It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Discuss anything related to audio or music production.
jlgrimes
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by jlgrimes » Thu Sep 05, 2019 1:07 pm

Stormchild wrote:
Wed Aug 28, 2019 3:58 am
doghouse wrote:
Tue Aug 27, 2019 4:18 pm
I missed the part about Rewire being dropped...really? That's a drag because with Rewire you can still use Reason's sequencer if you like.
But why bother? Having to flip back and forth between two separate arrangements was always one of the biggest downsides of ReWire. It’s not like Reason’s bare bones sequencer has any special features that aren’t matched or beaten by whatever DAW you plug it into.

1. Pattern automation of Redrum, Matrix, Drum Sequencer (I dont see this being easier to do in Live as Reason created pattern automation lanes specifically for these devices). Drag and drop of midi files would fix this though. Also Drum Racks is overall better than Reason Redrum, but I'm not sure if Ableton M4L has anything like the Drum Sequencer (I could be wrong). It is actually pretty good.

2. Comping vocal tracks. Reason is decent here. Ableton doesn't even have this.

3. Pitch editing vocal tracks. Another thing difficult to do in Ableton as Ableton lacks ARA support and Reason has a decent pitch editor built in.

4. Utilize Reason's timestretching. It is pretty clean sounding.


Other than that though, Reason sequencer is pretty lacking but it did have a few specific areas in where it was better than Live. Including this would have allowed users to use best features of each program. Ableton's generally faster workflow in arranging, mixing, married with Reasons comping, pitch editing all without needing to export stems and what not.

My guess it probably would have overcomplicated some users who just think of Reason as a group of sound modules but even having the option to enable/disable would have been cool, unique and cutting edge. I kind of agree on the mixer though. It is too kludgy.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Sat Sep 07, 2019 3:59 pm

jlgrimes wrote:
Thu Sep 05, 2019 1:07 pm
1. Pattern automation of Redrum, Matrix, Drum Sequencer (I dont see this being easier to do in Live as Reason created pattern automation lanes specifically for these devices). Drag and drop of midi files would fix this though. Also Drum Racks is overall better than Reason Redrum, but I'm not sure if Ableton M4L has anything like the Drum Sequencer (I could be wrong). It is actually pretty good.

2. Comping vocal tracks. Reason is decent here. Ableton doesn't even have this.

3. Pitch editing vocal tracks. Another thing difficult to do in Ableton as Ableton lacks ARA support and Reason has a decent pitch editor built in.

4. Utilize Reason's timestretching. It is pretty clean sounding.

Other than that though, Reason sequencer is pretty lacking but it did have a few specific areas in where it was better than Live. Including this would have allowed users to use best features of each program. Ableton's generally faster workflow in arranging, mixing, married with Reasons comping, pitch editing all without needing to export stems and what not.

My guess it probably would have overcomplicated some users who just think of Reason as a group of sound modules but even having the option to enable/disable would have been cool, unique and cutting edge. I kind of agree on the mixer though. It is too kludgy.
These are good points. I totally forgot about pattern lanes in Reason’s sequencer. For me, none of those things make it worth switching between two separate apps though.

I suppose they could have kept ReWire around for those who actually like Reason’s sequencer, but I don’t think they discontinued it without a good reason. My guess is it was a burden to keep it working across OS updates on both platforms, and with all the various ReWire hosts.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Sat Sep 07, 2019 4:03 pm

jlgrimes wrote:
Thu Sep 05, 2019 12:53 pm
That said the VST mode has severe limitations. […] Also the Rack doesn't host VSTs. Probably not a big deal for a program like Live that has Racks, but for other DAWS, this omission is pretty bad as it kind of weakens applications for the Combinator.
Reason doesn’t host VSTs in ReWire mode either.

