Beta testing has commenced and the release will ultimately be offered as a free download for registered users.
Propellerhead is looking for a few professionals – registered and non-registered users alike - to test Reason for Intel-based Macs. Reason 3.0.5 will only be available in the Intel format, and will not run on PowerPC-based Macs. 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 currently available. For this reason it has been decided to keep the two versions separate for the time being.
Propellerhead Software are currently working together with Apple to increase the performance of the PPC version of Reason compiled with XCode. The company 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. ReWire 2.5 will sport significant performance enhancements when loading samples into Reason, in a ReWire session.