Reason 3.0 was realeased in March. I’ve been waiting for this software for about a year. For those of you not familiar with Reason, its a virtual music studio in a box. You can load up as many synths, effects, drum machines, samplers, etc as you want. Your only real limitation is your computer’s CPU and memory capacity. I’m a big fan of Reason, I’ve had a cracked version of 2.5 for a while and promised myself I’d buy it when 3.0 came out.

My copy just arrived from Sweden a few days ago, and its pretty damn cool. I’m not sure it is really worth a major release number change though. The mastering suite is kickass, I applied it to some old songs and the difference was quite noticable.

The combinator idea is really awesome—you can basically build mini racks that have their own input and output. So you can have 8 synths wih their own effects routing (even their own mixer), and then send that combined “unit” midi data and have them all play at once. I haven’t played that much, but I think this will let me get rid of some of the flatness I used to get frustrated with. I can probably build a super saw now, and of course save it as a preset. Wicked.

I just paid for a 6 months of Digitally Imported’s new Premium subscription service. I’ve been listening to Digitally Imported for a while now, at least since Tag’s Trance Trip dried up because of the CARP ruling.

I was listening to the trance channel this evening when I noticed that the upper frequencies seemed a bit dull. Turns out they’ve limited the public channels down to 96kbps from 128. Upon investigating, I found that Digitally Imported has recently launched a subscription service. 12 dollars a month is a bit steep but I listen a LOT while I’m home, so it seems like a pretty good deal. Plus they offer a 160kbps stream, so it sounds great!!

Check them out if you like electronica, they’re THE place on the net these days. I highly recommend them, too bad my stream ripper doesn’t know how to connect now that they’re authenticating paid users. I’d love to save some of this music that I’m paying to listen to.

As I don’t seem to be finding much good stuff on Kazaa lately, I went looking for a good shoutcast stream ripper. I found a great piece of software, funnily enough named Strean Ripper! It has enough options to do what I want, especially the ability to monitor what I’m ripping (it would be silly to stream the data twice, once for winamp and once for the ripper).

Of course, now that I’m connected to DI 24 hours a day, I feel more compelled to donate a decent amount. I seem to be sucking down around a Gigabyte of traffic per day, so I figure I should at least give something back. DI and DJ Ari, you guys rawk! I will donate very shortly, I swear.