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

[Machinesworking]

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.

I didn't really use it until 4, but I'm getting the impression you're mixing it up with Plogue Bidule maybe? The main weirdness in Reaper is a track starts off as anything, you set whether it's a MIDI, audio, Aux, or VI etc. That and that it's ridiculously scriptable, and ugly. It's also easily the biggest CPU saving DAW on either platform. roughly twice the CPU performance of Live. Other plusses are that it has nearly every feature. The only one I can name it doesn't have natively is Logic and Cubase's expression maps for orchestral work, and it has a script for it. <- It's not as elegant as Cubase or Logic that way though. There's also that it's fantastic with Push 2. Möss made a java application that's super sweet for Reaper and Bitwig. That brings the total to 4 DAWs, because there's a commercially available Reason app for Push 2 and 1.

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.

I know a good amount of pros, if they have the space they definitely have an older machine around or two. Some of them are completely computer illiterate, which is always surprising and funny. The disadvantage of older OS's and computers is obvious now. Massive X doesn't run on older Xeon chips. My Mac Pro while ridiculously powerful at 12 cores 3.33ghz can't run it because the required instruction set that no one was taking advantage of at the time is used for it and NI decided to cut their losses with it.

I plan on getting a used 8 core i9 2.3ghz machine with a terabyte SSD next year. those things are out of hand powerful! My 2012 is showing it's age lately, mostly in terms of stripped out screws etc.

[Stormchild]

I didn't really use it until 4, but I'm getting the impression you're mixing it up with Plogue Bidule maybe?

I’ve never heard of Plogue Bidule (until now). I’m almost certain it was Reaper, because I remember the name struck me as suspiciously similar to Reason (and the concept of the app itself was setting up a “studio” by adding devices to a rack). Can’t remember exactly when, but I downloaded and tested one of the very early versions and it was truly awful. I can’t find any screenshots or info older than version 6, but I swear I didn’t imagine this!

It looks very capable now, and totally different from what I saw back then.

I know a good amount of pros, if they have the space they definitely have an older machine around or two. Some of them are completely computer illiterate, which is always surprising and funny. The disadvantage of older OS's and computers is obvious now. Massive X doesn't run on older Xeon chips. My Mac Pro while ridiculously powerful at 12 cores 3.33ghz can't run it because the required instruction set that no one was taking advantage of at the time is used for it and NI decided to cut their losses with it.

I plan on getting a used 8 core i9 2.3ghz machine with a terabyte SSD next year. those things are out of hand powerful! My 2012 is showing it's age lately, mostly in terms of stripped out screws etc.

I still have a drawer full of old laptops, including a PowerBook G4 that I kept telling myself I’ll someday restore with the original version of Mac OS X it shipped with, with Logic Pro 6 and old plugins like Absynth 2, Pro-53, impOSCar 1, so I can resurrect my old projects that won’t open properly anymore. Recently I realized I can just open the old Logic files in a text or hex editor and look for embedded strings in the otherwise unreadable binary garbage to figure out what patches were loaded in the plugins. With any luck those patches still exist in the current version of the plugin, or if they’re custom patches, hopefully I still have them and the file format hasn’t changed. I’ve managed to save a few old projects that way, but honestly with the number of plugins I have now, and many more years of sound design experience, it’s easier to just recreate the missing sounds (or replace them with better ones). I must be the only bozo who thinks someday he’s going to finish those old tracks from almost 20 years ago.

My iMac 5K (late 2015 quad core 4 GHz) always felt like more CPU than I’ll ever need for audio, but recent advances in analog modeling emulations have shattered that illusion. My next machine will either be a Mac Pro or iMac Pro, because suddenly I want tons of cores. The new 8 core iMacs would at least double my core count, but considering I can peg all four cores in my current machine with a single analog emulation running at high quality (like Repro-5 or Roland’s polysynth plugins), that doesn’t seem like enough headroom.

I sympathize with people who can’t run Massive X due to the AVX requirement, but it probably wouldn’t run on any reasonably priced machine without AVX. Hopefully you’ll be able to run it soon. It’s a really impressive synth (with a half finished UI that still needs a lot of work).

[Machinesworking]

I’ve never heard of Plogue Bidule (until now). I’m almost certain it was Reaper, because I remember the name struck me as suspiciously similar to Reason (and the concept of the app itself was setting up a “studio” by adding devices to a rack). Can’t remember exactly when, but I downloaded and tested one of the very early versions and it was truly awful. I can’t find any screenshots or info older than version 6, but I swear I didn’t imagine this!

