Reason 12 quality issues.

[avasopht]

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.

That's what I've been suggesting all along. Delay the release (or in this case, just be upfront about the state now that it's already out in the open).

Of course, we should expect working software. I wouldn't suggest otherwise.

What I'm commenting on are the attitudes and presumptions people are expressing.

[avasopht]

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.

Well, then you should have enough experience to understand what's sort of going on from a developer's perspective.

I've experienced hear identical bugs when rolling out a new GUI library. None of the bugs was in my library, of course (I don't write bugs ). But it exposed an uninitialized variable in code that had worked fine before (for obvious reasons).

Could just be one small miscalculation in the allocation of a vertex or texture buffer. Maybe it needed to round up the size when accounting for OS scaling or something but is rounding down elsewhere.

Either way, we are talking about an elusive and somewhat rare bug that was not so evident during testing and isn't easily reproducible either.

[Tweak]

Either way, we are talking about an elusive and somewhat rare bug that was not so evident during testing and isn't easily reproducible either.

Why do you keep on suggesting that bugs were not picked up during testing? Did you participate in the beta tests yourself, or is this speculation? I saw enough bugs in the first few minutes of using this software (and then confirmed them on different setups) to know the quality gate was set unusually low for a release.

[avasopht]

Why do you keep on suggesting that bugs were not picked up during testing? Did you participate in the beta tests yourself, or is this speculation? I saw enough bugs in the first few minutes of using this software (and then confirmed them on different setups) to know the quality gate was set unusually low for a release.

There are threads about this.

In a nutshell, some people experienced this during testing BUT it was not reproducible (even with the same hardware IIRC). If a bug isn't reproducible, even when trying to invoke it (and other users with the same hardware aren't able to reproduce it), you don't stall the release because 999 times out of 1,000, it's just a configuration issue on that one tester's machine.

So, while this happened to you the first time, it didn't for many others. Naturally, when it happens to you it probably seems like it must be happening like that for everyone. But this is actually pretty rare (apparently).

Personally, I've not recommended R12 or R+ for this very reason. Last thing I want is for someone else to be stuck with broken software.

I've also refrained from using R12 (I tried it out for a few days without any issues, but I don't want to take any chances).

[orthodox]

Why do you keep on suggesting that bugs were not picked up during testing?

I don't think you can suggest otherwise. I can speak only for myself, and before the release I had no clue about all those bugs discovered later.

[Tweak]

I have bugs I reported on day one of my involvement testing still awaiting a fix.

[orthodox]

I have bugs I reported on day one of my involvement testing still awaiting a fix.

I have too, but mine are minor ones in my opinion. If I were to release the product, I'd release it with them. First time I heard of that scary stuff, hangs and crashes was in September.

[Tweak]

I’m not going to talk specifically about beta testing here, as doing so would be inappropriate, but using the current stable release build of Reason, I’m more of a tester still than a user based on the bugs and behaviour I see. I’m on an older Mac OS version, still supported by RS, but have enough troubles I’ve really drastically reduced my creative - let it flow - type use of the application, and instead resort to doing small things, saving or restarting frequently. It’s an inherently untrustworthy experience, and one that really reduces the joy factor as a result.

[avasopht]

I’m not going to talk specifically about beta testing here, as doing so would be inappropriate, but using the current stable build of Reason, I’m more of a tester still than a user based on the bugs and behaviour I see. I’m on an older Mac OS version, still supported by RS, but have enough troubles I’ve really drastically reduced my creative - let it flow - type use of the application, and instead resort to doing small things, saving or restarting frequently. It’s an inherently untrustworthy experience, and one that really reduces the joy factor as a result.

That's really crappy.

I was really disappointed at how they handled this launch when the issues surfaced.

Anyone experiencing those issues should be given a refund and allowed to keep their license IMO.

I skipped R11 (but do have R11 Lite) and was looking forward to things like the stock SSL rack devices.

[Tweak]

I don’t want a refund, I love Reason, I want it fixed!

[DaveyG]

I was a Beta tester for R12. I reported several reproducible bugs that I would class as medium or severe. I didn't get any reply to any bug report and the bugs were still present in the release version, as reported by other users. It's clear that they were bound by their planned release date rather than by the overall quality of the software. If R12 was a car they would have been forced to recall it until the problems were fixed but this is software land, where you can get away with shipping sub-standard stuff on the promise that it will be better eventually. I think all but one of those bugs are now fixed but I can't verify because I have not upgraded to R12 and they decided to boot out of the Beta program anyone who stayed on R11 after the release.

I think I did a decent job in the Beta testing and I find it a bizarre decision to block users like me from continuing with the Beta testing. So bollocks to them. I'll save my energy, stay on R11 and spend my money elsewhere. Props used to have soul and care about shipping bulletproof software. Now they care about something else. Maybe one day they will find a new owner who cares about the right stuff again.

[avasopht]

I don’t want a refund, I love Reason, I want it fixed!

Sure, but it's still something that should be on the table.

I'm patiently waiting. It's taken much longer than I expected and does test our patience. But because I understood how big of a problem this was, I made a decision early on during Early Access not to buy into R12 until all of these issues have been resolved.

[jam-s]

I decided early on that R12 is a version to skip. By the time R13 is announced R12 hopefully then is stable again.

