Reason 12 Coming This Fall – Here’s What’s New

Reason Studios has announced Reason 12 – a major update to the popular virtual studio for Mac & Windows.

Here’s a summary of what’s new in Reason 12:

  • Reason 12 focuses on improving the Rack experience. This includes making Reason high resolution. With version 12, you can zoom Reason to fit your set-up, and all 3rd party Rack Extensions will be ready for hi-res on day one.
  • Reason 12 also includes a brand new sampler. It’s designed to quickly explore and play back sounds in interesting ways—be that from your collection of samples, something recorded on the fly, or even an export of the very track you’re working on.
  • The Combinator in Reason 12 is overhauled to be fully customizable, more powerful, and easier than ever to work with. Create a custom interface with the controls you want laid out how you like, add images, set up expressive macro controls, change the panel size and more to make a patch your own.
  • To help you navigate new content, Reason 12 also features an improved Reason browser. Search is now faster and your search results are categorized to easily find what you want.

Reason+ subscribers will get access to improvements and new features as soon as they are available, Reason 12 perpetual licenses and upgrades will be available for purchase on September 1st 2021.

16 thoughts on “Reason 12 Coming This Fall – Here’s What’s New

  1. upgrade to 11 for $90usd was cheap, and a good deal when one gets an upgrade to 12 – so i grabbed it. i had forgotten v11 main thing was the rack as a plugin and its crazy how quickly i can get ideas and song started using it with live10. much easier and just damn wicked. funny how reason11 runs slow on my old macbook air but as a plugin i have no issues so far 😀

  2. Reason becoming an AU plug-in is one of the greatest things that has happened and so cool the keep pushing it further. way to go Reason.

  3. “…all 3rd party Rack Extensions will be ready for hi-res on day one.” I’m hoping this includes REs which, for one reason or another, are no longer available in the ReasonStudios Shop. There are a handful of those I lean on regularly in my Reason work.

  4. The best part of Reason is the back of the rack modules. I don’t think its explored as much but thats what sold me on it, the fully modular environment and its capabilities. Now the directions is more on the rack VST which you cant blame them. Open your DAW to other DAW’s and you don’t have to really fix your DAW. But when FL studio released their version of this, it was fun for like a second, fully multi-tracking fl studio project in another daw. After a while, you default to just using one DAW to avoid all of the stuff that makes music less fun, the technical stuff. Thats why hardware has such an appeal, you just get to work, record the audio in a DAW and mix. I know extending software beyond its own DAW will open up a lot of possibilities to a ton of user, especially those who use Ableton but what if Reason would compete with Ableton’s timeline, its piano roll, or FL studios step sequencing like Logic pro has. It could be a beast versus syphoning off its rack to the “another plugin” world.

    1. Nice that Logic has a step sequencer, but the comparison to Flstudio’s channel rack is only superficial. In logic, the step sequencer window is only controlling one instrument. So, each sound is still part of one “drum instrument” for example. In Flstudio, each step sequencer row is a totally separate instrument/generator, with fx bus and piano roll as well, so you can sequence independent instruments all in one pattern/step sequencer. This is the core difference between Flstudio and everything else. If another DAW managed to copy this workflow, I’d be game to try it out, but I’m not sure how patterns could work in the same way, with combined instruments per pattern, when instruments are generally assigned to their own track in all other DAWS.

      Bigwig has done a great job copying Ableton’s session view, which is it’s most unique feature.

  5. Been using it since version 1.
    Thanks for finally addressing the actual biggest pain IMHO since day one,
    Looking forward to an interface I can comfortably see lol.

  6. if this means that I can scale the Rack-GUI, I’ll upgrade! (stopped the upgrades when I got my large dual screen setup years ago – and have been naggin’ about it online ever since)

  7. There is no info on system demands yet (as far as I can see) – I’m still on Win7/64 here – and I really do not want to go for Win10 before my next computer build (due to some nice HW that Win10 might do obsolete). However – if Reason12 will work with my current OS – it’s a no brainer.

  8. I signed up for Reason+ but letting the subscription go. Missing VST3 and MIDI-Vst support was a big reason. I’ll be watching the updates to see what the system requirements are as well as them supporting VST3.Once 12 is released totally, I may sign back up to check it out.

  9. We’re interested to see what they bring to the table. I’m glad they offer the option of the rack vst. Hopefully the GUI update will be better. It is a little hard to use because you can’t adjust the rack’s size.

  10. VST3 is tragically overdue at this point. Plug devs have already started to replace VST2.4 plugins with VST3, leaving us to find our own workarounds in R11, adding latency and cost.

    I’ve been a dedicated Reason user since v2.5, and I’m loving so many of the improvements they’ve made over the years.

    My only complaints at present are the lack of VST3, lack of foldable/hideable tracks, inability to move multiple faders as a group, and not enough flexibility within the browser structure (e.g., nested folders, sort/reorder folder contents, etc.)

    I get that Reason Studios needs to continue to make a profit, but these are pretty basic features that continue to be overlooked, to the detriment of the reputation of the DAW. I’m hoping that, now that Reason+ and GUI improvements are out there, maybe we can see some of these implemented…?

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