It looks very capable now, and totally different from what I saw back then.

Considering that Reaper is still on version 5 I'm firmly convinced we are now in an alternate reality and I'm just being used as fuel in some Marix type dystopian nightmare!

Here's a Cockos list of jpgs of version 0 to 2. (this was the super ugly period, be warned!)
http://reaper.fm/timewarp.php
None of them look like Racks. It's all a pretty straightforward linear sequencer deal. There are a couple other DAWs out there like Mulab that have a sort of modular or rack approach but I'm pretty certain Reaper has always been track/mixer based.

I still have a drawer full of old laptops, including a PowerBook G4 that I kept telling myself I’ll someday restore with the original version of Mac OS X it shipped with, with Logic Pro 6 and old plugins like Absynth 2, Pro-53, impOSCar 1, so I can resurrect my old projects that won’t open properly anymore. Recently I realized I can just open the old Logic files in a text or hex editor and look for embedded strings in the otherwise unreadable binary garbage to figure out what patches were loaded in the plugins. With any luck those patches still exist in the current version of the plugin, or if they’re custom patches, hopefully I still have them and the file format hasn’t changed. I’ve managed to save a few old projects that way, but honestly with the number of plugins I have now, and many more years of sound design experience, it’s easier to just recreate the missing sounds (or replace them with better ones). I must be the only bozo who thinks someday he’s going to finish those old tracks from almost 20 years ago.

My iMac 5K (late 2015 quad core 4 GHz) always felt like more CPU than I’ll ever need for audio, but recent advances in analog modeling emulations have shattered that illusion. My next machine will either be a Mac Pro or iMac Pro, because suddenly I want tons of cores. The new 8 core iMacs would at least double my core count, but considering I can peg all four cores in my current machine with a single analog emulation running at high quality (like Repro-5 or Roland’s polysynth plugins), that doesn’t seem like enough headroom.

I sympathize with people who can’t run Massive X due to the AVX requirement, but it probably wouldn’t run on any reasonably priced machine without AVX. Hopefully you’ll be able to run it soon. It’s a really impressive synth (with a half finished UI that still needs a lot of work).

I can run the demo of Massive X on my 2012 laptop, honestly I'm not super impressed. It's a good sounding synth of course but unlike a lot of people I wasn't that into Massive either. I'll pick it up when NI do another sale on Komplete and I finally upgrade my copy.

Personally I tend to write in a bunch of ways, some songs get done in a day, some a month and some get mined for parts years later. If I was smart about this I would print to audio tracks in undeveloped songs, this way one could use loops in new compositions that were your own material. I've done that in the past, it was one of the first things I experimented a lot with in Live on v3.

[Stormchild]

Considering that Reaper is still on version 5 I'm firmly convinced we are now in an alternate reality and I'm just being used as fuel in some Marix type dystopian nightmare!

Here's a Cockos list of jpgs of version 0 to 2. (this was the super ugly period, be warned!)
http://reaper.fm/timewarp.php
None of them look like Racks. It's all a pretty straightforward linear sequencer deal. There are a couple other DAWs out there like Mulab that have a sort of modular or rack approach but I'm pretty certain Reaper has always been track/mixer based.

Haha. Okay, those look nothing like what I'm thinking of. That makes a lot more sense than that clunky old thing I played with in 2003 or so somehow transforming into the Reaper everyone knows today. Thanks for finding the old screenshots…at least I know it wasn't Reaper now. Well, I'm back to square one trying to remember what that crappy Reason clone was called. Whatever it was, maybe it was so bad that no one used it, wrote about it, or even took screenshots of it, and everyone forgot about it long ago. Maybe someday I'll remember what it was.

I can run the demo of Massive X on my 2012 laptop, honestly I'm not super impressed. It's a good sounding synth of course but unlike a lot of people I wasn't that into Massive either. I'll pick it up when NI do another sale on Komplete and I finally upgrade my copy.

That's how I got it too. I don't know if I would have bought it separately. I think it sounds fantastic, but the current state of the UI and lack of manual have discouraged me from trying to make my own patches. The other thing is I'm kinda tired of mousing around on a screen when it comes to making my own sounds. I used to make tons of patches for softsynths, but I've never had a good place to put a keyboard that I can comfortably test a patch while working on it (it's always mouse mouse, reach off to the side to play a note, back to the mouse, back to the keyboard).