[orthodox]

Apparently I was lucky not to have had any problem with R12. Glad I've been using it since the release.

[Billy+]

I was a Beta tester for R12. I reported several reproducible bugs that I would class as medium or severe. I didn't get any reply to any bug report and the bugs were still present in the release version, as reported by other users. It's clear that they were bound by their planned release date rather than by the overall quality of the software. If R12 was a car they would have been forced to recall it until the problems were fixed but this is software land, where you can get away with shipping sub-standard stuff on the promise that it will be better eventually. I think all but one of those bugs are now fixed but I can't verify because I have not upgraded to R12 and they decided to boot out of the Beta program anyone who stayed on R11 after the release.

I think I did a decent job in the Beta testing and I find it a bizarre decision to block users like me from continuing with the Beta testing. So bollocks to them. I'll save my energy, stay on R11 and spend my money elsewhere. Props used to have soul and care about shipping bulletproof software. Now they care about something else. Maybe one day they will find a new owner who cares about the right stuff again.

I have to say that I agree with you on this fully, I tried the cheap subscription and I ended the subscription because of the bugs and cost increase but it definitely wouldn't have hurt them to offer a beta version to license holders as many of us have years of experience with Reason and would ultimately have worked for free to make it right.

As things stand I'm not even considering R12 as a viable version and will definitely be running a cheap trial before purchasing any future versions instead of just upgrading like I have for the last 11 versions.

[joeyluck]

I have bugs I reported on day one of my involvement testing still awaiting a fix.

Well you've done what you can. Are you still a tester?

[Tweak]

I have bugs I reported on day one of my involvement testing still awaiting a fix.

Well you've done what you can. Are you still a tester?

I certainly am Joey, an active one at that.

[joeyluck]

Well you've done what you can. Are you still a tester?

I certainly am Joey, an active one at that.

Ok, I was going to say to give them a mention about them over in the beta forum.

[Eprom]

*rant over*

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

I am sure they do, but don't release stuff BEFORE it is ready. That's a sure way to alienate your customers.

[Loque]

...That's a sure way to alienate your customers.

From my POV there is a scale. The good stuff on the one side, the bad stuff on the other and bugs, especially simple ones which could easily be catched or fixed or are not fixed within reasnable time, are on the bad stuff side.
If a dev or company gets too mich weight on the the bad side, i ignore and never buy again. They need to do quite a lot to get my trust back.

Here are a few companies i already left:
* Rob Papen
* Melda
* Waves
* IK Multimedia
* Softube
* And probably a big bunch of companies the names are already eliminated, badly associated or never got any good points in the positive scale in my brain...

Reasonstudios is currently in the balance...that is not a pretty good state IMO...and they just live from the good old times atm.

[orthodox]

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

I am sure they do, but don't release stuff BEFORE it is ready. That's a sure way to alienate your customers.

It's not black and white, there are degrees of readiness. Everything is not ready to some extent. It was just not correctly assessed by the RS at the time of the R12 release.

[Loque]

I am sure they do, but don't release stuff BEFORE it is ready. That's a sure way to alienate your customers.

It's not black and white, there are degrees of readiness. Everything is not ready to some extent. It was just not correctly assessed by the RS at the time of the R12 release.

Agree. The feedback i read (not only here) is "too many bugs" but good stuff with Combi2 and Mimic. So, i would say balanced

[avasopht]

*rant over*

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

There's definitely a hell of a lot of bloat nowadays.

Most of it is just because they aren't concerned and might have misunderstood the caution against premature optimisation and as a result habitually hold our CPUs and ram hostage.

There are lots of leaky abstractions out there. It might be rendering a graphic using the CPU because the library being used lacks and GPU acceleration, and then sending the loaded graphic to the GPU (so now you're maintaining at least 2-3 times the storage).

Or integrating a bunch of frameworks that each have their own ad-hoc, bug riddled list processing functions littered around their modules that lead to deeply nested call stacks to do what could have been achieved in a single loop (a little hyperbole, ... but maybe not).

[djsmex]

I have a different issue with R12 which is a direct result of the new GUI that renders almost all of the already limited screen reader support to just the top and context menus. Reason hasn't got any awards for accessibility neither have many other popular DAWs like Ableton, Cubass etc. That said Reason to my knowledge is the only long standing DAW that has a full backwards compatibility record. You can still load a R1 song in R12 and it'll sound the same.
Reaper, Logic and ProTools all have some level of accessibility and Native-Instruments NKS offers some level of accessibility to VSTs via their hardware. However, being a Windows user, Logic and ProTools accessibility is limited to the Mac VoiceOver, leaving just Reaper and NI NKS.
RRP doesn't have Remote support and MIDI mapping is far from ideal. This leaving me the last option of using Remote with web tech to provide some level of accessibility.
My only hope is for RS to extend Remote to offer a full and complete list of remote items to cover everything from the browser panel, sequencer to the tool window. Then with web tech I can make R12 accessible to blind users like myself.
Small graphic glitches that don't impact the sound or performance to me are minor issues, like scuff markes on a guitar case, it still plays and sounds the same but take away the strings and you loose the sound, you can not play it.

[kitekrazy]

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.

I disagree. Requirements alone speak that.