Reason 7

[TweakHead]

Yeah, what I meant was: now that it's got the Rack Extensions and it can send Midi Messages. If you get some crazy modules for that - pretty much like the real deal on the Euro Racks -; you couple that with a Midi to CV converter and it can create crazy messages to use on hardware. I don't think of it as an isolated product that could compete with Ableton or Logic or something within those lines, but more like a rack plug-in - with Rewire.

About the sound: used to be more like that when people were all confined to the same instruments and often the same libraries of sounds and stuff like that. Doubt that's the case nowadays, but honestly don't know. But I feel that opening up the midi door was a huge step for them. One thing that's easily overlooked here is: you don't get to patch your FM8 along with Predator, or introduce some mad cv modulation module in between to see what happens, then send the result of that to hardware as CV message, see where I'm going? You can either get the expensive euro racks (like making noise's... boy oh boy...) or this feels like a cheap way round that - if the modules do show up from third party developers. Checked it, there's some stuff, but not enough so far. The potential for that is already there. And they'd be crazy not to explore it more!

Think it's cool to control the FM amount of a synthesizer with the LFO from another - with the third party plug-ins you get to do that in Reason, whereas it's impossible with any other DAW. And now that it's got u-he's devices and such stuff, that's a big plus for them. Even though you'd still need to buy the rack extension version of the plug-ins, even if you own the VST/AU version of it - which is a real shame. But they're certainly getting somewhere with this.