A Good Farewell

[jlgrimes]

I can't take it anymore!

I'm caving in, upgrading to R11- ditching the DAW and sticking the RRP in Reaper 6.

I was cruising through the boonies when I realized why I love Reason; the damn rack!

I can't stand the torture any longer of having to think that the team manning this ship is slow, partly incompetent or willfully uninspired, and owned by a VC that doesn't care about the product.

Compliments to sticking to the flagship of the product and where it all started. Sad it couldn't have been more while I'm still young

A video on youtube broke me: (check it out: It's a much better DAW!!!! https://youtu.be/zyKSfStJElo) into admitting defeat for this battle.

They can have my $129 but they won't see me back! Unless by God they pull a typical PHeads move and put a paywall on the graphic update

I'll also pick up Expanse on my way out...Thank you.

But I'm gone! No more seeing infinite threads turn into request posts without a reply from Devs or even the pretty quiet Mattias. No more disappointingly small drip fed updates or IMO: misdirected shots at 1-3 things the team will focus 6-12 months on and still end up half baking somehow.

Reaper is an amazing DAW for audio and mixing, but for midi, I never get much inspiration from it.

My biggest gripes:

1. No included "good" instruments.
Very understandable for its price point, but you would think something a little more inspiring for Reasampomatic for drums at least. A decent basic drum plugin "built-in" is very important to me. Probably something free is available to fill this need though. Reason Redrum alone fills this need enough. I guess though maybe Reason+Reaper is a better workflow combined.

2. A great deal of its workflow is based off of Track templates.
Reapers tracks are highly configurable. So depending on how you want to do quantize, takes, overdubbing and what not kind of throws me off. I prefer more global settings similar to Reason or Ableton but I understand that other users prefer track based settings which is probably better for micro managing tasks but the insane level of details overwhelms me to bits.

3. Must create midi clip to edit it.
This is the same for Reason, Ableton, but those two DAWS make it pretty easy and intuitive to do this from the start. Ctrl + drag took awhile to remember as I'm sure plenty of NOOBs probably would just stare into space.

4. Piano Roll is very "weird"
It is actually a very powerful piano roll that is probably the most customizable out there (for any DAW). But its default tools are extremely limited (even compared to Reason) and mainly mostly filtering tools I hardly ever use. That said it makes use of mouse modifiers in clever ways that are very nice and configurable. But a alot of "normal" functions like Ctrl D works very differently than expected and it takes alot to get it to work normally (user scripts).



That said it is pretty amazing that a $60 program that relies on a "good faith" system is actually a viable alternative for more expensive DAWs as I can tell the developers are very passionate and put alot of time in the program (as well as the users who add extra scripts to the DAW).

[Jackjackdaw]

I have not been using Reason lately either. I splurged on both the Arturia collections and use them in Cubase as VST3, the scalable UI and all the visuals for envelopes and functions put Reason in the shade plus they sound great. I really miss the players though. Hopefully by the time I can afford to upgrade to RRP they will have fixed the graphics! Otherwise Rewire is fine for a lot of stuff.

[ltbrunt00]

I may be in the minority here but I have gone out into the wilderness and have been using on a regular basis Bitwig 4 years, Studio One 5 years and Cubase 1 year. I have largely abandoned Bitwig just not my cup of tea. I have started many projects in Studio one and end up not completing them or moving my projects over to reason to complete.

I do like Cubase a lot but found that for me it is good at starting new songs then if I feel like for a minute if I am getting stuck I move the project over to Reason to finish. I mostly deal with midi and never use loops. I still think the Reason sequencer is uncluttered and vastly quicker at getting in your information in adding automation then quickly moving automation to other tracks very quickly.

The SSL Mixer is an addiction with adding parallel channels is not easily replicated in other DAW software. Reason may not be everyone's cup of Tea but I Still find it inspiring at creating new ideas quickly.

Now if only they could add some type of integration with products like Finale, Notion, Dorcio and add video editing I would be in literal heaven.

[Oquasec]

Reason's piano roll is actually not bad for a linear daw.
It's actually pretty comfortable to use and probably one of the only ones I liked besides FL Studio & Bitwig's.

[ShelLuser]

I'm caving in, upgrading to R11- ditching the DAW and sticking the RRP in Reaper 6.

I was cruising through the boonies when I realized why I love Reason; the damn rack!

I can't stand the torture any longer of having to think that the team manning this ship is slow, partly incompetent or willfully uninspired, and owned by a VC that doesn't care about the product.

