Compression in Reason 4 and Ableton 8

[greentail]

Hi I have a problem that I can't seem to get my head around:

I make electronic hip hop and have made 100s of songs in Reason, and I am trying to play a live set in ableton. I love the mastering effects in Reason which allows my songs to swell and fade with the bass drum very smoothly. When I import different audio clips from Reason into Ableton of all my instruments, the volumes are all over the place because they need the other channels playing (when exporting from Reason) to make it 'bounce'. What I really need is direct outs on the virtual mixer in Reason, but they do not exist. When I put a compressor on the master in Ableton, no matter how much I tweak it I can't get it to sound the same as it did in Reason. Has anyone ran into this problem?

My options are:
1. Set up MIDI channels in Live and route all MIDI back to Reason instruments, and then send the audio from Reason to live as a final stereo channel. The shame is, I can only effect the MIDI notes, and not the cool audio effects on each instrument/channel in live.

2. Buy a damn good plugin that can replicate the Reason mastering. anyone?

3. Buy Propellorhead's Record, so that I can send all the audio channels from Live to Reason, use Reason compressors and mastering, and then send that to the master channel in Ableton.


I get why the two sound different - Reason manipulates MIDI, and Live has to deal with the same information but in audio waveforms; this is why Live sounds much more chopped up and irregular.

All help is really appreciated.

[tlennon]

Most of your assumptions are incorrect. Do a search on Rewire and you will be a happy camper. This will allow you to have the best of both worlds.

[greentail]

Hi,

First id like to say thanks for your help.
The one thing that is scaring me about using Rewire (instead of easily exporting audio files from Reason songs) is you have to set up 2 channels (one for audio and MIDI) for a single instrument in Reason. If you intend to play 30 songs that have 10-15 instruments each in a row for live use, thats 600 channels in a single ableton file. You would also have to close down and open up a new Reason file every time you want to play a new one - how would you mix multiple songs together? the only way I can think of is making a super huge Reason file with 100s of instruments. This is why I thought it would be easier to export audio clips from Reason and compress them in Live. Hope this makes sense, I'm still very new to live.

cheers.

[abluesky]

External instrument plugin.