What do Propellerhead staff do at work all day?

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mark999
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01 May 2018

I've been thinking about this a lot lately... what do Propellerhead staff work on every day? And how many staff are there?
There are many features in Reason that are missing, but seem quick and simple to implement... so I can't help but wonder what the staff must be doing all day because they are not being implemented. Perhaps there are not as many staff and programmers as I think there are?

Some examples;

MP3 export functionality... Why don't we still have this functionality? Surely it wouldn't take more than 1-2 days to implement? What is the hold up?

What does Ryan Harlin do when he is not working on Reason tutorials? I love his work and want to see more of it. We see maybe 1 tutorial from him every 2 months. What does he do the rest of the time? It doesn't take 2 months to create a 5 minute video. He creates amazing content so I want to see more of it, more often.

What do the graphics/GUI/interface people do all day? Do they even exist? Are they just freelancing? reason has been needing a graphical/vectorised graphics update for years. Why is this still missing? What are the designers doing all day? What are they designing because we're not seeing anything.

I could list many more...

scratchnsnifff
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01 May 2018

Well I’m not certain because I don’t work there and don’t personally know any of these people but I’m pretty sure (at least with Ryan harlin) that he’s a musician like the rest of us. I remember seeing a post or I think it was in one of his videos that him and Justin Williams were making a song for a mobile game. Basically saying they were working on a score for some video game. Point being is that I think some of them are doubled musicians (professionally) I don’t blame them! How awesome of a job would that be, make music and then get to throw ideas at what would make the tool grow. I’m honestly jealous XD
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EnochLight
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01 May 2018

If I've learned anything from watching HBO's Silicon Valley, it's that running a software company and doing software development is never as simple as one may think. :puf_bigsmile: :lol:
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01 May 2018

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Goodbye
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01 May 2018

I imagine there's a really big room with floor-to-ceiling windows. People start turning up around 11am and sit around drinking coffee. Then someone suggests a game of Doom on the LAN and that covers things until lunch. After lunch (at about 3pm) somebody puts on an some late 90s hard-euro-trance and everyone sits back and starts to get into the mood for work. By 4-4.30 everyone is psyched to really get stuff done. For the next 30 mins the place is frantic as people power up their laptops, clean their screens and write a few words on a whiteboard like 'User Focus' and 'More Romplers'. Then damn! Its 5pm and time to go home. The place is empty again by 5.15 apart from the intern whose job it is to sweep all the days user requests and bug reports into the bin.

mark999
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01 May 2018

Goodbye wrote:
01 May 2018
I imagine there's a really big room with floor-to-ceiling windows. People start turning up around 11am and sit around drinking coffee. Then someone suggests a game of Doom on the LAN and that covers things until lunch. After lunch (at about 3pm) somebody puts on an some late 90s hard-euro-trance and everyone sits back and starts to get into the mood for work. By 4-4.30 everyone is psyched to really get stuff done. For the next 30 mins the place is frantic as people power up their laptops, clean their screens and write a few words on a whiteboard like 'User Focus' and 'More Romplers'. Then damn! Its 5pm and time to go home. The place is empty again by 5.15 apart from the intern whose job it is to sweep all the days user requests and bug reports into the bin.

hahahahaha... love it! :D :D :D :D :D :D

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rcbuse
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01 May 2018

mark999 wrote:
01 May 2018
MP3 export functionality... Why don't we still have this functionality? Surely it wouldn't take more than 1-2 days to implement? What is the hold up?
Surely won't take more than 1-2 days. Oh wait, the library we planned on using doesn't build on this platform we support, now its a week to get that building. Oh this library doesn't do variable bitrates very well either, well we better just write our own MP3 encoder, now thats another month. What encoding options are we going to provide? Probably need to write a dialog box with export options for that. Oh we need to support ID3 tags too? version 1 and version 2? We have to support ID3 tag photos? Which image types? Do we need an image viewer and file browser for that? Now for testing and updating the manual. Ugh testing has the mp3 encoder crashing on OS X 10.9, track that down, fix. Weird audio glitches when exporting a long silience, wtf, track down, fix. Alright, great, we just spent 4 months of developer time, we have to cut these other planned features in the update. I guess we will put in flac and ogg export next time.

Things take waaaaaay longer than you would expect. Rather, things done right take waaaaay longer than you would expect. Its easy to throw some stuff together quickly and have it 'work'. But if you want the Propellerheads quality of software, the price is effort and time.

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normen
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01 May 2018

It‘s a good idea to not think of other people as morons or being against you, most people do the best they can given the circumstances. I mean where do you work? Can you always give the best result you could in theory reach? I‘m quite sure you can‘t. Be it because the time isn‘t there, the money isn‘t there, the tools aren‘t there, you being distracted by life etc. etc.

Being negative is easy and it makes you sound like you have an idea about whatever you‘re criticizing - resist that temptation :)

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Kenni
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01 May 2018

Mp3 is a dead format. There's no point in going through the development cycle it takes to implement, as rcbuse perfectly described.

