Reason 12 quality issues.

[withnail]

Hi, is anyone else finding Reason 12 buggy? It feels like a pre-release version.

Since upgrading, I've had problems with a lack of backwards compatibility (even to recent tracks from R11), pop out windows not maximising and random sound artefacts.
Since 12.2.5d138, I've had graphics flickering in the sequence lanes (not a big issue) and I'm getting regular 'unknown exceptions' which are an irritation. More serious are 'Device Error's in various devices, when these happen I can do nothing with it apart from deleting the device from the rack. I'd go back to 11 but I need the GUI zoom for my dodgy eyes to see.

My PC is a 6 months old, Windows 10, Ryzen 9 5900, 32G of ram from a reputable supplier. Up to date and absolutely rock solid no issues.

I've used Reason since the very beginning and even in the dark old days of it being a closed system the one thing that kept me was the stability, you could just switch it on and work. That seems to have gone.
I work in software and if something I worked on got out in this state my boss would have my guts for garters.

[Hoboys]

That's what I said. They won't apologize, though. "Reason works fine for most people" is their official line. I ended up getting a refund, but I had a problem where it kept crashing without saving and that's without any VSTs used. I thought I won't be able to work in low res again, but saving your sanity made it well worth rolling back.

[avasopht]

I work in software and if something I worked on got out in this state my boss would have my guts for garters.

It's a gremlin type bug.

They deployed a new GUI system with GPU acceleration, hi-dpi rendering with zoom and while taking OS resolution scaling into account.

My money is on these bugs hiding in old code that had been shielded by the old GUI code. For example, it could be a buffer overrun that had previously been overwriting unused graphics buffers but now is corrupting critical portions of memory.

I figured it would take at least 3-4 months, but man was I being overly optimistic.

[guitfnky]

it’s not in a great spot right now. like you, I’ve got a fairly beefy newer PC (just a 3900x here though, w/64 GB RAM). a busy project that ran flawlessly in 11 is glitching out on me at a 128 sample buffer size even though the DSP meter is barely above halfway.

a couple of weeks ago I had been working on it and changed the buffer size while the track was playing (something that worked fine in every earlier version), and I started freaking out getting a program not responding message, since I’d made some important edits I hadn’t saved. I decided that rather than killing it and losing my progress, I’d at least see if leaving it to sort itself out would work—I was lucky, and it did. I came back 20 minutes later and it had finished whatever it needed to, and I was able to save. not a great experience, but at least I know it’s not as stable as it used to be.

[withnail]

Just been working through a load more device errors and exceptions. Shocking low quality, clearly not fit for release.
Hopefully they’ll get their game together and sort this, then I’ll stick with the first stable version they can manage to bang out.

They’re not the only ones though, had a kettle less than 18 months and the switch won’t latch. Tried fixing it, can’t get parts. Wasn’t a cheap kettle either.

Also bought a garden fork, also not cheap. Snapped like a cocktail stick.

[rgdaniel]

[Loque]

Just been working through a load more device errors and exceptions. Shocking low quality, clearly not fit for release.
Hopefully they’ll get their game together and sort this, then I’ll stick with the first stable version they can manage to bang out.

They’re not the only ones though, had a kettle less than 18 months and the switch won’t latch. Tried fixing it, can’t get parts. Wasn’t a cheap kettle either.

Also bought a garden fork, also not cheap. Snapped like a cocktail stick.

Agree. Somethings wrong theese days. I have 20 year old games running fluid and 1 year old games crash like hell and have countless bugs. And on top, the software gets quicker slower than CPUs get faster

[avasopht]

And on top, the software gets quicker slower than CPUs get faster

Ain't that the truth ...

My first computer had a 20mb hard-drive ... ...

Pretty much every background service/app uses up more than that when doing nothing!

[orthodox]

And on top, the software gets quicker slower than CPUs get faster

It has to be this way. Part of the added performance is absorbed by the increased product complexity.

