It's the news you've been waiting for confirmation of all weekend. Long have Reason users wondered when Propellerhead would integrate audio recording into the famously fun and stable sequencing program. The answer is here, and surprisingly, it seems to be "never" with an added "instead, we've gone and made a completely separate product and called it Propellerhead Record, a DAW that incorporates many functional and work-flow elements pioneered in Reason."

So is Record any good? If we can judge a DAW by its promo video, I think it's safe to say that Propellerhead Reason is incredibly well made and easy to understand, with a high re-watch-ability factor and just a touch too much eyeliner.

Propellerhead Record Rack Window

Record -- currently in Beta -- looks pretty much like you'd expect a Reason-take on a DAW to look. Propellerhead wants to make it clear that Record is targeted at "musicians" and not "engineers," (I didn't know those two were mutually exclusive), and after a quick glance through its specs, it looks like Record is functionally deep enough even for "engineers." Three main windows comprise your workspace, and you switch between them via keystroke. There's the sequencer window which looks like Reason's sequencer window, the mix window, which looks like any DAW's mix window, and a rack window, which looks, again, like Reason's rack.

Propellerhead Record Seqeuncer Window

A few features jumped out at me right off the bat. The rack is where you manage each channel's "plug-ins" and, because it's based off the Reason rack, offer quite a bit more routing flexibility than a typical DAW channel insert (i.e., you can flip the rack around and graphically patch and rout virtual cables). Also, Record comes bundled with software versions of Line 6's Guitar POD and Bass POD. I saw some Reason effects in there, like the DDL-1 delay unit and the RV7000 reverb plug, but it doesn't look like Record will support any third-party plugins. In addition to the PODs, Record sports its own ESX24-style multi-instrument, called ID8.

The sequencer window is where you'll be doing your initial tracking, and Propellerhead has geared it to put as few steps in between you and recording as possible: a single click creates a record-ready track. The audio tracks sport an integrated tuner for guitar and bass, and it looks like the sequencer supports virtual-track play-listing (or comping), a plus for vocal recording. Finally, Record takes a cue from Ableton and supports full-project, pitch-stable time-stretching of both MIDI and recorded audio. If the promo video is to believed, it's some of the smoothest time-stretching I've heard to come prepackaged in a DAW. . . especially one that is supposed to retail for $299 US.

The mixer might be the most impressive aspect of Record. For a program that claims to be aimed at non-engineers, Propellerhead sure picked an interesting subject on which to model their virtual mixing console -- the Solid State Logic 9000K. Just take a look at the channel strip to the right: you get the full 9000-series signal path for every channel, including SSL-style dynamics, SSL-style EQ, four inserts and eight sends. You get a 64-bit mix bus, a dedicated allotment of "record effects" (separate from the channel rack effects) and a Master channel with master bus compressor (also based on the master bus compressor of the SSL 9000k) for in-the-box mastering.

Reason users will be happy to note that, if you have a registered version on the same computer as Record, all your Reason rack effects and instruments will show up in your Record rack. Record is also slave-able to another DAW or sequencer via ReWire, and supports Propellerhead Remote for instant hardware control surface integration.

You can sign up for beta testing between now and the official Record release date (ha!) of September 9th, 2009.