Propellerhead Announces Reason 3.0.5 For Intel-Based Macs, Beta Testers Needed

Propellerhead Software AB is pleased to announce the creation of Reason 3.0.5 - a version of their flagship music production instrument - for Intel-Mac computers. Reason 3.0.5 offers full native compatibility with Apple's Intel-based computers, with identical functionality to the currently shipping 3.0.4 version, created for PowerPC-based Macs. Beta testing has commenced and will ultimately be offered as a free download for registered users. No shipping date has been set.

Propellerhead Software is looking for good men and women to test Reason for Intel based Macs. This round of testing is open to both non-registered users and to registered Reason 3.0 users with a keen eye and a habit of breaking things.

Reason 3.0.5 will only be available in the Intel format, and will not run on PowerPC-based Mac computers. This is contrary to Apple's recommendation to developers, which is to ship a combined PPC and Intel-Mac application in a package called a Universal Binary. Based on the Propellerheads' commitment to always provide the highest possible performance on all computer platforms supported, Propellerhead made the decision to deviate from Apple's recommendation. A Universal Binary actually contains two compiled applications, one for PPC and one for Intel. To create a Universal Binary, Propellerhead would need to use Apple's XCode compiler for both the PPC and Intel versions of the program. By contrast, the shipping version of Reason for PPC computers (version 3.0.4) is compiled with Motorola's CodeWarrior compiler. Unfortunately, internal performance testing shows that compiling Reason for PPC using Apple's XCode compiler creates a significantly slower program than the shipping 3.0.4 version that is available today. For this reason it has been decided to keep the two versions separate for the time being. While this creates a small inconvenience in that users have to manually determine which version is the right one to install, this is by far outshined by the advantages of having maximum performance.

Propellerhead Software is currently working together with Apple to increase the performance of the PPC version of Reason compiled with XCode.

Propellerhead Software has also updated the ReWire and REX libraries, which are used by many other applications to provide integration with Propellerhead Reason and ReCycle. Both ReWire and REX will be made available as Universal Binaries at the same time as Reason 3.0.5 ships. The new version of ReWire called 2.5, also sports significant performance enhancements when loading samples into Reason, in a ReWire session.

For more information, visit their web site at www.propellerheads.se.