Record

I think Propellerheads protest far too much about the usability problems with most DAWs. In fact, the interface for Record looks like a lot more clutter than I’m used to in Logic, as others have noted already. I used Reason for quite a while and liked it, but I did find its interface inflexible in some ways, notably its vertical tallness; with wider screens becoming the norm I often found myself wanting a double-width rack instead of just the single column. Record looks like a step backward in terms of clutter. For one thing, if its mixing desk is always that size it would drive me batshit. I barely use Logic’s mixer; I find myself tweaking levels, panning and effects by track rather than messing with multiple tracks at once.

The timestretching is useful, yes, but the comping feature (for putting together vocal takes etc.) doesn’t seem to me to be very different from the way that Logic does it.

And what this bullshit is about it not being a DAW, I have no idea. I can see the distinction they’re trying to make, but it amounts to little more than spin in the real world. It comes across as an attempt to avoid disadvantageous comparisons with competing products.

None of which goes to say that I wouldn’t give it and Reason a go again; in fact, I’d been dithering about upgrading to Reason 4 recently anyway, the ability to use effects like the Scream on audio, and the modular tricks you can do in Reason using Combinators and chained effects would also be interesting.

But the closed nature of the system turns me off somewhat. Having to run three applications (Record, Reason and Logic) just to use an AU plugin on one channel strikes me as utterly absurd. And I think by delaying the addition of audio recording to Reason for so long they may have talked themselves into over-egging it when they did add it.