Machinesworking
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Machinesworking » Sat Sep 07, 2019 5:59 pm

Stormchild wrote:
Wed Aug 28, 2019 3:58 am
doghouse wrote:
Tue Aug 27, 2019 4:18 pm
I missed the part about Rewire being dropped...really? That's a drag because with Rewire you can still use Reason's sequencer if you like.
But why bother? Having to flip back and forth between two separate arrangements was always one of the biggest downsides of ReWire. It’s not like Reason’s bare bones sequencer has any special features that aren’t matched or beaten by whatever DAW you plug it into.
One of the main advantages of rewire is/was that you could work on a song in Live, then move to Logic, DP etc. to finish it without having to move all audio, MIDI, instruments etc. to the other DAW. Live 10 allows users to even use Push 2 as a controller for Live while it's in slave mode. Reaper allows VST hosting while in slave mode. Makes me wonder if Props didn't just look to discontinue Rewire because they weren't for whatever reasons able to pull off the sort of rewire efficiency that their competition was?

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Mon Sep 09, 2019 5:04 am

Machinesworking wrote:
Sat Sep 07, 2019 5:59 pm
One of the main advantages of rewire is/was that you could work on a song in Live, then move to Logic, DP etc. to finish it without having to move all audio, MIDI, instruments etc. to the other DAW. Live 10 allows users to even use Push 2 as a controller for Live while it's in slave mode. Reaper allows VST hosting while in slave mode. Makes me wonder if Props didn't just look to discontinue Rewire because they weren't for whatever reasons able to pull off the sort of rewire efficiency that their competition was?
That's a nice idea in theory, but Live doesn't host plugins in ReWire mode. As soon as you start it as a ReWire slave, it disables all your plugins, so unless your project consists entirely of audio clips, this is not a viable approach (I can't even use my external MIDI gear, because I use it via External Instrument plugins). Reason has the same issue — it won't load VSTs in ReWire mode. It's cool that Reaper allows it; I don't know why Live and Reason don't, but there must be some technical barriers. If it was easy to make it work, I'm sure they would.

I use a similar approach with Maschine where I sometimes fire it up in standalone mode to play with some ideas, and if it starts to come together, I'll load the whole thing into Logic or Live and keep working on it. I can either trigger scenes in Maschine with MIDI clips in Live or Logic and incorporate them into the main arrangement, or just drag the patterns out as MIDI and migrate all the sequencing to the DAW. But there are two important differences that make this a way better experience than ReWire:
  1. Because Maschine is loaded as a plugin, it becomes part of the parent project, so I don't have to keep flipping back and forth between two apps and remembering to save in both. When I'm going through unfinished stuff I worked on months or years ago and can't remember what it sounded like, I don't have to launch two apps and load two projects just to find out.
  2. Maschine is fully controllable with the mk3 hardware, so I never need to open its window. It stays completely out of my way. If you want to use Reason alongside your DAW, a second monitor solves part of the problem, but you still have to switch back and forth all the time.
Although I've generally had good experiences with ReWire (I've used Logic + Reason via ReWire since 2002), it does occasionally cause either the host or slave to crash, and it's a PITA to recover from that. Regardless of which one crashed, I have to close the other one and relaunch both in the right order, reopen the projects, then figure out what I lost. Logic, Live, and Reason are all very stable and pretty much never crash on their own; I only have stability problems when ReWire is involved.

I think they could address people's concerns about losing ReWire by including the full app in the plugin (instead of just the rack) to make it easier to migrate projects from Reason standalone to another DAW. If they can do that in a way that doesn't have a significant performance penalty for people who don't want to use Reason's mixer or sequencer, I don't see why not (I haven't specifically tested the performance delta, but Maschine seems to run equally well as a plugin as it does standalone). Maybe if there's enough demand they'll do that in a future update. If that sounds like it could work for you, you should get in touch with them and let them know, and encourage others to do the same. I've always found them very receptive to feedback.

