Upgrading to R11: Opinions solicited

[Social Exodus]

Without getting into anyone's religious beliefs regarding Reason, given my situation described below -- what would you do?

First, I am a hobbyist but I love tinkering around in Reason. The rack metaphor feels like home since I was a telephone plant and tech control worker in my now distant past. I own R10 plus I also have Reaper and Cakewalk by Bandlab for the Windows world. I'm one of those oddballs that don't think a MAC is all that and a free drink myself. Also, I own many of the RE's that would come with the Reason Suite, at least the ones I'd want EXCEPT the new(er) Reason Bass and Drum extensions that replaced the older refills (which you can't get anymore?), plus the broken out parts of the SSL mixer would be a plus. Also, even if they are minor, the workflow enhancements would be nice too. I have zero desire to use this as a VST at this point but IF this new capability has zero effect on using it as a standalone DAW then I.'m OK with it being there.

The Reason Bass and Drum Bundle runs $179 which is most of the way to the $249 Reason Suite upgrade price of $249 and that's all that comes with it. Obviously that makes this attractive to just upgrade, but my concern is that R11 is maybe getting a bit piggish on resources? I have an older i5 3.40MHz Ivy Bridge machine but I have maxed out it's memory to 32gb and it runs Windows 10 and R10 flawlessly. So I don't want to upset that apple cart if upgrading to R11 is problematic that way.

Also, I've never taken FULL inventory on the sound libraries included in R10, but I know it got a big boost in Drum and Loop libraries. Is there an even bigger cache of loops, samples and drum MIDI patterns in R11? I like to start with predefined MIDI patterns dropped into a KONG or A-List drummer, so I am HOPING that there are more of these things in the Bass and Refill bundle or included in R11 -- or am I delusional there?

Any thoughts on all that are welcome and appreciated.

Edit to add: I already have all of RS Player utilities so they are a non starter.

- Steve

[Heater]

The main selling point for me was running Reason plugins as a VST/ AU. Now I get to hear the sounds I love in a modern Daw which allows for one thing, track freeze so no issues relative to CPU usage.

[Yonatan]

You seem very much wanting the Bass and Drum RE. I know they are also in one of the Rig Bundles. I do not think a bundle of these two for $179 is well spent money. You should at least get them for $39 each as that was the price anyone could buy them for at the beginning. Or get them in a bigger bundle. Or put them in the basic subscription until they go on sale. Then you can find out if it is enough of what you want and need for your songs.

[Social Exodus]

You seem very much wanting the Bass and Drum RE. I know they are also in one of the Rig Bundles. I do not think a bundle of these two for $179 is well spent money. You should at least get them for $39 each as that was the price anyone could buy them for at the beginning. Or get them in a bigger bundle. Or put them in the basic subscription until they go on sale. Then you can find out if it is enough of what you want and need for your songs.

Excellent point, thanks.

[PhillipOrdonez]

If you aren't looking to use the reason rack plugin, and are only interested in those two rack extensions, wait till Reason 12 brings more value to you.

[Social Exodus]

Anyone want to weigh in on R11's resource footprint vs R10?

[QVprod]

R11 runs just as well as R10 does.

[WillyOD]

R10 is almost the same as R11. (In the beta only useful feature for me was muting midi notes, and still a bit disappointed these simple sequencer improvements weren't backported to R10). Might as well wait for 11.5 or 12. That's what I've decided to do unless R11 goes on sale for ~50 bucks.

Don't get me wrong I love Reason but even lovers need a holiday, far away from each other.

[Enlightenspeed]

At the end of the day, you need to decide whether or not you would get usage out of the new features, and in many cases waiting for the next upgrade might suit you more - that's fine.

