To Anyone Who Owns Propellerhead Reason – System Requirements Question:

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DanDada

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I am about to purchase Reason. When I went to Propellerhead’s site, they have some pretty low system requirements listed – so low in fact that I am skeptical. Can it honestly run on what they say it can? My system is far above what they say the program requires in processing power (they recommend 233Mhz or better & 64MB RAM), however, I’m still unsure as to whether or not it will run smoothly as I only have 256MB RAM.

Thoughts / experiences?
 
funny. it requires at least 64MB RAM and you say, "But I have 256".


lol
 
I’m unsure as to whether or not that’s sarcasm or not? If not, I don’t know why that would be humorous, and if so, after using the Internet for 9 years now, I still will never understand why people waste their time replying to posts without an answer. I don’t know about you, but I value my time too much to come into a thread and respond with sarcasm.

My question to you is, do you own Reason? If yes, give me an answer from a personal perspective. If not, how do you have ANY knowledge that 64MB of RAM would even be acceptable – seeing as you do not own the program, having 256 MB might not be sufficient – even though you think it is.

My point is… everyone has purchased software that gives “minimum” and “recommended” system requirements AND later learned that even the recommended requirements weren’t accurate once you loaded it onto your PC. Take Madden 2004 as a perfect example. That was the reason for my post. Propellerhead may give a system requirement of 64MB RAM, but you may actually have to have 512 or even 1 Gig of RAM for it to perform the way it’s meant to.

If anyone can give me an answer from firsthand experience, please do.
 
My take:

"minimum requirements" always mean what would be required to get the damned program to run at all, not "run well".

If all you are going to to do is use Reason ... 1.5Ghz or better, 256MB RAM or more ... as good a soundcard as you can afford, especially if you plan on using an external controller.
 
I've run Reason on a 400MHz PC with 128Mb of RAM. I've also run it on a 266MHz Mac with 192Mb of RAM. The interface was pretty sluggish, but it worked.

It's been my experience that Propellerheads write good tight code that really takes advantage of whatever hardware you're using to run it.

I remember running ReBirth on a 60MHz Mac, back in the day.

I think their exclusion of VST plugins, audio input, etc. has really kept the program stable and predictable.

I haven't run it on the exact minimum system you mentioned, but you can rock Reason with a pretty modest computer.

-Hoax
 
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Hey DanDada, welcome to FP!

I'm guessing "try the demo first" is too obvious an answer :) It's ~50mB and does come with a sample soundbank, so you could just add a whole bunch of devices, copy them a dozen or so times, and generally watch how it degrades as you add more and more things to your rack.

I haven't done any performance testing of Reason myself, so this is all just first-hand observation but I've happily run Reason 2.5 on a work computer with 256mB RAM and never noticed any slowdown in tracks with (for example) 2 ReDrums, 3-4 DrRexes, 4-5 samplers all split and routed in whatever way through as many Screamers as the rest of the units combined, and that's not even figuring in effects. It's one of the most stable and seemingly efficient programs I've ever seen.

But don't take my word for it, it's not exactly cheap and the last thing you want to do once you've received it is be forced to upgrade your computer. Check out the demo if you can, or wait for someone else who's also running it under those conditions to weigh in.

If you can upgrade your RAM at some point in the near future, I'd really consider doing that. You won't regret it if you continue to work with audio :)
 
Thanks to everyone for your input – I appreciate it greatly.

And if anyone else cares to contribute, feel free to do so.

Thanks for the welcome alex23.
 
I've run Reason with a 700Mhz Celeron with 128Mb RAM, 40+ tracks and a huge load of effects, CPU usage never reached 50%. I think you're good to go.
 
THe more racks you add, plus all the rewire'ing can push your CPU. Im on a AMD 2400+ , 1Gig Ram and 2 Western Digital 120Gig 8MD HD's and things work pretty good. I think the sound card is the one that has to be strong.
 
I was running it on a 900mhz with 128mb ram and WinXP. As long as the rack was small things went fine. But as I added devices, especially external samples and did some automation, it quickly got to the point where the processor maxed out. You get this terrible message, "you puter is too slow, try making you track more efficient"

I upgraded to a 2.8ghz with 512mb RAM and it hardly pushes the processor at all. Basically you don't want to be limited by you processor, and hardware is pretty cheap these days, so get a good machine, you'll be glad you did.
 
...make sure your sound card is low latency. if its not they it will sound like poop no matter how fast your pc is.
 
GoAsakawa said:
...make sure your sound card is low latency. if its not they it will sound like poop no matter how fast your pc is.
Click to expand...

Actually it doesn't affect Reason playback at all. When I first got Reason I used to run it on my parent's comp which has a SoundBlaster16. No problems using Reason with it (didn't have a MIDI controller back then though - that's what's gonna be affected by latency).
 
i have run it on a P3 733MHz with 384Mb of 133 SDRAM, reason ran fine but i had trouble getting the latency down to a reasonable level so i could play instruments via midi keyboard and listen at the same time with out a large delay. i have only a soundblaster live (with connection bay) maybe it was the soundcard not up to the job,this problem got worse the more the rack filled up!but still usable though just
 
When i first got Reason i was on a run down 1.25ghz, 128 mg ram computer and couldnt even run the drum computer with out getting the blue screen of death.. that computer was a piece of sh*t.
 
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