed at how easy is to create any kind of music style when sitting in front of that luxurious infinite stack of Synths and effects including the new Mixer. The audio stretching is impeccable! And the new effects are able to transform beyond recognition (if you so desire) any audio going through them.

DefaultUserName
DefaultUserName
17 October 2012 at 9:26pm

Love the new workflow and the rack extensions, and i didn't think i would but it really opens up a new world of sonic capabilities.

zeebot
zeebot
3 December 2013 at 3:05pm

Terrible review, doesn't cover half of the things in reason and a glaring mistake saying that SYLENTH is included in the software??

This is obviously written by someone who doesn't know the software at all.

ballacr75
ballacr75
21 August 2015 at 2:52pm

I think that Reason now MUST have a decent MIDI OUT instrument, i mean with Bank MSB and LSB, with more than 1 assegnable knob (maybe 16...) because almost every keyboard has more than 128 patch, and I don't want to program bank change msb and lsb into the sequencer, it is very very uncomfortable...

pquenin
pquenin
31 March 2016 at 11:19am

The workflow improvments in Reason 8 are great, Reason now feel almost like a modern DAW, but still far some other DAWs.

The way you add insert effects to an instrument is still not very handy, as the cabling system. I think that the "real device" paradigm of Reason has its limits.

Otherwise, it's a great package for the price, think of what you get for that price in the hardware world. But the upgrades are pricey.

129 € for the Reason 8 upgrade is almost a fraud. Certainly there has been a lot of work behind the scene, but it was just about bringing Reason workflow to a descent level compared to other DAWs.

eivind
eivind
2 October 2017 at 11:15am

Reason is fine, but we are in October 2017, and still - after all these years with increased monitor screen estate the Props have yet to make the Reason rack scalable. Maybe the solution used in Terry Gilliams move Brazil (1985) is a viable addon??

synthesite
synthesite
23 May 2019 at 8:17pm

Not so easy as you might think; it's 1:1 design pixel by pixel and this is done in order to create ultra clear graphics. If you zoom a photography it will look pretty okay at all resolutions but these are highly detailed instruments where function is above everything else, and boy do they function! Best synthesizer studio on a computer anywhere.

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