Reason 10.0 workstation - UPGRADE TIPS?

Hey mates,

since Propellerhead’s Reason has VST-support on board since version 9.5, I switched back to Reason (By the way: Reason 1.0 made me switch from Fasttracker 2 + Cubase to Reason 1.0 + Cubase :wink: )

Quiet since a while I feel like my main audio workstation is lacking of power here and there. Especially browsing through big libraries is a bit slowly - thanks to my audio device, working with complex projects consisting of many VSTs isn’t a problem with ok latencies of about 12-14 ms.

Now I want to upgrade my setup, mainly browsing through libraries should be faster.
Any experiences, which components have the biggest impact in this case?

My setup:

  • CPU: Intel Core i5-3750k (not overclocked, passively cooled)
  • RAM: 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR3 1600 (default settings)
  • HDD: Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB (contains program + mostly used sound libraries)

Do you think, a dedicated and faster SSD exclusively for my sound libraries could speed the browsing up? Or would a CPU update (i7-8xxx, Ryzen 7) also result in significantly higher loading times?

Cheers from Berlin-InEar

My setup:
-CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 (not overclocked, passively cooled)
-RAM 4x8GB DDR4 Kingston Hyper X Fury
-HDD: 1TB Seagate+external 2TB

I can’t say that I have a lot of problems with loading time and browsing libraries.But I did a batch-resave of all libraries. Even with HHD it speeds up the process of loading libraries.I don’t think that the chosen DAW affects the performance of the PC.
I think that updating the computer will certainly help improve performance. But before investing money in it, it’s probably worth trying to improve the situation by methods that don’t require investments?

Not sure what Motherboard you have, but if you can get your hands on an identical Samsung SSD 840 EVO 250GB, and put the drives in Raid 0 you should double your read/write speed which should theoretically result in a faster load time.

Hey mates,

thanks for your input!

To make it clear: the loading times seem to be absolutely normal (<1 sec for standard patches and sounds, 1-3 secs for combinator-presets or complex instruments. So it’s all about accelerating this process, because I love browsing through interesting patches on-the-fly :wink:

So far, putting my most used libraries on the SSD didn’t improve the loading time of complex patches or multilayered instruments significantly - compared to my standard HDDs (Samsung HD103UJ, Samsung HD154UI). Maybe I should give it thought to make a nice SSD raid :grinning:

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I just recently updated to the latest Komplete Kontrol with the new patch for Instrument previews, where they took the entire Komplete 11 Library and turned them into little loop snippet previews, similar to Abletons browser, and browsing through sounds has never been so quick… It’s like browsing through radio stations really quickly :smiley:

Previously I had a MacBook Pro with an SSD running at about 300Mbps Read speed & recently upgraded to a windows setup with 2 SSD’s in Raid 0 thats running at around 1000 Mbps Read, I’ve opened some older projects using a stop watch to benchmark from the time I click a project to open to the time it’s in front of me… The results were almost night and day, One project would take roughly 4 Minutes to open on the Mac, where as on the windows setup it takes about 1:30, I barely have time to make coffee anymore :wink: (When opening these projects I was monitoring the system resources and the hardrives were the ones taking the most strain)

@Berlin-InEar Give it a go, the worst that could happen is that you landed up with more space for even cooler stuff, haha :slight_smile: