Flavolous wrote: ↑15 Nov 2017
content which they worked hard to put together (and its top quality content from my experience in the beta), I think that would have sounded like a much bigger deal, Grain is the only must have from the upgrade imo.
Think about this for a moment: How is cheaply licensing in other peoples' existing and long-since amortized samplesets "working hard"?
Answer: it is not.
That's not saying licensing is automatically a bad thing
per se: all or nearly all of the FSB/ORK sample content is likewise, but licensing is pretty much a definition of
not working hard: it's a short-cut designed to circumvent effort for long-term reward for small upfront outlay, that itself is a lot, lot less than the cost of doing the work new from scratch in terms of time and labour. Licensing, as in this model, is not even getting someone else to work hard, as again, that hard work has almost certainly already been paid for via previous sales in other formats.
And then to compound the effortless shortcut of licensing, when you look at the Drum Supply Kong Kits, for example, you'll find they use a single text pad template across all patches, regardless of the content of the pad. Thus you end up with claps labelled as snares, lo and hi congas labelled as lo and hi toms (and either side of an actual mid tom just to make it extra stupid), etc etc, and fuck knows what any of the Perc pads do until you press them. I know that's a brutal and typically sweary assessment, but it's right there in the Reason 10 install for everyone to see if they choose to look and think about it what they're seeing and listening to. And failure to label pads is the very definition of half-arsed and lazy, and just generally not being bothered to do any polishing. It's shameful, and all for the lack of spending a morning auditioning pads and labelling them properly.
Yes, it's a chore, a bit of a grind and not as fun as gurning for Likes on Facebook live streams, but that's the difference between marketeers running the show and actual product managers who can manage a product and its content, aware it's the little details that make the difference between a good-looking headline and a usable product. Chores are what hard-working developers and hard-working content creators have to do, and not doing those text labels is the primary indicator to me of how much care and diligence Reason 10 had applied to it, and the sad fact is that demonstrably there was no attention to detail at all.
I've been playing with Grain the last few days. It is cool in and of itself, but after a while it becomes apparent it's rather a one-trick one pony. It does one thing quite well, but then gets a bit samey and the omissions start to become apparent. Heck, it doesn't even have reverse sample playback (other than manually using Sample Edit, but that would be a workaround using a general Reason tool, not a synth feature and so not something you can change on-the-fly, it's an either/or decision, short of creating two devices). So the grains and spectral edit are cool features for sure, and it absolutely offers something not otherwise
native to Reason, and as such may be worth the upgrade in and of itself to a lot of people. But it is limited, and together with Europa, I suspect many developers—as I'm sure Ochen, whose spot-on assessment yesterday rebooted this thread, also knows—are well aware they were clearly designed to rip off the best bits of two or three sample-loading REs as native devices that can run more efficiently than any RE will ever be able to. And it's strange how much devs are told PH want to boost RE sales, yet they neuter the market with similar native devices, thus reducing the need for RE purchases, for desperately short-termist goals like subscriptions and VST support. Don't buy that whole "VST was decided long before Verdane" line. Given that VST support for Reason (or my guess here, it was a proposed feature for Record 1.0) was originally designed, to some extent at least, back in 2007, then yes, it's literally true, as it was decided long, long before Verdane!
What many fail to realise with those kinds of carefully worded official statements, is that it's very specifically not the same as the decision to actually implement VST support when it was, and that can only have been for it to have been placed on the table as either a demand from Verdane last year, or, vastly more likely, as a very large and specific carrot for all potential investors in a pie-chart infused PowerPoint presentation* as early as Summer 2016. Investments don't have happen overnight, and we know from MHG's own posts that he was pushing hard for VST support, despite the fact that SDK2.5 was being worked on at the time, a clear conflict-of-interest imho. Given that the VST support release was right after SDK2.5 launched, it's hard to come to any other conclusion than VST support was added when it was specifically in order to faciliate investment from
someone. Any sensible business plan would have dictated giving SDK2.5 a chance to bed in and resolve new issues, and effectively amortize itself through new REs, but there was demonstrably never any serious intention to do that once it was decided to get that investment and buy-out.
Oh, and subscriptions? We were hoodwinked. Utterly hoodwinked.
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*This is a complete guess. It could well have been floating bar charts, the clever-looking ones that involve painting the first value the same as a background... I still have nightmares about PowerPoint.