In case you haven’t seen already, Propellerhead is slowly doling out new feature information on its website for Record 1.5 and Reason 5. So far, they’ve announced pitch correction and vocal synthesis in Record (because we really don’t have enough AutoTune-style vocals in the world, apparently), multiple loop support in REX, and new block-style arrangement (a bit reminiscent of Cubase’s implementation to me).
It’s all good stuff, and I look forward to seeing what the final announcement is later today. I’m still hoping that Record gets ReWire host mode, because I can think of some users who would love to drop tools like Ableton Live into Record for final mixing and mastering. (Flying Lotus, Steve, I bet you agree with me!) Update: Nope. It’s not a deal-breaker; you can just import audio, which is okay, given that mixing and mastering generally happens last. Of course, I still think it’s a good idea.
But the big news so far is that sampling has come to Reason. What a lot of Reason users I talked to said following the Record release was that they had no desire for a big, SSL-style console, but thought a lightweight sample input was what Reason had lacked all this time. Sure enough, that’s exactly what you get in this release, as seen at top. It makes perfect sense for the Reason workflow, and the implementation appears to be fairly easy to use, complete with a sample editor. Yes, I know – what many of you would like to know is likely why it took four releases to get here. But for Reason die-hards, it could be well worth the wait.
With sampling and the Blocks feature both in Reason, you also aren’t forced to by Record just to get audio input or arrangement.
Our own Matt Ganucheau is currently in Sweden at Props headquarters; I’ve scheduled the announcement for 9am NYC time / 3pm Berlin and Stockholm time / 1pm Greenwich Mean Time… you know. Some time today.
Full CDM upgrade story, to go live later today
The launch video doesn’t tell you much, unless you’ve been so caught in Reason world that you didn’t realize mics can be used to record things. It does, however, give us a picture of what the world’s strangest, audio geek mod of Unreal Tournament would look like. (Duke Fieldrecordem 3D, anyone? We could totally have a CDM clan.)
And yes, it is absolutely fair for Propellerhead to point out that too many “samples” don’t allow live input. It’s a crime. It’s not a sampler if it only plays things back and doesn’t record. This sort of thing is the cure. Input is a good thing.