Propellerhead Figure Brings Reason To iOS For $1

Musikmesse 2012: Propellerhead today announced that it is bringing the Reason audio engine to iOS as a new app, Figure.

Propellerhead Figure is based on the Reason engine, but features a new user interface that is designed for multitouch use. So, the look and feel of Figure is optimized for touchscreen use, but, underneath, you’ll be controlling Kong, Thor, etc.

The application has been submitted to the App Store for approval and will sell for $1.

Propellerhead also announced plans for Rack Extensions, a new format that will open the Reason Rack to developers. Korg, Sugar Bytes and others have announced plans to develop Rack Extensions.

We’ll have official details on both Propellerhead Figure and Rack Extensions as they are available.

via PropellerheadSW, CDM, Leo Nathorst-Böös

34 thoughts on “Propellerhead Figure Brings Reason To iOS For $1”

      1. Yeah but Apple often sells their own apps cheaper than the competition for instance Logic Pro is only $200 now which undercuts the competition that usually sell a inferior product for 300, 500 or more, and then Final Cut Pro, oh man, at $300 this is a steal compared to $750 for the next closest competitor. This is one of the things that lower the “total cost of ownership” of a Mac that makes me say people whining about hardware prices are probably pirates.

  2. I think it’s great iOS software is very cheap but at the same time I feel bad for the developers.. Just like it happened with music overtime the value of it went down the fucking toilet. and yes, everyone downloads music and software for free anyway but this makes it even harder to make a living when just a few people pay for it.

    1. That’s a very cool post, and I wonder how this will play out?

      It’s tempting to think (I hope I’m not being childish) that quality will always have a place in the market and when well-designed, well-programmed software (or hardware) hits the market, people will pump up the buzz and someone–maybe even a small minority of people–will be enough to at least keep the good stuff available.

      But the market might just crush the good stuff and replace it all with wretched stuff.

      It will be very, very interesting to see what happens to Teenage Engineering and the OP-1. They are making an effort to do cool stuff properly. 1) Will they even make enough $$$ to stay in business? 2) Will they get swallowed up by some giant corporation to leech off their successs (and remove them from competition)? 3) Will they just go bankrupt or change their business plan to more normal, less quality-driven products?

      That one company might reveal a lot about the music technology business future.

  3. It seems pretty clear that Propellerhead is looking to build its customer base with Figure.

    We’ll have to see the details, but it’s obvious already that Figure will have a subset of Reason’s features. Propellerhead will probably make it easy to start something on your iPad or iPhone and then import it into Reason to develop.

    You get hundreds of thousands of people using Figure and you can bet that some of those people are going to end up buying Reason.

    I’m looking forward to the details on this announcement. But $1 will make this a no-brainer.

  4. I think the under-$20 app model is brilliant.
    I’m an artist of modest means, but over the last year I’ve spent close to $300 on apps, mostly in the $.99 – 9.99 price range. All purchased legitimately. (even if there were another way to get iOS apps.. there likely is.. but it doesn’t matter because the prices are very affordable.)

    Compare that to a 10-year period where I was an independent artist working in computer graphics, and I was able to purchase Adobe Photoshop once for about $300, but every other program I needed to use I obtained through sharing or dowloading cracked versions.. shame on me but whatever I was young and needed to work.

    Needless to say this system is much better and likely more profitable in the long run. It costs a lot of money to come up with (nearly useless and annoying to legit buyers) ways of preventing people from obtaining pirated $300-and-up software.

    So there you go. 🙂

  5. This is really pretty exciting news, something that I’ve been waiting a while to happen. I’ve used Reason for many years and I think that it transition nicely to the touch screen environment. Will it look and react just like Reason 6? Probably not, I don’t think that we’re quite there yet with iOS technology. Maybe I’m wrong – I hope that I’m wrong – but either way, I still see plenty of potential in Figure. I think that there are plenty of things that the iPad can do with Reason that will make iOS music making all the better.

    I’m not really discouraged about the price – low prices are part of the App Store. It does make me wonder what exactly we’ll see in Figure though. What I’d hate to see happen is a bare bones version of Reason that is just a “sketchpad” for bigger ideas to be completed in Reason. If Propellerheads is actually going to make the step into iOS technology, I want them to go all the way and give us a product that will actually push mobile music making to the next level. I want to see them take the platform seriously and deliver a serious music making tool, support it with regular updates, and find new ways to make iPhones and iPads tools for musical creation.

    I’ve had good experiences with Propellerheads for a long time, so I’m trusting that this is going to be a great product. I guess we’ll all wait and see, but suffice to say, I’m very excited!

  6. Out of curiosity, could someone with a New Zealand or Australia App Store account say whether Figure has arrived? If so, it’ll be coming out around midnight in everyone’s local Stores.. needless to say, I’ll be there a few seconds after midnight!

  7. Sweet, but I bet anything really cool and groundbreaking will be tied up in in app purchase. Nevertheless for 99 cents it will of course we worth a look.

