While the vast majority of our developers areputting all their effort into the next update of Reason 12, other initiatives are happening as well here at Reason Studios HQ. We wanted to give you a sneak peek of some of the underlying technology work happening here, and why.   Enabling Tech  With the release of Reason 12 we are adding a new development track into the game – Enabling Tech. Wikipedia describes enabling technology as an invention or innovation that can be applied to drive radical change in the capabilities of a user or culture.  

We are really thrilled about this. If we would translate Enabling Tech into what we would like to achieve at Reason Studios, I would say it means that our Enabling Tech will turn our exciting ideas and vision for music making into reality, faster.  

Putting a development team on this, working in parallel to product development, means that we are ensuring that we can work long term on the technical feasibility to make Reason the most creative music making environment – ever. 

Updated REX SDK and M1 Support 

We are starting rather unsurprisingly with M1 support. Reason has worked like a charm on Apple Silicon machines through the Rosetta 2 emulator, but it is time to go full blown M1 native.    The first step is taken today by releasing REX SDK 1.9 with native Apple M1 support. This has been a top request from our industry colleagues who are also going M1 native and now they will be able to continue to playback your awesome REX loops. And for the record we fixed a nasty potential crash when reading corrupt files as well. The REX sample format came along with Reason Studios’ pioneering loop editor ReCycle back in 1994. ReCycle quickly became popular in loop heavy genres such as hip hop and electronica. In 2004 REX2 became an open format so any DAW could support it. It is now a standard format implemented inside most modern music making applications, from Ableton Live to FL Studio.   So, REX is now M1 native and M1 support for Reason is in the works! The work doesn’t stop there though. We don’t want Reason to just stay up to date, we want Reason to be a technology leader. Reason Studios has always been a pioneer in the music technology industry, and we will continue be so even more. Will keep you in the loop.   Sara Roos  CTO  Note: Further information on the REX SDK can be found here: https://developer.reasonstudios.com/downloads/other-products