Machinesworking
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Machinesworking » Mon Sep 09, 2019 5:30 pm

Yes, Live can't host VSTs for this to work. Live isn't the only reason to want Rewire to still be supported though. Plus it is/was a great way to ad Live's time stretching to other DAWs etc. That might be compromised in the future with OS updates as rewire slowly disappears. Personally I still can't figure out why a newer v2.0 turbo charged version of Rewire wasn't worked on? but mostly I'm disappointed for software like Live and Reaper, which both give fantastic rewire support. Mostly if I'm using Live as a rewire slave I missed the Push 2 and the drum machine support it gives, which Ableton figured out, just to have Props discontinue rewire... Reaper allows full VSTi support in rewire slave mode, even MIDI support for Roli hardware, it's crazy.

As far as Reason is concerned, I'm 100% going to update my literal copy of Reason 2.5! 8O
Right now you can get the upgrade for about $110 at JRR Shop. Since I haven't used it in so long I probably will never use it with VSTs, just as a way to get a huge amount of cool toys into Reaper and Live. :D

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Thu Sep 12, 2019 1:12 pm

Machinesworking wrote:
Mon Sep 09, 2019 5:30 pm
Personally I still can't figure out why a newer v2.0 turbo charged version of Rewire wasn't worked on?
The version we’ve been using for the past 15 years already was ReWire 2.0 (I’ve forgotten the details by now, but according to the only official info I can still find, it added “MIDI streaming and a toolkit for communication between the applications”). At one point you had to actually download and install ReWire (I’d forgotten about that too…just came across it while looking for info). Eventually it was just built into any app that supports it.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Mon Sep 16, 2019 9:56 am

Having used the beta for a few days now, I think I have to concede they should have kept ReWire around, at least for now. The one downside of the Reason rack plugin is it's meant to be used as a single instrument (or effect chain, for the effect version). This means you need a separate instance of the Reason plugin for each instrument. The plugin can contain as many devices as you want, and it has plenty of audio outputs, which can be routed to individual tracks in your DAW's mixer, but any MIDI sent to it will be received by all top-level devices in the rack. You can use a Combinator to do splits or velocity-based layering, but there's no way to assign individual instruments to specific MIDI channels.

What I was hoping to do is load a single Reason rack plugin and use it for all my Reason devices within a project. To me that's one of the really cool things about Reason. For example, if you want your kick drums to trigger some effect on another device, you can route the Redrum gate output for the kick to whatever you want. Having all your instruments split up into separate Reason rack instances makes it impossible to do that sort of stuff.

Ideally the rack plugin should have the "Advanced MIDI" functionality that exists in the hardware interface device at the top of the rack in Reason standalone. I understand there are some challenges at the DAW level, but it's certainly possible to send MIDI to one plugin from multiple tracks, at least in some DAWs. Ableton Live lets you route the MIDI output of any MIDI track to a plugin on any other MIDI track, and you can also specify the channel. In Logic you might have to rig something up in the Environment.

Maybe they'll add the Advanced MIDI functionality to the rack plugin in one of the point releases of Reason 11, but it seems they dropped ReWire support a little bit prematurely. I guess you can just keep using Reason 10 for now.

jlgrimes
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by jlgrimes » Mon Sep 16, 2019 2:17 pm

One interesting thing about this is that I haven't realized how far Reason's sequencer has lagged behind.

I'm pretty sure alot of Reason only users are upset as the main feature kind of implies to use another DAW. That can be a big investment of money and time. But nowadays there are alot of free or very low cost DAWs. I've used Reaper in the past for Audio. For Audio, it is a great program and gives Pro Tools and Studio One a run for the money but I felt its midi was pretty lacking. I actually forced myself yesterday to make a track using Reaper's midi and it wasn't half bad. It's piano roll is actually pretty nice now. It definitely isn't for everybody but it does have some cool functions like non destructive Quantize where your notes even reflect the settings but you can always get back to your original performance. Pretty cool for a $60 program. Reaper isn't for everybody though, it actually suffers somewhat from too many options and it is a DAW that pretty much needs to be customized to get the most out of it.