Compliments to sticking to the flagship of the product and where it all started. Sad it couldn't have been more while I'm still young

I can fully relate to this. Well, not fully I suppose because I don't use Reaper but Ableton Live, but yah.. I really disliked the fact that R11 did away with ReWire (still do) but in full honesty I also have to admit that R.S. heavily improved on the Reason rack plugin as well. In fact, I too am slowly warming up to it; last week I've been using the R11 rack setup a lot more than R10 rewired into Live.

In my case there's another reason for all this: Maschine. It takes a bit of tweaking but Maschine's sequencer is a lot more accessible for me than Reason ever was. And although I seriously miss the mixer section there's also something to say for using Maschine & Push to set up the mixdown (adding Ozone helps out tons as well). Best of all: all my Rack Extensions are fully usable this way as well.

Complex-1 + Players backed by Live + Push? I'm warming up to the whole thing.

[EdwardKiy]

I'm caving in, upgrading to R11- ditching the DAW and sticking the RRP in Reaper 6.

I was cruising through the boonies when I realized why I love Reason; the damn rack!

I can't stand the torture any longer of having to think that the team manning this ship is slow, partly incompetent or willfully uninspired, and owned by a VC that doesn't care about the product.

Compliments to sticking to the flagship of the product and where it all started. Sad it couldn't have been more while I'm still young

I can fully relate to this. Well, not fully I suppose because I don't use Reaper but Ableton Live, but yah.. I really disliked the fact that R11 did away with ReWire (still do) but in full honesty I also have to admit that R.S. heavily improved on the Reason rack plugin as well. In fact, I too am slowly warming up to it; last week I've been using the R11 rack setup a lot more than R10 rewired into Live.

In my case there's another reason for all this: Maschine. It takes a bit of tweaking but Maschine's sequencer is a lot more accessible for me than Reason ever was. And although I seriously miss the mixer section there's also something to say for using Maschine & Push to set up the mixdown (adding Ozone helps out tons as well). Best of all: all my Rack Extensions are fully usable this way as well.

Complex-1 + Players backed by Live + Push? I'm warming up to the whole thing.

Please relate to this in the Reason Request section of the forum in my latest rant. Maybe we can get through to them there.
viewtopic.php?f=6&p=491752#p491752

[Proboscis]

I can't take it anymore!

I'm caving in, upgrading to R11- ditching the DAW and sticking the RRP in Reaper 6.

I was cruising through the boonies when I realized why I love Reason; the damn rack!

I can't stand the torture any longer of having to think that the team manning this ship is slow, partly incompetent or willfully uninspired, and owned by a VC that doesn't care about the product.

I have reached a similar conclusion over the last couple of months. For me, what makes Reason great is the rack, and what I find very annoying is the lack of basic features that I would expect to be standard in a modern sequencer, but release after release, very little gets done. The R11 sequencer additions are great and all, but it's too little too late.

Unlike you, however, I will hold out for R12, pay my $129 'exit tax' and learn to use Cakewalk. I'll have all the things I love about the rack, without the disappointment every time Reason drip feeds us one or two features. It's not an appealing proposition to start over with a new DAW, but I'll say farewell to Propellerhead/Reason Studios and move on, anticipating a few months of growing pains while I learn a new platform.

And after doing some exploring with Cakewalk, and getting to know what the company is all about regarding improvements, I've discovered that they rollout heaps of bug fixes/features almost every month, the development staff are very active on their forum, and they actually make stuff happen, fast, based on user feedback.

After doing a bit of a feature comparison project recently between DAWs, it's more evident now how far behind the times Reason really is.

>

features.PNG (28.98 KiB) Viewed 2545 times

[EdwardKiy]

I have reached a similar conclusion over the last couple of months. For me, what makes Reason great is the rack, and what I find very annoying is the lack of basic features that I would expect to be standard in a modern sequencer, but release after release, very little gets done. The R11 sequencer additions are great and all, but it's too little too late.

Unlike you, however, I will hold out for R12, pay my $129 'exit tax' and learn to use Cakewalk. I'll have all the things I love about the rack, without the disappointment every time Reason drip feeds us one or two features. It's not an appealing proposition to start over with a new DAW, but I'll say farewell to Propellerhead/Reason Studios and move on, anticipating a few months of growing pains while I learn a new platform.

And after doing some exploring with Cakewalk, and getting to know what the company is all about regarding improvements, I've discovered that they rollout heaps of bug fixes/features almost every month, the development staff are very active on their forum, and they actually make stuff happen, fast, based on user feedback.

After doing a bit of a feature comparison project recently between DAWs, it's more evident now how far behind the times Reason really is.

>
features.PNG

Great! Please add this to the Feature Suggestions thread/rant

viewtopic.php?f=6&p=491752#p491752

thanks

[Creativemind]

Unlike you, however, I will hold out for R12, pay my $129 'exit tax' and learn to use Cakewalk. I'll have all the things I love about the rack, without the disappointment every time Reason drip feeds us one or two features.

