I'm not sure how to take your comment here... Studio One for example is light years ahead of Reason for workflow, speed, sequencer features, etc. I just recently used the new version at a colleague's Studio and the sheer speed of working was night and day compared to Reason. Each persons mileage may vary, but for me at least..
Let's start with a really embarrassing one; the "combinator" controls in Studio One are better than in Reason! 8 knobs, 8 switches, and 2 XY pads. Exactly the kind of thing Reason
used to be the leader at.
Everything is Studio One was right there in one simple click or drag. Editing, arranging, adding fx sends, etc was super fast. Anything can be selected and copied/generalized to multiple tracks at a time. All the tools from the clumsy F8 box in Reason can be done simply by drawing with the mouse or hitting keys, plus there are long-overdue functions such as instantly drawable compression/expansion/modification of MIDI and automation, which are still not available in Reason (unless you pay extra for a CV utility or player to -you guessed it- workaround!). In Reason, the most basic things are very simple and quick, but anything beyond that becomes tedious and laborious very quickly. In Studio One,
everything was very efficient, at least as far as I saw.
And of course, there are a ton of things you can do in Studio One that you simply
cannot do in Reason, such as video playback and switching between "sequencer" style and musical score. The integration of the main sequencer window, transport section, browser and so on, seem more logical and less fiddly than Reason. The different parts all "talk to" each other. Infinitely better metronome also lol. None of these things by themselves seems very big, but its
everything together that makes the difference.
The one-and-only saving grace of Reason for my particular workflow - and the thing that keeps me using Reason, and mostly enjoying it, is that in Reason all of the instrument and FX devices in your track are visible right there, wired together in their groups, showing instant feedback with meters and VUs and lights, not needing to be popped up, or opened and then pinned somewhere. It's very tactile and satisfying.
I
love that part of the Reason experience, and it has kept me using it regularly since Reason 2.5. (It's also why I don't care to use the RRP. I don't use Reason as a collection of "plugins", I use it like a studio). If they could get the quality of life stuff right, it would be such a joy to write music in Reason. However, I have actually had to stop working on projects in Reason a couple of times and switch to another DAW, because it simply was too limited to handle them. And it was stupid little things that should have been fixed years ago, like not being able to zoom out to show the whole project.
DougalDarkly wrote: ↑08 Dec 2020
chaosroyale wrote: ↑08 Dec 2020
I appreciate that you don't care as much about the look, but if the
only important thing is function, why use Reason at all? Live, Bitwig and Studio One are much better functionality-wise, more macro controls, easier modulation, more sequencing tools, etc.
That's a joke right?