I got a System-8 earlier this year and for the first time in many years I'm doing tons of sound design again. I think it's a combination of having immediate access to every feature with (very nice) physical controls, and just working within a simpler architecture. Even the main System-8 engine is far less complicated than today's softsynths with multiple envelopes, LFOs, functions and patterns that can be routed to anything through a huge mod matrix. You'd think having more features gives you more freedom, but I find it's exactly the opposite. Limitations inspire creativity. Endless possibilities cause paralysis.

Personally I tend to write in a bunch of ways, some songs get done in a day, some a month and some get mined for parts years later. If I was smart about this I would print to audio tracks in undeveloped songs, this way one could use loops in new compositions that were your own material. I've done that in the past, it was one of the first things I experimented a lot with in Live on v3.

Yeah, that all sounds familiar. I was not smart enough to bounce all my parts to audio. I have lots of MP3s of unfinished tracks, but not the individual tracks within each project. Generally if I get a track done at all (which is pretty rare), it's because I was lucky enough to crank it out very quickly before it expired on the shelf. Once in awhile I go through all my old stuff; I still really like a lot of the ideas and wish they were full tracks. In a few cases I've actually managed to bring one back to life and finish it. Just finished one in 2016 that I started in 2006 and hadn't touched since.

Reason is really excellent in this regard. I can still open projects I made with Reason 1.0. Other than having to locate the samples (all of which I still have, but I've moved my audio folder since then), they all play exactly the way they did back then. They were even smart enough to put a compatibility switch on the back of the mixer when they upgraded the EQ quality in Reason 2 or 3 (which defaults to the old behavior in old tracks). I guess that rock-solid backwards compatibility will no longer be true of all projects now that it can load VSTs.

[Machinesworking]

I got a System-8 earlier this year and for the first time in many years I'm doing tons of sound design again. I think it's a combination of having immediate access to every feature with (very nice) physical controls, and just working within a simpler architecture. Even the main System-8 engine is far less complicated than today's softsynths with multiple envelopes, LFOs, functions and patterns that can be routed to anything through a huge mod matrix. You'd think having more features gives you more freedom, but I find it's exactly the opposite. Limitations inspire creativity. Endless possibilities cause paralysis.

I've always been pretty good at not getting bogged down, that doesn't mean I don't agree about hardware though, WYSIWYG is underrated. I own: Metasonix Wretch Machine, Xpander, the Lintronics Memorymoog, and an MPC Live. I still love soft synths, but patch making is much more fun on dedicated hardware. I could literally release entire records with no OSX or Windows machine in sight. This is something I plan on doing mostly, adding in only certain FX from the computer.

Yeah, that all sounds familiar. I was not smart enough to bounce all my parts to audio. I have lots of MP3s of unfinished tracks, but not the individual tracks within each project. Generally if I get a track done at all (which is pretty rare), it's because I was lucky enough to crank it out very quickly before it expired on the shelf. Once in awhile I go through all my old stuff; I still really like a lot of the ideas and wish they were full tracks. In a few cases I've actually managed to bring one back to life and finish it. Just finished one in 2016 that I started in 2006 and hadn't touched since.

Nice! I'm sure you've heard all the horse pucky about how to get things done, but like you mentioned and I briefly brought up, coming up with imposed limitations to start the ball rolling is never bad. My last serious band Future Kill I mostly had two writing techniques, start with a granular or otherwise sample mangled sound, and use that as the basis for the song, or fire up the moog etc. and come up with a bass or lead line, write around it.
This last project I'm currently doing is back to guitar, it's all electronic otherwise, but guitar is in every song. So the song then has two places to start from, and that helps a lot in the process when it comes to breaks and bridges etc.

Reason is really excellent in this regard. I can still open projects I made with Reason 1.0. Other than having to locate the samples (all of which I still have, but I've moved my audio folder since then), they all play exactly the way they did back then. They were even smart enough to put a compatibility switch on the back of the mixer when they upgraded the EQ quality in Reason 2 or 3 (which defaults to the old behavior in old tracks). I guess that rock-solid backwards compatibility will no longer be true of all projects now that it can load VSTs.

This is why I will never use VSTs in Reason, and will just get the standard version, I loved it's self contained nature. Even Logic, old EXS files from 06 era are gone, so old drum tracks I did in the EXS are broken.

I should do the same thing with the MPC, never use VSTs in the software version, then all files are compatible between the soft and hardware.

[jlgrimes]

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.

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.