That's a good way of putting it, drip feed. Linked clips and automation, midi chase and tempo detect of audio are 3 others missing from the pic above too that I know Reaper, FL Studio and Logic have to name 3 but not Reason.

Even when they do add features, they don't seem to fully think them through. The curved automation, Reaper has 5 curve types + linear and they could've added quantizing of automation and draw In-able shapes in 11 as well. Same with the crossfading audio - only 1 crossfade type (most daw's in 2020 have 3+) and no verticle allignment. Why don't they implement them as best as they can be? I know Reason kinda is aimed at being easy to crack on with but easy to crack on with doesn't always have to mean basic does it?

Cakewalk can even time-stretch midi clips and copy a groove from a midi clip and you can apply it to another midi clip. Come on Reason, I stuck with it for 7 & a half years but now I'm on Reaper and it's so damn smooth and feature rich I don't think I could ditch it and switch back to Reason without at least 20 features being added to Reason.

[Jagwah]

@OP I think we can all sympathize with your pain to some degree.

The features in Reaper are endless from the vids I've seen. I'm yet to find a feature Reaper doesn't have?

Apparently it has video editing capabilities, so I will be checking it out.

EDIT: The video editing in Reaper has a few basic features and more which open up a universe of creativity. It's not just scoring it's actual video editing support and it doesn't seem like it was such a feat to incorporate it. Good on them, I'm sure they will sell a few copies based on this feature alone as it's not easy to find a DAW with video editing support. After years of efforts and no video support nearing any closer for Reason, perhaps even further away now, this looks like a decent option for me.

[challism]

And honestly (surprisingly too) using the RRP in Logic feels so "Reasony" that even though I am no longer using Reason the DAW, I still feel like a Reason user. I'm definitely not missing anything, and instead of sitting there frustrated, I'm fully taking advantage of all the things Logic offers that us Reason DAW users have been wishing 4 for YEARS.

And this here is the whole point! Why keep hoping to get what you want when you can simply have it.

Yup. It was a genius move by RS to open it up to all DAWs. RS turned all past competition into allies. Now users can have whatever features the other DAWs have and still use Reason. And (hopefully) stop whining about feature requests on every thread. Anyone who is unhappy with Reason, should upgrade to R11 and use it in the DAW of your choice.

Unlike you, however, I will hold out for R12, pay my $129 'exit tax' and learn to use Cakewalk.

>
features.PNG

That's a nice comparison chart. I started out with Cakewalk as my first DAW back in the 90s. Started using Reason 1 and Cakewalk together via Rewire, but got tired of having to manage two different song files. I think the Reason Rack Plugin is saved as part of the master DAW song file now, though, right? I haven't yet tried the RRP, having only owned R11 for about a month now.

I think Cakewalk is free now that Bandlab bought it. Download it here: https://www.bandlab.com/products/cakewalk I downloaded it a while back, but haven't installed it yet. I really can't believe it's free. Crazy! One thing I have really missed is the musical staff/score feature Cakewalk has. Looks like it still has it. I'm going to have to install it and use my R11 plugin with it. Just haven't had the time or desire, really. But I will soon. I'm curious to see what all Cakewalk has added since I left it. I haven't used it since before they changed the name to Sonar!

[Oquasec]

Reason's not really a pain in the ass to maintain,
Each upgrade's 44$ a month for plugins.
(Plus there's like 150 plugins in the box)

[diminished]

Cakewalk can even time-stretch midi clips and copy a groove from a midi clip and you can apply it to another midi clip.

I feel you (crossgraded to Cubase), but Reason can do all of these.

1. - viewtopic.php?t=7497794

2. -

[Creativemind]

@OP I think we can all sympathize with your pain to some degree.

The features in Reaper are endless from the vids I've seen. I'm yet to find a feature Reaper doesn't have?

Apparently it has video editing capabilities, so I will be checking it out.

EDIT: The video editing in Reaper has a few basic features and more which open up a universe of creativity. It's not just scoring it's actual video editing support and it doesn't seem like it was such a feat to incorporate it. Good on them, I'm sure they will sell a few copies based on this feature alone as it's not easy to find a DAW with video editing support. After years of efforts and no video support nearing any closer for Reason, perhaps even further away now, this looks like a decent option for me.

Welcome to the 21st century.

[Creativemind]

Cakewalk can even time-stretch midi clips and copy a groove from a midi clip and you can apply it to another midi clip.

I feel you (crossgraded to Cubase), but Reason can do all of these.