[Loque]

And on top, the software gets quicker slower than CPUs get faster

It has to be this way. Part of the added performance is absorbed by the increased product complexity.

Which complexity? Still window based UIs. Still some sending data to graphics and sound chips. Nothing fancier than back in the time. And i could work faster or at least as fast 20-30 years back, even than with visual UIs with windows. Probably not the high DSP stuff needed for ultra raytraycing and sound rendering, but most of the stuff worked pretty good and fast. Today even a simple "Hello World" with a C compiler needs easily half MB. I mean...cmon! That is more memory most computers had back in the 80s and they had games, music, multimedia, network and all that stuff...

Maybe its just a problem of the bad OS we have today. Windows is sht as fck and Apple is even more crap... For what do i need to install a few GB just for an OS?

The most complexity just comes from bad programming, too many unneccessary features and ppl which cannot manage their code and have no clue how to write easily maintainable code...And most devs dont have a clue how to optimize code and know what happens with there code in the CPU today. They just write in the hope that it works somehow...

*rant over*

[orthodox]

*rant over*

As if it could be done any better... People are working hard, doing their best

[crimsonwarlock]

The most complexity just comes from bad programming, too many unneccessary features and ppl which cannot manage their code and have no clue how to write easily maintainable code.

Wrong. Most complexity comes from the fact that applications need to run on ever more complex operating systems, which in turn need to be able to interface with more complex infrastructures like networking and more complex peripherals. It is a cascading problem, and it will only get worse. Add to that the fact that software complexity has reached a level where no single human can comprehend what is actually happening inside any seriously sized codebase. There are actual solutions to this problem, but those are complex as well (and incredibly expensive).

[withnail]

It doesn’t matter how hard they think they’re trying out how complex the task is. This isn’t good enough. We pay a lot of money for this software, if they can’t get it into a better shape than this latest release then maybe they need to try harder.

[deigm]

I had my first crash today. LUCKILY I'd hit ctrl+s a few seconds earlier. No issue with previous versions of 12 but todays session was jittery and completly crashed twice.
The latest roadmap reads sort of like they are finished squashing bugs and moving on to VST3. I'm sure that's just image control/marketing or whatever though, and bug squashing won't actually stop. I imagine in the software development business that's business as usual.
I don't mean to rag on the reason studios team and I won't pretend I know the first thing about coding. The upgrade was obviously a huge undertaking and I look forward to enjoying the fruits of their efforts for years to come.
I just hope this is a temporary rough patch and not what we can expect from the new 'agile' approach to development.
I don't care if it means we dont see VST3 for years, stability should be non-negotiable. It doesn't matter how much I love reason if I can't use it without loosing chunks of work randomly.
Maybe an auto-save feature should become a priority while they sort out the kinks.

[mcatalao]

First things first... Reason 12, at least on Windows, has got more and more stable for me from 12.1 to 12.5. I don't have mos of the issues people are complaining, and I can work with reason with no troubles.

As for what you guys are saying, a lot of the work they were doing in the last 5 years has reviewed a lot of the legacy code. Yes there's probably some more obscure stuff that still might be lurking here or there. But TBH, after 4 or 5 years rebuilding the application since they added VST2 support, I don't believe these are too much and there are ways to isolate these parts of the software. So it might be a mess, but a controlled mess.

[kitekrazy]

Just been working through a load more device errors and exceptions. Shocking low quality, clearly not fit for release.
Hopefully they’ll get their game together and sort this, then I’ll stick with the first stable version they can manage to bang out.

They’re not the only ones though, had a kettle less than 18 months and the switch won’t latch. Tried fixing it, can’t get parts. Wasn’t a cheap kettle either.

Also bought a garden fork, also not cheap. Snapped like a cocktail stick.

Agree. Somethings wrong theese days. I have 20 year old games running fluid and 1 year old games crash like hell and have countless bugs. And on top, the software gets quicker slower than CPUs get faster

We are in an era of very poor developing. I've come to the point most developers never use their products. You will see it in everything, even a phone app to use for a grocery store.

