Topic: Reason4 Issues

Hello,

I bought an AlphaTrack to use with Reason4, but unfortunately encountered a few issues. Here's a list:

- When the RPG-8 is the current device just touching the fader actually changes the value it's bound to. The fader controls the rate, which is 1/16 by default. Touching it changes it 1/8T. This doesn't happen with all my songs, though.

- My default song has a mixer with a track, selected by default. When I open R4 and start changing the current mixer channel there seems to be a bug that forces me to switch to another device and back to continue. Having the transport track selected in the default song fixes this.

- I find it really unpleasant that the encoders default to 8 steps and I have to push them in to get the normal single step behavior. When controlling the pan in the mixer the max. value is 63. This means once I reached it I can't change back to zero with the default step size, only to -1.

- The touchpad sequencer navigation is rather choppy and unreliable. I can't seem to make it work good enough to ever favor it over just using mouse/keyboard controls. I tried the recalibration of the device, no improvement.

I have the latest drivers installed.

Last edited by APUser (2009-02-16 22:00:49)

Re: Reason4 Issues

Hello APUser,

- yes, I can see the RPG-8 fader thing happening occasionally too. I am not sure what causes this device to interpret the touch message as in increment in some cases. I will make a note to check this at the next opportunity.

- It appears that Reason doesn't send an initial device channel message if launched with the mixer selected. This one may be out of or control but we'll note it for checking as well.

- Reason uses a Midi value scale such that hard left is -64 and hard right is 63. So using any number greater than 1 will have this result in one direction or the other. However, if we defaulted Pan control to 1 then it could take many turns to do pans and we have been criticized for doing this in the past. So we default to 8 to allow quick initial adjustment, and then fine tuning if desired after that. In course mode, a quick turn left and back to center will bring you back to 0 everytime.

- Touch strip resolution should be 1 and 4 beat resolution depending on whether you are using 1 or 2 fingers. Let us know if you are seeing something other than that.

Hope this info helps and that you enjoy using your AlphaTrack with Reason.

CS

Re: Reason4 Issues

Thanks for your reply!

It's strange that the startup issue only happens with the mixer. Also, it doesn't seem to happen for my master keyboard, it correctly displays the mixer channels etc on startup.

I can see that the knob precision is a matter of taste. One suggestion would be to jump from 63 to 56 instead of 55. That would allow a clean reset to 0 without pushing the knob in or turning it all to the left. An option to toggle the default behavior would be great.

I'm not sure what is the issue with the touch strip. Maybe Reason just has poor support for this type of control, but it seems that it is just a bit too small for my fingers to allow both precise and fast navigation.