  8. The real story here is that the Reason rack is being opened up to devs. This is great news! I’ve always liked Reason, and I still use it for some things and they’re finally doing all the things that I wanted them to do. First was adding audio recording and now finally we’ll get plugins for it that still behave like the rack! I guess the boys at Propellerheads have finally woken up. It just kills me that it’s taken them this long, their main competitor (FL) had this stuff figured out long ago. I’m interested to see where this goes. With the right developers onboard, Reason could become a real force in the future….

  9. $1 is a marketing ploy because Reason lost a lot of market share to Ableton, though it is different enough with the racks and wires, etc. to stay in business. This might entice someone to buy it and notice that Propellerhead is not so bad. However, iOS is a cell phone operating system. OSX is taxed by DAW’s and the like at a reduced sound quality, imagine the poor sound quality of a cell phone OS. For $1 it will be little more than a fun toy to allay the boredom until one can use a real computer.

  10. If the workflow is really cool, I will def consider using reason as part of my main studio rig as well. I think this is a push for halo effect, and it will work if it’s dope.

  11. The price is no marketing ploy other than the “less is more technique”, same as Moog used for Animoog and that was a runaway hit on the app store, only music app I know that went to number one and held its place there for a while.

    Ever since I got an iOS device a few years ago, I was praying reason would come out and last year I said it will, before summer this year. And lol, people were calling me crazy all over the place.

    But look, it’s imminent but highly likely ( I’d gladly accept being proven wrong though ) that it will be like Imaschine is to its hardware counterpart, a very slim version capable of doing some neat tricks. But..I really hope I am wrong. Nonetheless, I’m grabbing it and likely ill find it useful.

    This will be a serious year for iOS music and the fact that this is coming out is very encouraging.

      1. There couldn’t be, right? Support from Korg, Propellerhead, Moog, Yamaha, JazzMutant, IK Multimedia, and now Propellerhead doesn’t mean a damn thing, does it?

  16. Now the bad news:

    the Prophead iOS app is NOTHING like reason. It uses the brilliant KONG and THOR synth engines, but the patches are non-editable. There are only 4 tracks. There is no piano roll or grid to fine tune or edit your recordings.

    What this means: no “synth.” Just synth sounds. No making custom kits with kong. No wiring up the back of the rack. No actual synthesis. None of the things that make those two devices cool in the first place.

    This app is starting to look like the iKaossilator app… which is cool, but not what I would want from Propheads… they should just port reason. Reason 2 ran fine on my old single core pentium 2… it should be super fast on an ipad.

    1. Even Reason 4 should run nicely on iPad 2. Its requirements were: G4 1GHz, 512 MB RAM minimum, 1 GB recommended.

      Its the money. 0,99 – 4,99$ that people are reay to pay for apps is not enough for the really impressive stuff. The same goes for games.

      (also, my earlier commnent is still awaiting moderation because of the link, and it might look stoopid after these comments)

  18. If comments made by Goku prove to be correct, Figure begins to look more and more like a toy instead of being a music production tool 🙁
    I just hope that more serious elements will be available as in app purchase. Even at the total cost of let’s say $50 and offered the functionality of Reason 2, I would definitely consider Figure a bargain, otherwise I’m giving it a miss…

  19. Like I said, it will come out basic, like imaschine, and likely phone only like ikaoscillator did

    But…with requests and proddings from people who buy this app, likely developers will er..develop it further lol. Likely one in app purchase will unlock more features who knows

    The good thing is that proppelors are re entering the market, after rebirth which was ok and we should embrace that, if they see the app sells well and HAS A POTENTIAL USE then I see no reason ( no pun intended) why they won’t expand it.

    Maybe they are testing the market and likely are testing new iPad to see exactly what it can handle..

    1. It could get good…but this app will never get Reason.

      Perhaps if they opened up they synth engines in future updates, as well as at least one more track. Then it would be worth of tens of dollars. Currently its hardly worth of even 1.

  21. You can see a video demonstration of the Figure app here:
    http://www.musicradar.com/news/tech/video-propellerhead-figure-for-ios-535513

    It’s NOT Reason on your iphone/ipad. As Goku has already said, it looks more like an iKaossilator-type sketchpad. It has quite a nice, minimal design, and seems like it will probably be a fun, intuitive little instrument (or toy, depending on your point of view). But it’s not what some of you were clearly hoping for.

  22. Yes, as of version 1.0, Figure is mostly a toy. You can’t export Figure songs to Reason.

    Propellerhead’s real news yesterday was their Rack Extension plug-in format, which was announced at the same press conference. I’m baffled as to why Figure, a dinky $1 iPhone app, got the emphasis here on Synthtopia.

  23. lol @ figure and the comments being closed. It was going to get real anti-iOS in that mutha. I don’t like the app. They could of made the skeptics eat words, but the skeptics won this round I figure.
    I do love Reason though.

  24. Things are different now. You really need to break out of the “Cost = Quality” thinking, because now it’s all about volume. Toilet paper and toothpaste are cheap, but do the math vs 300 million people and you see what a huge industry those are! Think the same with music apps now. We used to have an ecosystem that could sell an app at a few hundred dollars to a few thousand people. Maybe a couple tens of thousands. But an iOS app could potentially sell literally hundreds of millions of copies! At just a dollar each, even if they only hit single digit percentages of potential sales, they will be making boatloads more money than they were before.

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