Advice on Reason Esentuals Total Newbie 1st post

Harly

New member
Hi All
I have been playing around with Demo copies of Reason and Reason essentials.
Essentials being more level to what i can afford.
I have not made the purchase yet as i am having a PC re-built especially for the purpose.
Pitfalls. problems. things to be wary of....
can i have it on more than one machine...PC (Home studio) and a Laptop (Gigging).
at the moment i have been running Essentials Demo on a Notebook with additional screen.
can anyone recommend books for an absolute greenie..
Also when researching reason, i came across proppellerheads Balance with reason essentials in the bundle. What happened to it.. seems to have disappeared off face of the earth ?
 
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Essentials is surprisignly powerful for what it is...and especially for the price. Basically you're left without some of the fx & synths, but otherwise it's more or less the same as the full version. Feature comparison here. And you can still buy the Rack Extensions. The biggest downside is that the upgrade from Essentials to the full version is almost as expensive as the full version itself (but of course they can't make Essentials + the upgrade cheaper - otherwise people would just buy that).

Yes, you can have it on as many computers as you want - as long as they're not running at the same time.

And the Balance interface was just discontinued - while it looked nice and it was convenient to be able to buy a bundle of "everything" from one manufacturer, it didn't really do anything special compared to the competition, and keeping up maintenance, support and manufacturing for a single product is expensive.
 
wow.. your giving me what I needed.
now if i can indulge you..
are you, Anyone here. good on the hardware..
so far research has given me..
intel pentium/AMD Opteron with dual cores or better
4 gig ram
Audio interface with ASIO driver
Windows 7 or greater avoid windows 10,
i have an Akai MPK mini keyboard that I have been using with the demo.
i know I have barely scratched the surface
any advice you guys can impart would be an asset.
Harly
 
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I'm not too well versed with PC specs these days, but I'd probably go for at least an i5, preferably an i7 if funds allow it; at least 8Gbs of RAM. The virtues of W7 vs W10 I can't say, as I'm on OSX all the way. For audio interfaces, there are a lot of options - and a lot of threads on here about choosing one. The MPK will work with just about anything, so no need to worry about that when choosing your stuff.
 
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