Propellerhead software has announced a version of Reason with native support for Intel based Mac computers, and they are looking for some people with a talent for breaking things.

This version of Reason, called, 3.0.5, offers full compatibility with Apple’s new Intel based computers but does not add any other new features to the program. Preliminary performance tests provide astonishing results.

“We are looking for good men and women to help us test Reason for Intel based Macs,” notes the Propellerheads site. “This round of testing is open to both non-registered users and to registered Reason 3.0 users with a keen eye and a habit of breaking things.”

Beta testing of the new version is planned to start in the week
beginning March 20th. As of today, there is no shipping date set; this
will be determined as test results start coming in. The Rewire and REX
libraries have also been updated to support Intel based Macs.

Propellerhead notes that their plans for the Intel Mac release deviate from Apple’s recommendations:

Reason 3.0.5 is only available in Intel format, which means that
this version does not run on PowerPC (PPC) based Mac computers. This is
contrary to Apple’s recommendation to developers, which is to ship a
combined PPC and Intel based Mac application in a package called a
Universal Binary. Based on our commitment to always provide the highest
possible performance on all computer platforms that we support,
Propellerhead Software made the decision to deviate from Apple’s
recommendation. Here are the details:

A Universal Binary actually contains two compiled applications, one
for PPC and one for Intel. To create a Universal Binary, Propellerhead
would need to use Apple’s XCode compiler for both the PPC and Intel
versions of the program. By contrast, the shipping version of Reason
for PPC computers (version 3.0.4) is compiled with Motorola’s
CodeWarrior compiler. Unfortunately, our internal performance testing
shows that compiling Reason for PPC using Apple’s XCode compiler
creates a significantly slower program than the shipping 3.0.4 version
that we have today. For this reason we have decided to keep the two
versions separate for the time being.

While this creates a small inconvenience in that user’s have to
manually determine which version is the right one to install, this is
by far outshined by the advantages of having maximum performance.

We are currently working together with Apple to increase the performance of the PPC version of Reason compiled with XCode.

More information is available at the Propellerhead site.