Live though have too many bells and whistles for me to switch to Reaper but for a new person starting out things couldn't be more easier now.

Machinesworking
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Machinesworking » Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:50 pm

Stormchild wrote:
Thu Sep 12, 2019 1:12 pm
The version we’ve been using for the past 15 years already was ReWire 2.0 (I’ve forgotten the details by now, but according to the only official info I can still find, it added “MIDI streaming and a toolkit for communication between the applications”). At one point you had to actually download and install ReWire (I’d forgotten about that too…just came across it while looking for info). Eventually it was just built into any app that supports it.
Rewire v1.8.7 build 145
So yeah, not 2.0.

It gets installed by various apps, even Live will instal rewire into your system etc. It's not built in, as much as added to the instal. Some application I used installed an older version over the latest version for instance, which had me have to actually go to props site to get the latest version etc.
Having used the beta for a few days now, I think I have to concede they should have kept ReWire around, at least for now.
Good, glad you came around. Rewire isn't just for Reason, Live rewires into Reaper and even better Reaper rewires into Live with full functionality, you can host VSTs and use MPE instruments in rewire mode, it's pretty nuts. I'm going to be pretty bummed when rewire disappears completely in some future version of OSX and Windows for this and other reasons.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:35 am

Machinesworking wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:50 pm
Rewire v1.8.7 build 145
So yeah, not 2.0.

It gets installed by various apps, even Live will instal rewire into your system etc. It's not built in, as much as added to the instal. Some application I used installed an older version over the latest version for instance, which had me have to actually go to props site to get the latest version etc.
Maybe they use separate version numbers for the ReWire protocol vs. the shared library. Here's a developer info page from a long time ago (it's not dated, but it refers to Mac OS X 10.5, which was released in 2007) that clearly says "ReWire 2":
https://www.propellerheads.com/develope ... retechinfo

Here's a 2006 article that refers to ReWire 2:
https://www.emusician.com/gear/making-c ... ith-rewire

Pretty sure it's even older than that.

Anyway, regardless of the version number, I take your point about it being developed further. I don't know why it wasn't.
Machinesworking wrote:
Mon Sep 16, 2019 8:50 pm
Good, glad you came around. Rewire isn't just for Reason, Live rewires into Reaper and even better Reaper rewires into Live with full functionality, you can host VSTs and use MPE instruments in rewire mode, it's pretty nuts. I'm going to be pretty bummed when rewire disappears completely in some future version of OSX and Windows for this and other reasons.
Well, if the Reason rack plugin worked the way I thought it would (a single Reason rack instance for all the instruments and effects you use within a project), there would at least be no need for ReWire in Reason anymore. Unfortunately the initial version of the rack plugin doesn't have a way to route incoming MIDI to specific devices, and only has one stereo input (plus a second one for sidechaining), so the whole thing is really a single instrument or effect from the point of view of the DAW. I'm hoping the plan is to add those things so we can do everything in one Reason rack instance. They definitely shouldn't have dropped ReWire support without that.

I can see the value in the other scenarios you described. It's unclear whether ReWire itself is completely going away, or only being dropped from Reason. Remember it was jointly developed with Steinberg, so I don't know if it's entirely up to Propellerhead (I can't get used to "Reason Studios" yet) to kill it. I think they should just open source it so someone else can take it from here.

doghouse
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by doghouse » Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:59 am

I've heard rumors that some of the new security features in Mac OS Catalina will break Rewire, this may have something to do with the change.