BUT

I wouldn't rule out using the RRP if you are a Reaper user - in fact of all the DAWs RRP works with, I have to say that Reaper gets more juice out of it than the rest because of the open architecture - particularly Reaper 6, which is the most crash proof the thing has ever been IMHO. If you're used to using Reason, then as an FX insert it can give you a set of tools for audio manipulation similar to that of Guitar Rig, but with the easy usability of Reason, and also 2 stellar new modulation plugins which Reason had been crying out for, and for a very long time. As an instrument stack it also gives you access to better workflows than the "bounce out of Reason, import to DAW" paradigm.

Personally, I'm an avid user of NI Komplete Kontrol and Maschine, but this doesn't mean I'll jump on every update - I typically wait until every second upgrade for Komplete in order to maximize value. That's a perfectly understandable attitude. As an aside to that, however, I would be very careful about reading into a lot of the negativity on here. It used to be the case that when Props/RS hosted their own forum, you would have all sorts of hate posts happening in the General Forum, but as they were almost always from "unregistered users" we tended to ignore them, because most of them were little more than trolling from people who weren't even Reason users. That filtering process doesn't exist here on RT, which means that trolls can look and act like they are fully paid up Reason users since v1, when of course they are not. So, you might wish to be inclined to implement a robust and efficient bullshit filter to a hell of a lot of the posts you see on here.

Hope this helps,
Brian

[2chris]

As a reason 10 user, I have resisted upgrading to 11. The rack is the best part of Reason, and I’m a big fan of them going this direction to open it up to other daws. I feel like they don't have the resources or desire to be a top DAW company or instruments company - they are an interesting in between. This version establishes a direction where they aren’t doing any of the stuff their hardcore users want. They are catering to the large group of users who figured out they need a second more modern daw (by buying something else), and to users of another daw whom will never move to Reason exclusively, but want the nice instruments and fx that come in Reason. As a business decision, that makes good sense to add new users.

They can survive this way because music isn’t a feature war. If that was all that mattered, everybody would be using Cubase or Studio 1, instead of Live and FL Studio dominating the market. I’ll be super happy to be proven wrong if this platform somehow becomes a market leader again at some point.

I bought Cubase 10 before they announced R11, and that’s kind of killed my curiosity for 11 at full price. I have an old license of Logic Pro X that keeps getting FREE updates, and Live 10 Suite is amazing. To me, if you’re a big fan of Reason, it’s because you like the synths, fx, and you have history with it and how creative it is. This update was about attracting new users on a different daw that lacks the cool instruments and FX that reason has.

If you love Reason, get 11. You’ll be happy. It’s everything in 10 plus two new FX, some bug fixes, and the rack VST/AU. If you view Reason as just one nice option among many like I do - feel free to wait for either a major sale, major unexpected feature release of something you want, or the next version that might move the needle. You can always just spend time learning Europa, Thor, complex1 etc better. Reason 10 is deep and complex, it will keep you busy learning the instruments as best you can.

[Social Exodus]

Thank you all for your valuable input, insights and take on this. I realize it is a very subjective thing, to the point of near zero objectivity (we like what we like after all) but it is good to see what others wee altogether.I do love working in Reason because it is approachable, easy to learn (though not to master!) and it now has really decent guitarist offerings from Kuassa (I am primarily a guitar player) as well as synths I have been learning and growing with. I have mastering tools, mixing options out the wazoo and I really haven't even bumped into any serious limitations yet. And I don't want to, hence my questions. The modulation effects, MIDI manipulation improvements and addition of parts of the SSL into track situations make the $129 worthwhile in my mind. The Suite may well be a good thing too, although I doubt I'd use the Scenic Hybrid RE much or Umph Beatmakers much -- but hey, you never know, right? I have taken drum beats and sounds that I'd never think to use just out of sheer luck and worked thm into my paltry "portfolio" so I don't dismiss anything in hand.

Thanks again!

- Steve

[Yonatan]

Good luck and hope to hear later how you feel about working in R11 if you decide to upgrade.

