In this first release of Reason 12, Reason is now presented in beautiful high resolution. In practice, this means that Reason will look good on any screen and resolution, no matter how large. There’s more to it than that though. We’ve rebuilt how Reason handles graphics from the ground up to utilize your graphics card. This allows us to do even more interesting, interactive, and great-looking things in the future. But right now, for you, the Reason user, it means that both our own devices and third party Rack Extensions will look drop dead gorgeous. In fact, every single device is available right now. Many other UI elements are of course hi-res too, and we’ll keep updating anything that isn’t as we go along.
While Reason will adapt to your screen and OS resolution, we recognize that everyone has their own personal preferences. For example, I tend to have a very high OS scaling so macOS is quite tiny, but when working in Reason I want to be up close and personal. Even more so when using the Rack in Ableton Live. To accommodate that, there’s now a global Application Zoom setting in the Options menu in standalone and the top bar of Reason Rack Plugin. That way you can easily get Reason to sit just right in your setup. To not interrupt your music making, we’re scaling the graphics to your setting in the background and once they’re ready we switch them in. Kind of like how the time stretch preview works in the sequencer! So if a device doesn’t look spectacular right away, don’t worry, and once they’re scaled to a certain size you don’t have to scale them again.
That’s not all though, we’ve also improved search in Reason’s Browser. Gone are the days of typing your search term, hitting enter, and then sighing as Reason crawls through your massive folder of samples, patches and ReFills. We now build a search index from all your locations (you know, the things you keep in your Browser sidebar) and immediately show search results as you type. The results are categorized by type and you can easily switch to searching All Locations at once. No need to worry about where a specific patch is located, searching All Locations will find it. Much like high resolution, this is also a great foundation for us to keep improving Reason’s Browser and make it easier to find what you need—or just go exploring. Coming up soon is a second early access release of Reason 12 that includes a brand new sampler. I won’t spill the beans just yet, but I can tell you that it’s called Mimic Creative Sampler and it’s really, really awesome. So to all you Reason+ subscribers: go grab the first version of Reason 12 from Companion, rejoice in seeing your favorite devices in glorious high resolution, and then make some music! Mattias Häggström Gerdt Product Manager