Machinesworking
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Machinesworking » Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:07 pm

Stormchild wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 12:35 am
I can see the value in the other scenarios you described. It's unclear whether ReWire itself is completely going away, or only being dropped from Reason. Remember it was jointly developed with Steinberg, so I don't know if it's entirely up to Propellerhead (I can't get used to "Reason Studios" yet) to kill it. I think they should just open source it so someone else can take it from here.
The value is insane. Right now, you can 'demo' Reaper host Equator or Cypher 2 etc. and you get full MPE support rewired into Live. Not to mention the rest of Reaper as a package. I'm going to bet Reaper eventually comes out with a VST version after rewire disappears entirely, then we're stuck with whatever support if it comes, for MPE that Live gets.
doghouse wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:59 am
I've heard rumors that some of the new security features in Mac OS Catalina will break Rewire, this may have something to do with the change.
Yeah, my goal is to get Reason 10 here, then I have access to both the VST version and the ReWire version. Plus I'm planning on freezing this Mac Pro here in Mojave or back to High Sierra if Mojave doesn't fix some of it's issues before Catelina drops.

It's too decent of a machine to sell for what I would get for it, and OSX has a horrible habit of breaking old software. I'm at that point to where it's just time to start thinking of certain boxes as hardware. This thing will be a rewire and VEP beast in the next couple years as I head back to laptops for main production work now that they're ridiculously powerful.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Tue Sep 17, 2019 10:27 pm

doghouse wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 11:59 am
I've heard rumors that some of the new security features in Mac OS Catalina will break Rewire, this may have something to do with the change.
This doesn't seem likely to be true. ReWire is just a protocol for apps to talk to each other that specific apps opt into by loading a shared library; the opt-in model makes it very unlikely to be a security concern. If it could directly capture the audio output of any app, that would be a concern, but Rogue Amoeba makes several apps that do exactly that, and they're updating those for Catalina as we speak (some of which are already working).

It's possible something changed in Catalina that requires ReWire to be updated, but Apple would definitely have worked with Propellerhead to sort that out if that was the case, as Apple's own Logic and GarageBand both support ReWire.

My guess is Propellerhead is trying to focus their development efforts on a shorter list of priorities, especially after shutting down Allihoopa, which didn't work out the way they hoped.

Stormchild
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Re: It;s a good time to be a Live & Reason user....

Post by Stormchild » Tue Sep 17, 2019 10:54 pm

Machinesworking wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:07 pm
The value is insane. Right now, you can 'demo' Reaper host Equator or Cypher 2 etc. and you get full MPE support rewired into Live. Not to mention the rest of Reaper as a package. I'm going to bet Reaper eventually comes out with a VST version after rewire disappears entirely, then we're stuck with whatever support if it comes, for MPE that Live gets.
Looks like Reaper has gotten pretty interesting over the years. I have a vague recollection that when when it first launched, it was basically a bad imitation of Reason that required you to choose a set of devices in advance and have it build out your virtual rack; you couldn't just drag in more devices on the fly. I remember thinking it was incredibly slow, ugly, and just plain terrible. Can't seem to find any screenshots or info from back then. Lately I'm hearing all kinds of great things about it. Looks very flexible and powerful.
Machinesworking wrote:
Tue Sep 17, 2019 7:07 pm
OSX has a horrible habit of breaking old software. I'm at that point to where it's just time to start thinking of certain boxes as hardware. This thing will be a rewire and VEP beast in the next couple years as I head back to laptops for main production work now that they're ridiculously powerful.
This is what pros do (not just in audio, but other industries as well). Once you have a setup that works, you never mess with it. If you absolutely need to update something to fix a bug or use a new feature, clone your entire hard drive to an external, boot from that, and test it there first. The only problem is if you ever buy a new Mac, it will ship with the current version of macOS, and you can't install an older version that came out before the machine did.

Apple's overall platform strategy is to keep moving forward, which often breaks older software. It's a bummer when old apps stop working, but this approach has allowed macOS to improve in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible (not just maintaining security and reliability but actually improving them, not to mention moving the whole thing from PPC to x86, and probably from x86 to ARM in the future). Windows has always prioritized backwards compatibility over everything else, which has obvious benefits, but it's also why we're all still stuck using the ancient x86 architecture that chugs power and belches out heat. It also requires a monumental effort to keep that whole beast working, while attempting to graft new features onto it like Homer Simpson stapling garbage to an already-full garbage can because he doesn't want to have to take out the trash.

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