Can any musicians in the know about music software comment on how this compares to say, Ableton Live?
Indeed - I've been considering getting a DAW to hobby shop with, and have been on the fence between Logic, Ableton Live and Reason. My (perhaps naive) impression is that Logic seems to be more geared towards recording live music, while Ableton and Reason seem to be more geared towards creating music in the program. They can all do both (recording live and create), but that's just my impression watching their demo vid…
1. I almost never actually finished anything in it. That's a problem for me in general, but Reason exacerbates it. There are so many knobs to tweak, that I often ended up mired in the minutia of tweaking sounds. I found it hard to stay high level and focus on the music.
2. Compared to, say whaling on a real guitar or keyboard, I found Reason sounded very "dry" out of the box. To get something that didn't sound cheap or reedy, I had to do a lot of set-up: make a synth or two, wire them through a few effects and EQ, tweak everything, add some reverb, tweak some more. I felt like I wanted to decorate a cake, but Reason forced me to go out and thresh some wheat first. This level of control is really powerful if you're into sound design, but made it hard for me to make songs and music.
Of course, your mileage may vary. As far as fun toy to play with, though, Reason is a blast. I spent many a happy hour tweaking and playing with little loops.