This feature has been requested for a long time: With the release of Reason 9.5 the sequencer from Swedish developer Propellerheads finally supports VST plugins. We know and love this company since the epic Rebirth 338 from 1996, which later became Rebirth 339 with the addition of the famous TR-909. Until now this has been probably the best tool to produce instant Techno music. By introducing Reason the company followed the approach to simulate classic studio equipment (nearly every virtual instrument and effect included in Reason is inspired by real-looking hardware made up of wires, knobs, buttons and sliders – this metaphor is followed up to extended patching functionality by allowing to switch to the rear side of the virtual rack by pressing the Tab button).
It has to be said that Rebirth was simply awesome. And it became a very successful product, too – since it emulated Techno’s most wanted hardware instruments which had become unavailable due to the lack of understanding (in the beginning) and ignorance (later) of it’s vendor Roland (- or did Roland just wanted to underpin the legendary status of it’s classic line of instruments? Although Roland always acted very friendly to support even 3rd and 4th owners of it’s gear with the supply of hard to find spare parts … but they never seemed to really understand why a TR-303 had become such an important instrument for a whole musical genre – just remember the mid nineties product lines including the Groovebox 303? Until now, or maybe still until now, since lately with the Boutique series the classic gear was (sort of) re-released, 20 years too late some may say, and in the middle of an all analogic revival – as all of the TR/TB-reissues are purely digital emulations … uh – I am drifting away. This is worth another post, especially since the 303 is probably the world’s most often cloned electronic instrument …).
Propellerheads itself decided to never include Rebirth as instrument into Reason’s rack, they just made it available via Rewire, plus: Rebirth went out of production … and finally out of maintenance. At the very end of the story Roland itself decided to sue Propellerheads if they would continue this road.
What does this has to do with VST? VST (Virtual Studio Technology) is a plugin standard introduced by Charlie Steinberg in (again) 1996. Whereas Steinberg’s Cubase and Emagic’s Logic – or even Ableton’s Live (the other big three in the sequencer / DAW market) integrated the standard – Reason always resisted. Mainly because they wanted their product to be inspired by real hardware and real studio workflows. Even the main mixer in Reason looks like a big Mackie pult. So, from that point of view VST effects and instruments never quite fitted into Propellerheads product strategy.
Yet, since the biggest competitor Steinberg was sold in 2004 to Yamaha, and Logic was made available only on Macs – and finally Live was rather specializing as advanced experimentation tool for loops and being adopted for “live” sets of electronic musicians – whereas Reason developed over the years more and more into a professional, yet classic, editing software: It’s piano roll editing functionalities out-ruled Cubase`s heavy and sturdy looking interface which became notorious of being prone for bugs (although they invented the intuitive bar sequencing concept initially).
It may seem a logical next step to open up a music production software to the endless sea of VST. In Reasons case it will be interesting to see how well this will work along with Propellerheads proprietary Rack Extensions format. RE are similar to VST, but they can only be used for Reason, no other DAWs are supported (yet?). Rack Extensions are propagated through Propellerheads own APIs and building blocks – along with tutorials etc, only open to registered companies. Recent history has shown that opening up to the largest possible developer community is essential, otherwise Apple’s iPhone would have never sinked Nokia’s N95 flag ship which had conquered the market being advertised as “computer phone” shortly before. Again – we are drifting away.
If companies do not adapt to market needs they risk to be evaporated by consumers needs. Steinberg put it’s shoes into other DAW’s doors, but after 2004 the VST standard evolved from version 2.x to VST3 – and became an instant failure. It took seven years until the final stable VST3 release, and it was never adopted by developers as Steinberg would have wished (or maybe they (or Yamaha) didn’t?).
Reason may support VST3 in future, but for now they made the decision to support only VST2 – which is a legacy product. Why? There may be the simple answer that the integration support of VST3 would be simply to high for it’s first introduction with version 9.5 – however, there may be more interesting reasons behind.
At the very end Propellerheads is a developer – and VST3 SDK is a nice example of how to not design an API (a plugin API basically needs 1 main entry point to communicate with it’s host. Steinbergs VST3 API enforces a whole bunch of code in comparison to VST2 – despite some problems like threading are still not solved in a good manner. An API should hide the ugly parts of it’s implementation – with VST3 they seem to be rather exposed.). Could it be that Swedish developers just decided to follow developers who are ignoring VST3 until today?
It is hard to believe since by allowing VST2 standard, this means that any VST3 plugin will not work. Plus: Reason only supports 64bit plugin versions.
Remember that Steinberg VST plugins can be build for 32bit or 64bit hosts. A deeper problem is that the VST2 SDK is no longer available (officially) from Steinberg, they only host the VST3 SDK, including only the needed VST2.x C++ headers to support backward compatibility. Now, the problem is that VSTGUI4 is tailored only for VST3. So when you download VST3 SDK you can build “headless” VST2 plugins only. On top Reason does not support headless plugins, so no way to tweak any parameters. Is Propellerheads expecting that Users will only install VST2 plugins? What about new companies developing new plugins? What options do they have to develop for Reason? If they still grab the old VST 2 SDK from somewhere unofficially – the next problem is that it includes an older version of VSTGUI that is build upon the outdated Apple Carbon GFX framework which only supports 32bit.
So, they only alternative for Reason users seems to be to build VST2 plugins with an alternative GUI solution. At the moment this is supported by either WDL/WDL-OL/iPlug or JUCE. I will write more on this in a next post.
For now it is unclear if Reason 10 which is scheduled for October 25th to include support for VST3 plugins, which would then break the walls, so that latest Steinberg SDK could be used – including full VSTGU4 support.
{*} wip: This post is still work in progress, which means I have not finished writing it yet and still continue to write it - since I do not know when I will finish it, I will post it anyway, just in case you are interested to see the progress. If you are not interested to see unfinished work, just skip it. Thank you.
Vektorstrand 