"We want a box!". Sure, what color? With fill? Or only strokes? Where should it be placed? What do we need to move in order to make room for it? Where should we place the old stuff afterwards?

Sometimes I wonder why apparent stakeholders in any given business even want to publicly appear to be estimating development time on features they want/need, with no knowledge about software development, and with no respect to the current priority. I actually think it's even worse when people who use tools for creative purposes make these bold estimation statements. Redoing the entire gui from scratch is a huge task. There might even be dependencies that aren't met for this to even be possible.
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artotaku
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01 May 2018

We know little. What we know is from the early days (Reason 2.0, around 2003) when the crew had these developer diary .plan files which were published on their website back in the days. Quite insightful.
Here is one from Marcus Zetterquist:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229230 ... ads.se:80/

Today I assume: agile feature teams, daily stand-ups, white-board discussing, refactoring, bug fixing, code reviews, technology research and 80 % of the time reading and understanding legacy code written by others.
Last edited by artotaku on 01 May 2018, edited 1 time in total.

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Kenni
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01 May 2018

artotaku wrote:We know little. What we know is from the early days (Reason 2.0, around 2003) when the crew had these developer diary .plan files which were published on their website back in the days. Quite insightful.
Here is one from Marcus Zetterquist:
https://web.archive.org/web/20031229230 ... ads.se:80/

Today I assume: agile feature teams, daily stand-ups, white-board discussing, refactoring, bug fixing, technology research and 80 % of the time reading and understanding legacy code written by others.
That exactly. This is like the most common day in an agile development team.
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stratatonic
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01 May 2018

rcbuse wrote:
01 May 2018
mark999 wrote:
01 May 2018
MP3 export functionality... Why don't we still have this functionality? Surely it wouldn't take more than 1-2 days to implement? What is the hold up?
Surely won't take more than 1-2 days. Oh wait, the library we planned on using doesn't build on this platform we support, now its a week to get that building. Oh this library doesn't do variable bitrates very well either, well we better just write our own MP3 encoder, now thats another month. What encoding options are we going to provide? Probably need to write a dialog box with export options for that. Oh we need to support ID3 tags too? version 1 and version 2? We have to support ID3 tag photos? Which image types? Do we need an image viewer and file browser for that? Now for testing and updating the manual. Ugh testing has the mp3 encoder crashing on OS X 10.9, track that down, fix. Weird audio glitches when exporting a long silience, wtf, track down, fix. Alright, great, we just spent 4 months of developer time, we have to cut these other planned features in the update. I guess we will put in flac and ogg export next time.
Ableton Live just got mp3 export a couple of months ago. Only encoding option: 320 kbps
I don't think that took them 4 months of dev time.
Kenni wrote:
01 May 2018
Mp3 is a dead format. There's no point in going through the development cycle it takes to implement, as rcbuse perfectly described.
Why would Ableton be supporting a dead format?




.

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Noplan
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01 May 2018

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superpop
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01 May 2018

The only thing I want is use my REs and VSTs without thinking about DSP bar... If pheads staff are between naps and CPU otimitzation it's ok for me.

Everything else I can do in a way or another.

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EnochLight
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01 May 2018

stratatonic wrote:
01 May 2018
Ableton Live just got mp3 export a couple of months ago. Only encoding option: 320 kbps
I don't think that took them 4 months of dev time.
Exactly. Looks like it took them almost 17 years. :D :lol:
stratatonic wrote:
01 May 2018
Kenni wrote:
01 May 2018
Mp3 is a dead format. There's no point in going through the development cycle it takes to implement, as rcbuse perfectly described.
Why would Ableton be supporting a dead format?
MP3 may not be a dead format, but no professional really needs it. All main online distributors require mixed down songs in 44.1 Khz 16 bit wav files. Record labels certainly do. Lossy formats are taken care of by the streaming services they're shared on.

I can certainly see a use for MP3 export for the enthusiast/hobbyist, though.
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chimp_spanner
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01 May 2018

I think for the sake of portability, MP3 is important. But it's like one mouse drag for me to turn a WAV into an MP3 if I need to send a mix to someone so it's not a huge deal. I can still see why it'd be nice to have but ya know. It's "eh".

avasopht
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01 May 2018

Reason sort of does have mp3 export (or some other lossy format) through the Allihoopa export. Chances are, it's just one of those decisions they've thought, .. ahem, .. ernestly about and just decided not to offer it, even if they could.

Normen has said it best, and rcbuse was also spot on.

It would be nice not to have to install those little mp3 conversion programs to make an export we know most users probably need.

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esselfortium
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01 May 2018

EnochLight wrote:
01 May 2018
MP3 may not be a dead format, but no professional really needs it. All main online distributors require mixed down songs in 44.1 Khz 16 bit wav files. Record labels certainly do. Lossy formats are taken care of by the streaming services they're shared on.

