Specifications

AUDIO BASICS
44
About this chapter
This chapter contains some useful information about how audio is handled by
Reason. 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 generates and plays back digital audio - a stream of numerical values in
the form of ones and zeroes. For you to be able to hear anything, this must be
converted to analog audio and sent to 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 (on the Macintosh you can use the built-in audio
hardware if you don’t have additional audio hardware installed).
To deliver the digital audio to the audio hardware, Reason uses the driver you
have selected in the Preferences dialog (see page 13). In the rack on screen,
this connection is represented by the Reason Hardware Interface.
The Hardware Interface is always located at the top of the rack.
! If you are using ReWire, Reason will instead feed the digital audio
to the ReWire master application (typically an audio sequencer pro-
gram), which in turn handles the communication with the audio
hardware. This is described in the Operation Manual pdf.
The Reason Hardware Interface contains 64 output “sockets”, each with an indi-
cator and a level meter. Each one of these indicators represents a connection to
an output on your audio hardware (or a ReWire channel to another application if
you are using ReWire - see the Operation Manual pdf).
However, the number of outputs available depends on the number of outputs on
your audio hardware. For example, if you are using a standard sound card with
stereo outputs (or the built-in audio hardware on the Mac), only the first two out-
puts will be available. In the Hardware Interface device, the green indicators are
lit for all currently available outputs.
In this case, a standard stereo audio card is used, and only the first two outputs (marked
“Stereo” on the device panel) are available.
Here, an audio card with eight outputs is used.
To send the sound of a device in the rack to a specific output, you route the de-
vice output to the corresponding “socket” on the Hardware Interface. This is
done by using the “virtual patch cables” on the back of the rack, as described on
page 51. In most cases, you will want to connect a mixer device to the Stereo
outputs (outputs 1 and 2).