Reaper is a good DAW. If you are just doing audio/mixing, it is probably one of the better DAWS out there. The way you can easily create aux routing, Wet/Dry mix on every plugin, the insane key commands and macros that could be done. Reaper had track Freeze before the program actually had it due to how its macro system worked.

Reaper made me stop using Sonar for audio/mixing. It was out competing a commercial app at the time.

Its midi though wasnt that great. It still is rough around the edges but has made great strides. Its power comes with customization. Creating your own tools, smart tools, mouse modifiers. Reaper is a program where you really need to know thyself and either learn its default workflow or create your own.

Reaper is nothing like Reason. It is waay more customizable. Probably more similar to Logic/Studio One.

Reaper isnt the prettiest program but the look can be changed to look pretty nice. And v5 doesn't look halfway bad. V1 looked worse than a 90s DAW though.

[Stormchild]

Reaper is nothing like Reason. It is waay more customizable. Probably more similar to Logic/Studio One.

Reaper isnt the prettiest program but the look can be changed to look pretty nice. And v5 doesn't look halfway bad. V1 looked worse than a 90s DAW though.

Yeah, I’m now convinced Reaper is not the Reason knockoff I was thinking of. I still can’t remember what that was called, but oh well. Probably not worth remembering.

When I started using Logic (around 4.7) it was no prize pig either. It was downright ugly, and a confusing mess of nonstandard controls and behaviors. Apple did an initial UI cleanup for Logic Pro 7, but it took a few more versions to make it look as respectable as it does now. If you dig into the environment you can still find some of the old junk in the toolbox.

[Machinesworking]

When I started using Logic (around 4.7) it was no prize pig either. It was downright ugly, and a confusing mess of nonstandard controls and behaviors. Apple did an initial UI cleanup for Logic Pro 7, but it took a few more versions to make it look as respectable as it does now. If you dig into the environment you can still find some of the old junk in the toolbox.

Funny, we're all such different people in some ways. I loved the way Logic looked back then.
The latest version is too plastic looking to me, and I don't want or need volume sliders in my Arrange view. Mostly I got upset at Apple for going with too much WYSIWYG in version 8 and making it so hidden tracks in the Arrange were automatically hidden in the Mixer window basically you could no longer have two different views. This was a concession to newbies that makes no sense to a power user. I rarely use volume type sliders on CC volume edits, I rarely automate anything on an Aux track, I automate the tracks leading to it. I liked Logic as this weird little nerd DAW, and appreciated it a bit less when it started being given the UX treatment by Apple. It's a great program don't get me wrong, I'm just sort of amused at how different our opinions can be about it's legacy, I also started using it around 4.7.

Reaper is ugly, even with the Skins, it's pretty much a Windows 95 DAW in the sense that the developer is not at all about the overall experience visually. It's supremely powerful though. I still mostly use DP and Live for music, and fill in the gaps with Reaper. I can see eventually being full time in Reaper, but yeah, it's not a pleasant looking DAW. There are some indications that the upcoming v6 will change that for the better though.
But yeah, look at the way a plug in track with it's VST GUI open looks... That white space on the side of the GUI, that never changes with any skin. It allows you to view all VSTs in a track, but man is it office document looking..

[Machinesworking]

Picked up Reason 10 with the free update to 11 when it comes out.
The new instruments are all pretty good. like I mentioned I have a lot of REX files that are going to be easiest played in the Dr Octo Rex Player etc.

The GUI sucks. it's weird to think that there are DAWs out there that haven't updated their GUIs since 480dpi was standard.. it's crowded and tiny. I can't imagine what it will look like on a high resolution screen? this is just a HD Raven monitor.

[Tarekith]

I sound like a broken record saying it, but I refuse to try Reason again until they sort it out for larger and hires displays. I used to love it back in the day, but it's painfully small these days for me.

[Machinesworking]

I sound like a broken record saying it, but I refuse to try Reason again until they sort it out for larger and hires displays. I used to love it back in the day, but it's painfully small these days for me.

Yeah I'm terrified to load it on my old Retina display macbook pro here.
$108 to upgrade from 2.5 though, and at least four instruments I'll use.
I always have "Zoom Display" enabled in "System Preferences/ Accessibility/Zoom/ Use Scroll Gestures with Modifier Keys to Zoom", just for these sort of things.

Everyone was all mad about the size of the GUI files Arturia put out for resizing, but they work great!
U-He, FXPansion etc. are on board as well.

Come on NI, Reason Studios, Air etc. etc.