I can certainly see a use for MP3 export for the enthusiast/hobbyist, though.
I wouldn't agree with this. Game dev clients generally expect me to send them MP3s or OGGs that are ready to import into the project. That's in addition to its usefulness for quickly sharing in-progress work to make sure we're on the same page about a song's direction.

With that said, the absence of a direct MP3 export in Reason isn't something that bothers me at all. I like to keep uncompressed audio masters of everything I work on, anyway, and it's simple enough to do the literally two extra clicks it takes me to encode an exported WAV file to MP3 so I can upload it.
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guitfnky
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01 May 2018

the only part of this I agree with is that I wish Ryan's tutorials were a more frequent/regular thing. I'm pretty sure he does other stuff that prevents making tutorials from being his main job function, though, so I'm okay with it.
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EnochLight
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01 May 2018

avasopht wrote:
01 May 2018
Reason sort of does have mp3 export (or some other lossy format) through the Allihoopa export.
Allihoopa gets MP4 files. Being based on Apple's MOV/AAC format, it can also store a ton more metadata over MP3 (video, subtitles, text, etc). Supposedly at the same sample/bit rate, MP4 does sound better than MP3, though.

If anything, I'd prefer MP4 export in Reason.

@Sarah - would your clients accept MP4 format?
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kuhliloach
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01 May 2018

I think this is a great question. I've just been assuming development is outsourced to China. I see no evidence to support the existence of in-house programmers. That would take away from CEO beer money.

WongoTheSane
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01 May 2018

guitfnky wrote:
01 May 2018
the only part of this I agree with is that I wish Ryan's tutorials were a more frequent/regular thing. I'm pretty sure he does other stuff that prevents making tutorials from being his main job function, though, so I'm okay with it.
I wish they were too, but between deciding on a topic, writing the script, proofing it with PH, finding locations and actors in some instances, recording, voice-overs and editing (which easily ranks among the best up there), I can't see those 5 on-screen minutes taking less than about a hundred man-hours, so two weeks of non-stop work. As Ryan probably has other tasks to attend to, no wonder he can't put out more...

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sublunar
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01 May 2018

esselfortium wrote:
01 May 2018
With that said, the absence of a direct MP3 export in Reason isn't something that bothers me at all. I like to keep uncompressed audio masters of everything I work on, anyway, and it's simple enough to do the literally two extra clicks it takes me to encode an exported WAV file to MP3 so I can upload it.
This.

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fieldframe
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01 May 2018

esselfortium wrote:
01 May 2018
EnochLight wrote:
01 May 2018
MP3 may not be a dead format, but no professional really needs it. All main online distributors require mixed down songs in 44.1 Khz 16 bit wav files. Record labels certainly do. Lossy formats are taken care of by the streaming services they're shared on.

I can certainly see a use for MP3 export for the enthusiast/hobbyist, though.
I wouldn't agree with this. Game dev clients generally expect me to send them MP3s or OGGs that are ready to import into the project. That's in addition to its usefulness for quickly sharing in-progress work to make sure we're on the same page about a song's direction.

With that said, the absence of a direct MP3 export in Reason isn't something that bothers me at all. I like to keep uncompressed audio masters of everything I work on, anyway, and it's simple enough to do the literally two extra clicks it takes me to encode an exported WAV file to MP3 so I can upload it.
Yeah, honestly more surprising than Reason not supporting lossy export is that Unity3D doesn't support AAC. It's a much better codec than MP3, and it's almost always hardware-accelerated on mobile (not so for Ogg).

I have a workflow (both for AAC and MP3) based around XACT, a free audio compression utility with a very straightforward UI. You just drop your AIFFs in, hit convert, and it cranks out compressed files.

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Kenni
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01 May 2018

stratatonic wrote:
01 May 2018
Ableton Live just got mp3 export a couple of months ago. Only encoding option: 320 kbps
I don't think that took them 4 months of dev time.
Kenni wrote:
01 May 2018
Mp3 is a dead format. There's no point in going through the development cycle it takes to implement, as rcbuse perfectly described.
Why would Ableton be supporting a dead format?
I have no idea why Ableton would spend time supporting Mp3. Dead, as in The Fraunhofer Institute ceased all activity on Mp3 development and licensing. There's many better, actively supported and developed compressed audio formats out there than Mp3, and Mp3 will see no changes in the future. As others has said, converting a wav/aiff file to any given compressed audio format is a matter of clicks, so I don't see the issue in DAW's not having that option in general, as long as it's possible to import at least.

It probably didn't take Ableton 4 months of active development to implement Mp3 export facilities, but it also didn't take 1-2 days as suggested in the OP. People that haven't been in touch with the world of development either as stakeholders or actual developers seldom have an idea about realistic time-to-market estimates on features. They don't consider all the steps involved, which they shouldn't either. It's just, the unrealistic expectations is an unfair starting point.
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