1. - viewtopic.php?t=7497794

2. -

That's very good but what I meant is, you can take a specific groove (like the transients) in Cakewalk and copy it to another audio track so in other words, copy a guitar strum (or at least the groove or where the transients lie) to another audio clip and the same for midi.

[mcatalao]

I can't take it anymore!

I'm caving in, upgrading to R11- ditching the DAW and sticking the RRP in Reaper 6.

I was cruising through the boonies when I realized why I love Reason; the damn rack!

I can't stand the torture any longer of having to think that the team manning this ship is slow, partly incompetent or willfully uninspired, and owned by a VC that doesn't care about the product.

I have reached a similar conclusion over the last couple of months. For me, what makes Reason great is the rack, and what I find very annoying is the lack of basic features that I would expect to be standard in a modern sequencer, but release after release, very little gets done. The R11 sequencer additions are great and all, but it's too little too late.

Unlike you, however, I will hold out for R12, pay my $129 'exit tax' and learn to use Cakewalk. I'll have all the things I love about the rack, without the disappointment every time Reason drip feeds us one or two features. It's not an appealing proposition to start over with a new DAW, but I'll say farewell to Propellerhead/Reason Studios and move on, anticipating a few months of growing pains while I learn a new platform.

And after doing some exploring with Cakewalk, and getting to know what the company is all about regarding improvements, I've discovered that they rollout heaps of bug fixes/features almost every month, the development staff are very active on their forum, and they actually make stuff happen, fast, based on user feedback.

After doing a bit of a feature comparison project recently between DAWs, it's more evident now how far behind the times Reason really is.

>
features.PNG

Man i look at this list and i think, 90% of what's here brings 0 to a better song. The midi stuff is important for people who use a mouse. Come on, showing the name of notes? Highlight notes when the mouse is on top? Really? Song notes? What about some karaoke??? Most of these are purely cosmetic and bring 0 to music making and Scoring is a job for a second application, designed for that job and someone that's serious about that has dorico or sibelius for that over the sequencer.

From this list there are 3 things that should be addressed as soon as possible for a better sequencer and those are imho, track freeze, track folders and above all auto punch in/out. The rest is bollocks. Nothing here is stopping you from doing great music and if you can't maybe RRP and a "better" daw is your best option.

I want to see reason improving not being transformed into a cluttered, decontextualized, mess of an app as is Reaper and Cubase.

[kuhliloach]

a great decision all around--to identify the strengths and weaknesses in all these products and utilize what we love. I learned something from being an iPad user that I now must apply to Reason (being a DAW that is so hopelessly outdated), and that is each tool can be a part of the total formula. Reason is still great for sound design and crafting small pieces that can be exported into your main environment. It just failed at fulfilling the role of "main environment". This is how iPad beatmaking flows with my main DAW (Logic) and the way I now think about Reason. There is so much care and love put into the development of Logic and the upgrades are free. This decision has been made for me, and I sense many others.

[Boombastix]

Reason is still great for sound design and crafting small pieces that can be exported into your main environment.

This is what I have been harping about since the release of RRP. There is a mistake in RS's thinking here because you can't get the midi clip/track out of Reason in a simple way.
Also you cannot transfer a sound you made if it includes a VST/RE Combinator.

It forces me to abandon the use of REs in favor of VSTs if I want to work this way. Probably not what they wanted. VST with midi out in the RRP will fix this, and a simple right click on a midi clip giving you an option to export fixes issue #2.

[Jackjackdaw]

I think that unless the RRP gets some extra features it is danger of being a forgettable novelty. I find when I'm working in another DAW, because RRP can't do the things I want it to then I just don't bother loading it up. I wonder if they have a road map for it, but have my doubts becuse RS usually just fires things out and leaves them to rot on v1.

[jlgrimes]

I think that unless the RRP gets some extra features it is danger of being a forgettable novelty. I find when I'm working in another DAW, because RRP can't do the things I want it to then I just don't bother loading it up. I wonder if they have a road map for it, but have my doubts becuse RS usually just fires things out and leaves them to rot on v1.

It has some issues namely with the browser not being resizable. And at some point, it really need to enlarge the whole GUI. That would make the players alot more useful alone. Also there should be a way of dragging samples from refills into DAWS. and VST integration would be useful too. It also seems to be buggies than standalone as I got some crashes upon loading.

That said it is nice getting Reason devices in other DAWS.

[ltbrunt00]

I think the Props have been quite working on something big. I can't see them putting out an update with only a bunch of new instruments and effects. I also think that now they are calling themselves reasons studios they would be adding features found in Cubase & Studio one.
I hope the next big update is not just the online web version of Reason. I do think something big is going on behind the scenes.