mdc wrote: Mon Jan 12, 2026 12:00 pm Landr (cloud-based mastering company) bought Reason (the DAW I've been using for 20yrs). This is maybe good? Maybe bad? It was owned previously by some random VC firm so at least having a parent co involved in the music world is probably heartening to some degree. That said, I'm not excited about having ai bloatware pushed into future releases.

I'm not really a typical Reason user, but I really love the workflow, the interface, the quirkiness, and the fake SSL mixer. I use Reaper and Audition for sort of utilitarian tasks, but the idea of having to move wholly into another DAW if Reason shits the bed is really disheartening.

This might be a good thing? I dunno, the holding company that owns Fender keeps buying shit and making it shittier. I don't know much about Landr, but I haven't heard anything bad, not that it means they are good.

cakes wrote: Mon Jan 12, 2026 12:52 pm

mdc wrote: Mon Jan 12, 2026 12:00 pm Landr (cloud-based mastering company) bought Reason (the DAW I've been using for 20yrs). This is maybe good? Maybe bad? It was owned previously by some random VC firm so at least having a parent co involved in the music world is probably heartening to some degree. That said, I'm not excited about having ai bloatware pushed into future releases.

I'm not really a typical Reason user, but I really love the workflow, the interface, the quirkiness, and the fake SSL mixer. I use Reaper and Audition for sort of utilitarian tasks, but the idea of having to move wholly into another DAW if Reason shits the bed is really disheartening.

This might be a good thing? I dunno, the holding company that owns Fender keeps buying shit and making it shittier. I don't know much about Landr, but I haven't heard anything bad, not that it means they are good.

I used Landr once about 3 years ago just to see how it held up to Ozones Auto Mastering thing, which I think is mostly pretty bad. It was far, far worse. Just way over loud, and saturated with extremely overhyped highs and sub lows. Probably great for the terrible EDM and Metal kids are listening to these days. Unusable for anything with any subtlety. My guess is Reason will become a very AI Based processing suite, like everything else will, except Reaper. I don't see that being a huge focus for the Reaper devs. I do know these AI too developers are looking to devourer some DAW to make it fully a AI experience to show off how Fantastic our lives are going to be once we no longer have any active participation in the process of Writing, Performing, Recording, and Mixing out music. It's going to be so great!

Maybe I lack imagination, but I can't imagine how AI in a DAW is going to be awesome, other than really menial tasks, like microdynamics, tuning and phase fixing. Who can argue about that? For the creative side, AI is worthless, because it's not a creative output. There's nothing creative about copying and pasting alone.

cakes wrote: Mon Jan 12, 2026 1:14 pm Maybe I lack imagination, but I can't imagine how AI in a DAW is going to be awesome, other than really menial tasks, like microdynamics, tuning and phase fixing. Who can argue about that? For the creative side, AI is worthless, because it's not a creative output. There's nothing creative about copying and pasting alone.

I'm being wildly sarcastic. AI is horseshit for creatives unless you are not a creative person posing as a creative person who is too lazy to learn a thing. I expect Reason will now be the top slop generator for YouTube and ticktock music

yeah there is no fucking way I would ever leave one of my records up to AI.

For one thing - even among all the other issues - it seems to be suspiciously biased by reddit.

llllllllllllllllllll wrote: Mon Jan 12, 2026 6:38 pm yeah there is no fucking way I would ever leave one of my records up to AI.

For one thing - even among all the other issues - it seems to be suspiciously biased by reddit.

I personally think it is fun to work on music. It's fun to doodle, make stupid shit out of other shit. I don't understand this universe where convincing people to do away with process is an advantage to anyone other than boring, lazy, greedy people.

I think there's a much bigger risk of Reason becoming enshittified through more "social connectivity" or whatever bloat than there is of it becoming an ai music auto generation tool. Those tools already exist and I can't imagine the win in trying to rebrand a DAW that very few people care about to be one of those versus just making your own thing with the same tech and zero baggage.

I think the guy who led the acquisition at Landr is a longtime Reason user, and probably genuinely believes he can help turn the company around, and will probably add some genuinely useful tools at first (intelligent dynamic eq like soothe2! better pitch correction! some kind of spatial shit!) that leverage whatever code and dataset Landr has to play with, but then will just force a subscription model and freemium a bunch of default-on stuff that no one asked for and no one probably needs or wants.

Just look at how awful UAD software has become, and no one even had to purchase them to make it get shitty.

Also, it's wildly off topic but a good read on the purpose of AI art:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/

I think AI can be used creatively. Like photography. The artistry isn't in the reproduction of reality, like with a drawing or a painting. It's the actual capture of something real. What makes it art is the composition, the use of lighting and shadow, the decisions in the medium it's printed on, etc. Often times, those elements are fleeting, not set up by the photographer. There's an artistic skill in capturing a moment. I think of AI like that. All the slop is going to be looked at as slop. But a true artist could transcend slop. It's when we turn off our brain and let the computer do the hard work that goes into decision making that makes it sloppy and not worthy of our time and focus. As artistic humans, we can spot this and we reject it. There will be a place in this world unfortunately, for slop. But it's not like it's new, it's existed in other forms like elevator music, art you buy at Home Goods, etc. The banal has a place for the banal, I really don't think much has changed in that respect.

cakes wrote: Tue Jan 13, 2026 10:13 amBut it's not like it's new, it's existed in other forms like elevator music, art you buy at Home Goods, etc. The banal has a place for the banal, I really don't think much has changed in that respect.

I thin k you could argue that what keeps AI from being considered art is that it removes the Process of creation from an artist. I would argue that banal media is art and it is an art to create it, using your Elevator Music example for instance, some probably really talented musician had to compose that banal music specifically to be banal and the success of that is an indicator of artistic prowess. It's actually probably a pretty difficult or at least thoughtful process to create that vibe, and someone made it. With AI there is no process just prompt, and no one is going to convince me that prompting is an art. Type in a description and hit Reiterate until you get close enough is not an art, and at least at this juncture, that is how AI functions.

Now, I do think it is possible for an artist to use AI generated media to create art. Artists can make art out of anything, my issues come with the problem of using to create "art" from AI whole cloth. Hit a button, get a result, take credit for it. That's crap and we are going to be neck deep in it.

As far as Landr, based on the results I heard, i'm not even sure that is AI involved. Probably just a comparative algorithmic mathy math that just forces your sounds to fit the signature of referenced examples. That's not AI. It's not even Machine Learning. It's just an algebra problem. But someday it probably will be.