Personally, I think v13 is going to be a fairly substantial sequencer update. How much it's going to inch it towards the competition is the only thing that up in the air to me. I cannot imagine them not going in that direction for the next (upcoming) release.
While the Rack is nice for users who wanted to be able to better utilize Reason devices in a better core DAW, I don't think it was all that beneficial to the product as a whole - especially considering the opportunity cost of developing it. The core Reason product doesn't look better for people who just want to buy a DAW to use, relative to the competition, as a result of it existing.
It will be interesting to see if they are able to grow their user base noticeably with the next release. I don't think v12 accomplished that. I see contraction - anecdotally speaking, of course.
Ichooselife wrote: ↑25 Aug 2023
EnochLight wrote: ↑25 Aug 2023
I chose Ableton Live instead. I realize it doesn't have lifetime free upgrades (which is not unique to FL Studio, BTW), but it does tend to be one of the most - if not
THE MOST - popular DAW on the market. And Push 3 does look very tempting. But I digress...
isnt it weird how ableton has barely more options than reason
( and only as good soundbank only if you buy the expensive suite version )
isnt it weird how people say reason is too simple
yet the most popular daw is even simpler ( haha pun )
there nothing like cubase and logic and studio one are they ?
and i think that’s why i like them
if you want a score editor
get a seperate one let a daw be easy and simple
Ableton Live Suite is routinely down to < $350 as an upgrade from Lite, and Ableton tends to have more sales than Reason Studios.
Additionally, with Live 12 they moved 4 of their synths, a few FX and a bunch of their Stock Packs down to Standard from Suite... So, Live Standard is actually a fairly well-stocked SKU now.
Not sure anyone who has used both of these DAWs would say that Ableton Live is "as simple as" Reason 12. It's not. It's deeper, and the workflow is better - and it scales far better than Reason does with Project sizes. The more tracks and virtual instruments you have in Reason, the more of a burden the Rack becomes. The mixing workflow in Live is better than Reason, though one can appreciate its skeuomorphism there.
Functionally, Cubase Pro goes far beyond both Live and Logic in terms of what it offers. It has crossgrade pricing and during sales can be gotten for just over $200 on crossgrade. After initial purchase, it's fairly cheap to maintain: $99 per 18 months upgrade costs.
Logic Pro is a bad comparison for value because it's heavily subsidized by hardware sales and used as a carrot to sell Macs. Before, it was a $600+ product. But, they also haven't charged for an upgrade in over a decade, so there is that.
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The big issue with Reason 12 perpetual is that it delivers a lot of redundant devices as stock instruments. Pianos, Redundant synths and mediocre samples/loops/acoustic instrument patches from the early 2000s are redundant out of the box when you add it to something like Live [Suite], Logic Pro and even Cubase Pro (which ships with VA, Subtractive, Wavetable and Spectral/Granular Synths + good samplers... on top of better sample/loop content and acoustic instrument libraries/patches).
This creates a weird scenario where people who move from a workflow centered around Reason as a complete production solution (Reason as a DAW) to using the Reason Rack Plug-in (or already use a different DAW and don't yet own it) have decreased incentive to buy, upgrade or even use it once they make that transition (or start elsewhere). The rack doesn't offer much benefit - particularly at its price point - and it's often a workflow benefit to keep things out of the rack and directly on the channel strip in the base DAW, anyways.
I think if they had twice as many instruments and players, they might have a things that were a bit more out of the box and worth investing in, but in that case it would have been advantageous to maintain the Reason Intro SKU to allow people to buy a lighter base product and then invest in the specific Rack Extensions they want - instead of having to invest heavily up front for tons of redundancies and then pay the price to add the stuff they want on top of it. They'd also have more room to bundle higher value products into the base SKU (things that are less redundant in so many DAW packages) to increase the
practical value of the perpetual product.
I mean, even for Synths like Algoritm, Parsec and Friktion there is a high level of redundancy in some DAW packages.
The subscription is always going to be low value. I'd rather subscribe to UVI Sonic Pass for $5 Extra and get access to all of their Effects and Sample Libraries (already own Falcon) - but I still wouldn't go there because...
Subscriptions for Music production software are a no go for me, because there is a higher chance that I'll want to open an older project, remix it, edit it, etc. in the future. Locking in my body of work to a subscription product is a complete non-starter. I could never do that.
I'd be more willing to subscribe to something like Premiere Pro or After Effects if I were a YouTuber, though, since I could drop it and move to something like FCP/Motion or Resolve/Fusion Studio without any drawbacks in the future - aside from the cost of switching (learning curve, productivity dip due to the transition).