[2chris]

Thank you all for your valuable input, insights and take on this. I realize it is a very subjective thing, to the point of near zero objectivity (we like what we like after all) but it is good to see what others wee altogether.I do love working in Reason because it is approachable, easy to learn (though not to master!) and it now has really decent guitarist offerings from Kuassa (I am primarily a guitar player) as well as synths I have been learning and growing with. I have mastering tools, mixing options out the wazoo and I really haven't even bumped into any serious limitations yet. And I don't want to, hence my questions. The modulation effects, MIDI manipulation improvements and addition of parts of the SSL into track situations make the $129 worthwhile in my mind. The Suite may well be a good thing too, although I doubt I'd use the Scenic Hybrid RE much or Umph Beatmakers much -- but hey, you never know, right? I have taken drum beats and sounds that I'd never think to use just out of sheer luck and worked thm into my paltry "portfolio" so I don't dismiss anything in hand.

Thanks again!

- Steve

I think getting 11 is the right move if Reason is your main daw. I really do like the instruments, fx, hardware metaphor, protection method where I don’t need a dongle to go workstation vs laptop, and the forward thinking nature of players. The rest of it is, well, a topic I won’t go into at the risk of sounding negative when I do enjoy the product.

[loopeydoug]

I only had 2(I think) REs from the suite, so upgrading made sense for me. If the suite upgrade wasn't an option, I would've just stuck with 9.

[Social Exodus]

Thank you all for your valuable input, insights and take on this. I realize it is a very subjective thing, to the point of near zero objectivity (we like what we like after all) but it is good to see what others wee altogether.I do love working in Reason because it is approachable, easy to learn (though not to master!) and it now has really decent guitarist offerings from Kuassa (I am primarily a guitar player) as well as synths I have been learning and growing with. I have mastering tools, mixing options out the wazoo and I really haven't even bumped into any serious limitations yet. And I don't want to, hence my questions. The modulation effects, MIDI manipulation improvements and addition of parts of the SSL into track situations make the $129 worthwhile in my mind. The Suite may well be a good thing too, although I doubt I'd use the Scenic Hybrid RE much or Umph Beatmakers much -- but hey, you never know, right? I have taken drum beats and sounds that I'd never think to use just out of sheer luck and worked thm into my paltry "portfolio" so I don't dismiss anything in hand.

Thanks again!

- Steve

I think getting 11 is the right move if Reason is your main daw. I really do like the instruments, fx, hardware metaphor, protection method where I don’t need a dongle to go workstation vs laptop, and the forward thinking nature of players. The rest of it is, well, a topic I won’t go into at the risk of sounding negative when I do enjoy the product.

Which is exactly what I did. Last night, sober (I might add) I sprung for Reason 11 Suite. I have thought about this a lot lately, seeing as I have 3 different DAWS available (4 if you count Ableton Live Intro unused at present) and the one I gravitate to about all others is Reason. I won't uninstall Reaper or SONAR, but I won't be using them -- at least for a while.

Reason isn't perfect. No DAW seems to be from my meager experience. There's always something that you say "man, I wish" about all of them. Reaper is difficult to grasp after so much time in Reason, so doing simple things takes time and motivation away from ideas to implement them. I just re-upped my license (at $60) in an abundance of caution in case Reason suffers the same fate as SONAR did (those Gibson bastards!) and while Bandlab has taken up the mantle of SONAR (Now just Cakewalk), the momentum I had these faded as I accepted that my investment there was long gone. Many of the things I got through the SPLAT gift (I was a survey volunteer and gave up a few hours and they gifted it to me) can't be used in Reaper anyway.

So the long and short of it is that Reason is no2w my one and only DAW, and there are enough toys in the suite along with the dozens of REs I'd purchased (mostly Kuassa stuff) that I can be busy for the next few years just learning to create quality recordings and step off the upgrade train for (possibly) good. We'll see. But I hold hope since the severe GAS I used to have for guitar gear has abated since I decided what I had was good enough several years ago.