KonceptG....your are wrong on quite a few things when it comes to Reason. I won't go into detail on it all but I will point out a few since you're obviously making statements based on what you think you know about Reason. You don't work with 3.04 so I'm sure there are things you don't know. Oh yea...u still failed to elaborate on how much "extra" cash you have to spend just to as you say "get serious" about your music using FL. Not to mention very few FL users here even have the XXL....lol They are working with the cheapest version out I bet.
This is true. Most cats DON'T get XXL.
BTW, I do have 3.04, I just found nothing useful in it so I dropped back to 2.5.
ReDrum- I'm sure your point here refers to layering. Come on man..get your facts str8. I can have however many ReDrums link'd together. And the ReDrum is just one source for drums. I can have a drum patch in the NNXT and the Dr Rex. All on one song! And as many of each as I want! You have a flip function on Reason so when you hit tab you see the back of all the units like you would see with "real" hardware (u see wires and the whole 9). U have nothing like that in FL. Fucking wires actually move around when u flip it(we on some virtual shit)....lol! Say I have 5 ReDrums up 10 samples on each one. I can go out of pad 1 on the first ReDrum into every pad 1 on the additional 4 ReDrums which makes it able to play 5 layers of what ever drum sample I have on pad 1 of each! If I hit pad 1 it will signal sample 1 on every ReDrum. Man..what are you saying? Now that's just 5...I can have as many as I want!!!!
FPC is a multi-sample playback device. On one pad, I can trigger up to 4 different samples based on velocity ranges, just like on an MPC or other real sampler. What this does is allow you to place 4 different samples, say corresponding to timbre changes for a cymbal soft, medium, medium hard, hard, and trigger each sample from the same pad depending on how hard you hit the pad. It has nothing to do with layering at all.
The moving wires thing was cute but useless. The way you can patch things in Reason IS useful, however, so Reason still gets points for it.
And in order to have as many samples available at once with ReDrum (without the multisample aspect of FPC), you still need to open 3 Redrum units and even then you'll be short 2 samples. As for the layering you spoke of, you can do that in FL too with FL Layer use an FPC as the parent device, open a couple of other FPC's as child devices and when you trigger one pad, you'll trigger the same pad on every child FPC.
Strike 1.
As far as the synth patches you named like Sytrus, DX10 etc. who cares..we have Refills that have exactly the same sounds.
No you don't.
The thing about using a true synth instead of samples is that you can manipulate the synth in ways you can NEVER do with a sample. Say you have an FM bell piano sound but want to add some slightly detuned harmonics to it. With the actual FM synth, you can do it. With samples, you can't at all. Same thing goes for every other type of synthesis. Samples can play back only what you give it and can manipulate that sound, but synthesis GENERATES the sounds itself. You can do all manner of things to it that simply can't be done with samples.
Strike 2
Wave Traveler- We have patches for the combinator that simulate stratching and kutting. Check the Reason section and you'll see the tutorial. They're also a few on UTube showing you how to build one within the combinator.
The Wave Traveler is purpose made for this. Using the combinator only approximates what the Wave Traveler does much better.
Mixer- You're wrong again. I can have 10 mixer's or more up if I want. 10 x 4 sends is what...."40" come on man. Speak what you know or don't speak at all. Not to mention that we are not limited to just one kind of mixer. We have the reMix 16:2 and the line mixer 6:2. Does FL have more than one type of mixer? I don't think so! Yes we have a basic Eq on the mixer. BUT WE HAVE MCLASS EQ'S so we don't need a monster Eq on our mixer. It doesn't get better than MClass. And I can have as many of those going as my heart desires.
Tru you can have 10 mixers or more, and you can also have different fx on each one, but those mixers are still limited to 4 fx, where the single, 64 channel mixer in FL has 4 sends with up to 8 fx per send. Reason's line mixer was a way to handle complaints about having to continually open more larger mixers when a simple line-type mixer would do. It's still not necessary in FL Studio.
Everything else you said was equal or Reason was better! You're throwing around the word "serious" like the only way you can be serious about your music using FL is to go out and buy 2G's worth of shit. I don't have to do that with Reason...It's in the box man *PERIOD*
No, Reason STILL doesn't have a wave editor within the app, it still has NOTHING that compares to Luv Philter, nothing that compares to the variety of synths available in FL Studio (BTW, isn't it ironic that you slag off buying VST's, yet have no problem endorsing having to buy Refills whenever you can't recreate a particular sound???), and I haven't even gone out of the box yet! Here's the killer part to it - Almost everything in the MClass suite IS INCLUDED IN FL STUDIO!!! FL Studio has a helluva multi-band compressor (Fruity Multiband Compressor - which Reason's is NOT), Fully Parametric EQ (Fruity EQ2- 7 band vs reason's 4 band EQ), Stereo Imager (one stereo image tool is on every mixer channel, plus there the Fruity Stereo Enhancer). The only thing it's missing is a Maximizer.
You still have yet to address the remainder of fx included in FL which have no equivalent in Reason.
Strike 3... you're out!
Free upgrades for life when you have the first ever FL ain't saying much! It's not like you get free upgrades from the $99 FL to the $369 XXL!!!! Reason doesn't have to have 9 upgrades for one version because they get shit right the first time! If you have to upgrade one version 9 times something is wrong!
Nothing in FL can fuck with the NNXT...nothing in FL can't touch the combinator and with the addition of Thor in 4.0 it's a wrap!
DirectWave and NNXT are neck and neck. You obviously haven't used DirectWave at all 'cause if you did you'd see that the two were equals with the exception of sample importing (Directwave supports more formats out of the box than NNXT).
I'll wait and see if I like Thor... but because Propellerheads will likely force me to pay, once again, for the upgrade from 3.0.4 to 4.0, I'll likely pass on it. If I'm going to have to pay just to get Thor, I might as well use that money to buy a VST that I can use in Cubase AND FL Studio.
Let's add that up... Shall we???
Reason 1.0 - $350 (if memory serves me, it's been a long time)
Upgrade to Reason 2.0 - $89
Upgrade to Reason 2.5 - $free (thank god!)
Upgrade to Reason 3.0 - $129
$568 total spent on Reason.
FL Studio 4.0 Producer Edition - $149
Every update after that - $0
$149 spent on FL Studio. At some point, one of my upgrades also included full versions of DirectWave, Sytrus, Wasp, and Wasp XL. Can't remember if it was 5 or a maintenance release of 5, but I now have 'em (meaning I now have the equivalent of XXL)
If I took the $419 dollars I saved with FL Studio and applied it towards the monster modular that is Reaktor, I can still come out ever so slightly cheaper (Reaktor is $399) AND I can still use Reaktor with Cubase AND ProTools!!!
BTW... You DO know that FL Studio can act as a Rewire host to Reason... Right??? So... I not only have access to Reason's synths and samplers, but I can use them in alongside FL Studio's synths and samplers.