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:
- 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.
- 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.