Propellerheads Reason Extensions (Open Platform).

[Sounddesigner]

Rumour has it that Propellerheads is about to open up reason to some third-party developers like UA, Softubes, U-he, etc . Good news for the Reason Platform wich imo was always too closed to a fault. Reason was always too slow in developing to me and everything it's getting now is too little too late (audio-in, recording, and now third-party-plugins). The Propellerheads also messed up and attatched a dongle to Reason wich makes it more unattractive to me. I use to love that Reason app a long time ago but Propellerheads never listened to user requests until they where forced to it seems and Reason thus is developing far too slow. When will midi out come? Don't get me wrong much of the Reason concept is a good one just not developed far enough imo. For stability it's great they do not support vst but still they needed their own plugin formatt for select third-party-developers long ago for better sound-quality and variety.
Here's the link - http://www.production-room.com/news/pro ... extension/

Other DAW's are starting to do similar concepts like Sonar wich has the Prochannel platform for third-party developers, seems DAW's are really trying to do it all.

PS. This i would imagine is good news to those who still love Reason. Soon they can buy third-party extensions from the Propellerheads store according to rumour.

[valis]

No longer a rumor, they announced at Messe and are calling their plugins Rack Extensions, or ‘Re’ for short. Yet another plugin format, and only open to 'approved' devs: http://www.gearjunkies.com/news_info.php?news_id=7214

I guess their stance against plugins is loosening, but yet another format (they have features that VST/AU don't have obviously) is going to keep it a small market even without the dev. approval restrictions. I suppose that Reason+Record+'Re' users will have even less of a 'reason' to rewire into Cubase or etc now though.

[Sounddesigner]

I guess their stance against plugins is loosening, but yet another format (they have features that VST/AU don't have obviously) is going to keep it a small market even without the dev. approval restrictions.

Their stance is loosening on many things they were totally against at first (dongles, audio-in, etc), the times are changing and devs are often forced to adapt or die (altho i do think the dongle choice was a bad move, many companies are now running away from dongles e.g. Waves, Brainworx, etc). As for the new RE plugins it is as you alluded to probably too many different plugin formatts out here already that take up alot of development time to code for; wich many users don't always understand when their dishing out their demmands and critisizms (VST, AU, AAX-Native, AAX-dsp, UAD, etc as well as O/S types Mac and Windows - 32bit/64bit). Many devs i don't think will welcome another plugin formatt unless it seems highly profitable. The good news is that it should'nt take many new third-party-devs/plugins to keep Reason users happy considering they've been with none for so long. I myself would'nt need alot just a few really good ones to be happy if i still used Reason. I wonder if U-He will code DIVA for Reason? if so then the users will have one of the best Native synths imo, but will also be taken out of that cpu-efficient world of Reason .

I read that the Reason RE plugins will run in some external Sandbox so that Propellerheads can keep that famous stability of Reason. I wonder if there is some latency and significant cpu use with the sandbox approach? It seems like a good move on the surface long as there is'nt a huge downside cause Reason is loved for its stability, that's one of the aspects about it that kept a smile on my face in the past.

[dante]

I always took the closed nature of Reason to be one of its strengths, so would have preferred they concentrate on the audio editing side of things, and included something like VariAudio, although Naptune is great, and more on that side of things is rumoured to come.

If they add MIDI out, that would be good though (rumoured as well for 6.x I think).

The dongle hasnt bothered me much, just thier sometimes unwieldy website navigation when updating stuff.