Propellerhead Record - The Future Of Audio? - Maybe….
The Record invitation had hit my inbox just over a week ago. The moment I had been waiting for - the best part of 8 years. The solution to the problem, I had tried to overcome with so many different music applications but always remained elusive - audio recording within Propellerhead’s Reason.
I had used Reason pretty much since its inception at the start of the decade. The rack mounted nature of it, the simplicity and intuitiveness of its interface, as well as the mind blowing number of routing options to experiment with made be a devout user pretty much from the get-go.
Limitations of Reason
However, Reason always had its limitations - lack of VST plugin support and no direct audio recording ability. The VST support was never a major drawback to me, I liked that the program never crashed and was super CPU friendly - I could use a crazy amount of synths and effects that wouldn’t have been possible with the regular DAW/VST combo.
The lack of audio support however used to drive me crazy. I would create a great song in Reason and then would get a cool idea for a guitar part, but would have to save the song and relaunch it via Rewire in Live or Logic, set up mixer channels etc, mess around with settings - one amazing creativity sucker! Things got more complicated having to save 2 different song files, working from multiple different windows, plus the CPU would start taking a hit. ReWire was a good idea and useful but a far from optimal work flow.
Reason to Record
Which brings us back to Propellerheads Record. At last a solution to my Reason/audio issues. I eagerly downloaded the Beta from the Propellerhead site.
First impressions, were good. The sound from the new SSL modeled mixer was fantastic, giving a full bodied professional sound - probably due to the excellent new mixer compressor & eq. The sounds from the Line 6 Guitar and Bass units are also excellent - very useful and the presets sound great in a mix.
The way it handles the integration of Reason modules is excellent - you can now have horizontal as well as vertical racks. Its good to see that all the features from Reason are available in Record.
Adding audio is a breeze, there is even a tuner within each audio track to help ensure your instrument is in tune - no need to rifle through sub menus. Its as simple as hitting record and recording your audio source.
Even though I was adding lots of synths and effects to my songs, it was very CPU efficient bearing in mind there was a lot of debugging code running in the background taking up resources. Once this is removed, its going to be a very efficient application especially as it also supports multicore processors.
One week later….Record upsides & downsides
After a week of using the software I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the recordings and also how intuitive the software has been to use. The ability to increase or decrease tempos with very little artifacts has been another great feature - the quality of which I believe far outstrips my beloved Ableton Live.
Now for the downsides. After all the hype I don’t think this software is the revolutionary product a lot of people are touting it to be. Its not on the game-changing scale of say Melodyne, Ableton Live or even Reason. Its just a great complimentary product for existing Reason users and also a great way for bands to get their ideas recorded and to create professional sounding mixes through that great SSL modelled desk.
It would have been nice to have had a few more exciting ideas from Propellerhead rather than just creating a basic, stripped down, albeit great sounding DAW. I’m sure they could have come up with a few interesting ideas for modules that would allow the user to manipulate the audio once it had been recorded. For example, the ability to throw in any audio file - mp3, wav and it automatically be tempo synced or turned it a .rex file that can then be used within the Dr Rex module, or some other module where you could chop up and play the audio from a midi controller.
Conclusion
Overall I think Propellerhead have done a great job with Record, in making a piece of recording software that is fast and intuitive to use and creates great sounding tracks via the SSL modelled mixer. The best bit though - after 8 years Reason owners like me, finally have the audio recorder we wanted.
*Propellerhead Record - Official Site
Here’s a short video of Record in action:
Finally, I got around to buying the new iLife’09 sofware for my MacBook. After eagerly tearing away the cellophane shrink wrap and effortlessly installing the software. I opened up Garageband ‘09 for the first time.
Finally a hardware manufacturer has had the balls to create a midi controller that aims to replicate the software’s interface rather than trying to cover all the bases by supporting a multitude of different music applications.
