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(More customer reviews)Reason is definitely a contender to become one of the best DAW's in the future although it's my belief that there is still things within the package that need work.
In it's out-of-the-box state, Reason offers a variety of tools to quickly compose beautiful sounding tracks of any genre of music you'll be into. The included virtual rack should provide enough tools to make the average musicians ideas easily come to life and the sound quality of all the included sounds and effects are beautiful. Where Reason begins to show some weakness is when it comes to integrating 3rd party tools and using sources outside of Reason to create music. I find myself frustrated at times with the products paradoxical ease and difficulty. I attempted to use some VST and VSTi plug-ins and they were unusable in Reason, although they do give you enough in the Reason package to compensate for it's difficuties in this department so I got over it quickly. I also had some issues with Recycle/Dr. Octo-Rex and how it calculates tempo and found it difficult to get accurate BPM information making any imported sequences not sync properly with the rest of the composition and with lesser products out there like VirtualDJ, which makes syncing tracks with different tempos a cinch, this seems inexcusable. Reason gives me the impression that your best bet when using it is to create what you'd like in Reason and don't attempt to import anything in the process, then export your finished portion into a DAW that handles tempo synchronization and sampling better to finish your work. The most glaring ommission of this product is that you cannot use mic inputs and record your vocals in Reason, which is again disjointed because Reason does so much yet is lacking and I find it baffling.
In the end I don't regret having Reason and believe it's an excellent almost must-have tool in a musicians arsenal, however, I couldn't call it a complete DAW because it lacks some major things but I figure Propellerhead is working on it and hopefully Reason 6 will fix these omissions and flaws and make Reason the product it deserves to be, a complete Digital Audio Workstation.
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Propellerhead Reason 5The Reason rack comes with all the gear you could possibly need: samplers, analog synths, graintable synth, vocoder, mixer, drum machines, arpeggiator, compressors, EQ and effects. With its generous sound bank and intuitive flow, Reason helps you along in your creative process, and never gets in your way. Version 5 adds the mighty Kong Drum Designer, the versatile Dr. Octo Rex loop player, live sampling input, the Blocks pattern based sequencing mode and more.
About ReasonReason's heart is its virtual rack of instruments and effects. As you create your track, Reason automatically patches and cables your rack. If you want to get deep, simply flip the rack around and route the cables any way you like.
Finding your sound is an important part of the musical process. With Gigabytes of synths, samples, drum kits, and effects, Reason's sound bank is packed with everything you'll need from the start. Want more? Expand your palette with a world of ReFill libraries.
The thing that strikes new Reason users most is how much they get done in a short amount of time. Reason's legendary creative flow keeps you focused on the music — and the fun. At all times.
Need more gear? No problem. Choose a synth, a drum machine, a loop player or any device from the Create menu and it will instantly appear in your rack, logically patched into the signal chain. And because Reason is designed to go easy on your computer, you can repeat the process until you're more than happy.
Each unit in Reason's virtual rack is edited from its own on-screen front panel. All the sliders, knobs, buttons and functions are right in front of you, ready to be tweaked, turned and twisted in absolute real-time. And all your front panel actions — filter adjustments, pitch bending, gain riding or panning — can be recorded and automated in the Reason sequencer.
A single key press will turn Reason's rack around, and there you are, in patch cord heaven. Most audio connections are made automatically. When a new device is created, it appears immediately below the currently selected device, and Reason patches it into the system in the most logical way. Repatch by dragging the patch cord plug to the desired connector to build your own sounds — or tweak the included presets.
New in Reason 5Dr. Octo Rex Loop PlayerThe upgraded Dr. Octo Rex loop player loads eight REX loops into one player and lets you switch between them on the fly. This makes arranging a breeze — load the drum loops into one player, the guitars into another and use the sequencer to select what loop to play in a pattern-like fashion.With eight loops to switch between, the new loop player also comes ready for the experimental minded. Set the player to retrig the loops on the beat, on the bar or on the 16th note. Or program the loops manually like in the original rex player.For each of the eight loops, the new rex player also comes with an expanded set of per-slice settings. Set pan, pitch, filter frequency and level, reverse slices, use multiple outputs, create alternating groups of slices and much more.The Reason 5 Factory Sound Bank comes complete with guitar and acoustic drums patches for Dr. Octo Rex and a huge selection of techno, house, club, hip hop and r&b loops from signature sound designers.
