User Manual

AUDIO BASICS
68
About this chapter
This chapter contains some useful information about how audio is handled by Reason and how the audio is routed.
Some of it may seem a bit technical, but we recommend that you read it to get the most out of Reason.
How Reason communicates with your audio hardware
Reason receives, generates and plays back digital audio - a stream of numerical values in the form of ones and ze-
roes. For you to be able to record and play back anything, the audio must be converted from analog to digital when
recording, and from digital to analog when playing back through some kind of listening equipment (a set of speakers,
headphones, etc.).
This conversion is most often handled by the audio card installed in your computer, or by an external audio interface
connected via USB or FireWire. To achieve the best possible performance, Reason requires that the audio card uses
an ASIO driver on Windows systems. On Mac OS X systems, Reason supports Core Audio drivers.
To receive and deliver digital audio to the computer’s audio hardware, Reason uses the driver you have selected in
the Preferences dialog. In the Rack on screen, this connection is represented by the Hardware Interface (also known
as the Hardware Device):
The Hardware Interface is always located at the top of the rack.
! If you are using Reason as a ReWire slave, Reason will instead feed the digital audio to the ReWire master ap-
plication (typically another audio sequencer program), which in turn handles the communication with the au-
dio hardware. See “ReWire” for more details.
The Hardware Interface contains 64 input and 64 output “sockets”, each with an indicator and a level meter. There
are also two Sampling Inputs that can be used for sampling audio to sampler devices. 16 input and 16 output sockets
are shown on the main panel, and an additional 48+48 sockets are shown if the “More Audio” button is activated on
the main panel. Each one of these indicators represents a connection to an input or output on your hardware audio
interface (or a ReWire channel to another application if you are using ReWire).
However, the number of available inputs and outputs depends on the number of inputs and outputs on your hardware
audio interface. For example, if you are using a standard sound card with stereo inputs and outputs, only the first two
inputs and outputs will be available. In the Hardware Interface, the indicators are lit green for all currently active and
connected inputs and outputs. Activation of inputs and outputs on your hardware audio interface is done on the Au-
dio page in the Preferences dialog (see “Active input and output channels”).
Inputs and outputs that are currently connected have green indicators. Available but un-connected inputs and out-
puts have yellow indicators and any connections made to unavailable inputs and outputs have red indicators.
In this case, Inputs 1 and 2 are available, but not connected, Outputs 1 and 2 are available and
connected, whereas Output 3 is unavailable, but connected on the back of the Hardware Interface.
! You never have to connect any cables to the Audio In jacks of the Hardware Interface to be able to record au-
dio on sequencer tracks. This routing is made internally “in the background”, which means you just have to se-
lect audio interface inputs from the Audio Input drop-down list - see “Selecting audio input(s) and defining
mono or stereo”.