I find myself playing games that came out during the XP/W7 era is because they are also better. The worst developers I think are in the gaming industry. I would never let one near the multimedia development.

[joeyluck]

I would suggest people join the beta and report any issues you are experiencing and include log files.

https://www.reasonstudios.com/beta-test/signup

Performance issues and bugs seem to vary between users and systems. While some issues might sound or look similar, I wouldn't sit back and hope that someone else's report of their issues and a fix for what they have reported is going to fix it for me and my system.

[avasopht]

I find myself playing games that came out during the XP/W7 era is because they are also better. The worst developers I think are in the gaming industry. I would never let one near the multimedia development.

Video games development is much more complex, and they tend to be the best developers.

However, they are forced by marketing to release the games before they're complete, so it's silly to judge them on that. It's not like they don't fix the bugs.

[avasopht]

I don't mean to rag on the reason studios team and I won't pretend I know the first thing about coding. The upgrade was obviously a huge undertaking and I look forward to enjoying the fruits of their efforts for years to come.

Bugs are unavoidable during the process of changing complex interlinked systems.

All that's happened here is that they released it during the process of change before it was fully ready.

[withnail]

As deign says above stability should be non negotiable especially on a creative platform. Getting your paying customers to report bugs and submit log files is not right. That’s what a QA department are for. I’m not at work, this is my hobby why should I be working out where log files are and how to submit them?
Good quality first.
It’s not that hard.
It’s just not fashionable anymore.

[avasopht]

As deign says above stability should be non negotiable especially on a creative platform. Getting your paying customers to report bugs and submit log files is not right. That’s what a QA department are for. I’m not at work, this is my hobby why should I be working out where log files are and how to submit them?
Good quality first.
It’s not that hard.
It’s just not fashionable anymore.

As I said, software development can be far more complex than you are able to imagine.

During a large change like this, there will be instabilities that the developers will iron out. These are inevitable things.

All that has happened here is that it was released before ironing out the instabilities.

It doesn't mean the PROGRAMMERS don't care about quality or anything. Just that MARKETING has decided to release it now and persist with mostly positive-only communication.

Also, the instability was rare enough to not reveal its full extent during testing until it was rolled out to tens of thousands of users. No matter how much testing you do, you can't account for minute differences among tens or hundreds of thousands of machines.

We've got to be grown-up about these things sometimes.

Throwing a tantrum and complaining and kicking and screaming comes across as a little self-entitled and brattish tbh.

[withnail]

I’m a software engineer pal, have been for 25 years so I don’t need to imagine the complexity.

And, tbh, I don’t need that experience to spot a bodge job when I see one.

[guitfnky]

of course you can’t lay blame solely at the feet of the developers. but you definitely can lay it solely at the feet of the company. I don’t think it’s throwing a tantrum to expect a piece of software you’ve spent hundreds of dollars on to function correctly, with stability, and minimal bugs. people have every right to expect a lot—we’ve paid for a lot. if that means they have to delay release, that’s better for end users—and in the long run, for RS—than what we have right now.

[Tweak]

Although, the instability was rare enough to not reveal its full extent until it was rolled out to tens of thousands of users.

Are you saying that the beta testing didn't find any reproducible bugs prior to release, or that these all got fixed, and what was left was undiscovered by testing?

[joeyluck]

As deign says above stability should be non negotiable especially on a creative platform. Getting your paying customers to report bugs and submit log files is not right. That’s what a QA department are for. I’m not at work, this is my hobby why should I be working out where log files are and how to submit them?
Good quality first.
It’s not that hard.
It’s just not fashionable anymore.

If you care enough... It's not that hard.

I report bugs for so much of the software I use and I don't hesitate to do it and provide as much info as I can. I want software I buy to work as best as it can on my system.

Don't assume any dev knows about the specific issues you are experiencing.