reason 8 is awesome. reason has quickly become a legit powerful daw that is capable of doing pretty much everything right out of the box. it comes with great sounds and instruments to tweak and create your own sounds, along with effects and great mixing capabilities. plus you can record and edit audio in it pretty easily as well, sampling is a breeze into any of its included instruments, and you can slice the samples quickly with what is basically recycle functionality built into the program. theres also midi out capability now so you can sync other hardware or programs with reason, and if you ever need more sounds or new instruments or effects you can always get new rack extensions which are like reasons version of the VST. reason 8 brings a great new GUI and streamlines the workflow making it much quicker and easier to work with. plus its extremely stable, and its relatively cheap!
I got sick of juggling multiple programs, minimize crashes, the costs of upgrading multiple programs, etc. so i simplified my setup down to doing everything in reason, and so far i couldn't be happier!