BlocksMany musicians tend to think of music in terms like intro, verse, chorus, breakdown, buildup and so on. With the new Blocks mode in Reason 5 and Record 1.5, your sequencer does too.Blocks lets you sequence your songs using a more pattern-based approach, with the segments of your song as individual building blocks to be laid out in your arrangement.Start by creating the discrete parts of your song in blocks mode. When you are ready to start building your song, just switch back to song mode and draw in what blocks should play in the dedicated pattern lane. Use one block for the verse and one for the chorus — or build your song around a single 8-bar loop.Blocks provide a very fast way of creating a musical structure for your song. But the options don't end there. With the basic arrangement laid out, you can see the contents of the blocks and create variations and mute individual parts, or add further musical elements in song mode.A typical use for Blocks is to create your backing track in blocks and then use the song mode sequencer to record vocals or instrumental performances. For music based around a single looped section, one repeated block with automation and mutes of individual tracks added in song mode makes arranging a breeze.You never have to commit to using either mode — you are free to move back and forth between Blocks and Song mode, and any changes you make in your Blocks will instantly be manifested in all instances of that Block. Need some tambourine on that chorus? Add it, and there will be tambourine whenever the chorus block is playing.
Live SamplingRemember the time when samples were something you sampled and not loaded from your hard drive? When a sampler was a machine that could record samples, not just play them back.As samplers became software instead of machines, they came to rely on external sample editing software for recording and editing the samples and the art of spur-of-the-moment creative sampling was pretty much lost. Now we are bringing it back to Reason 5 with its live sampling input.All sample players in Reason are now samplers. Just hook up a sound source to the rack's sampling input and you are ready to start sampling. Use a mic, a turntable, an instrument or the entire Reason mix.Sampling in Reason is simple and straightforward. Hit the sample button and Reason starts sampling. Reason will detect the sample start automatically. You can sample when Reason is running too if you like — no need to stop the music.If needed, bring up the built-in sample editor to set start and end points, loop points and more. This is possible for all loaded samples by the way — not only the ones you have sampled.As always, Reason lets you focus on music making — and sampling in this case. All samples are neatly stored in our song file and accessible in the new samples pane in the tool window. Here you can easily see what samples are loaded into what machine and delete and export samples as you wish.Live sampling together with pitch detection of root key and automatic zone mapping makes it dead easy to sample an instrument and map the samples across the keyboard. This way you'll create your own multi-sampled instruments for NN-XT and NN-19 in an instant.
Kong Drum DesignerAnalog synthesis, physical modeling, sampling, REX loops, support sound generators, effects, flexible routing, multiple hit types and more. The Kong Drum Designer is not your regular drum module. It's the drum module focused on letting you get exactly that drum sound you're after. Kong has 16 pads and 16 drums. Build your drum sounds based on any of the nine different drum modules. Flavor the sound with 11 support generators and effects. Program automation, create alternating groups and let Reason's powerful sequencer control the beat.Reason 5 ships with a sound bank with a generous supply of kits for Kong across a wide variety of styles.
System RequirementsWindows
Intel Pentium 4/AMD Athlon or better (multiple cores highly recommended)
1GB RAM
DVD drive
Windows XP SP3, Vista or Windows 7
2 GB free hard disk space
Monitor with 1024x768 resolution or larger
A 16 bit Windows compatible audio card, preferably with an ASIO driver
A MIDI interface and a MIDI keyboard recommended
Requires any version of Reason or Record Reason Duo
Mac
Intel Mac (multiple cores highly recommended)
1 GB RAM or more
DVD drive
Mac OS X 10.4 or later
2 GB free hard disk space
Monitor with 1024x768 resolution or larger
CoreAudio compliant audio interface or built-in audio hardware
A MIDI interface and a MIDI keyboard recommended
Requires any version of Reason or Record Reason Duo
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