LiveSet 1.0 ($129) from PeterTools (www.petertools.com) is a MIDI-processing program designed primarily for use with Propellerhead Software's Reason, but it's compatible with any application that can function as a ReWire slave. LiveSet is meant to be inserted between your MIDI controller and the target application in order to capture and process all incoming MIDI messages, and it accepts data simultaneously from two MIDI ports.

LiveSet offers an assortment of general-purpose MIDI processing modules as well as two modules that are custom tailored for Reason. The general-purpose modules include a Velocity gate and a compressor, a note transposer, note and controller multiplexers, a chord maker, a controller crossover, a MIDI LFO, and an output router for external MIDI devices.

As an example setup, you could split incoming MIDI notes by Velocity, routing high-Velocity notes to a bass sound and transposing them down an octave while routing low-Velocity notes to a chord maker to play a keyboard sound (see Web Clip 1). In general, you can use these modules to split, layer, and MIDI-munge virtual instruments in any ReWire application in just about any way you can imagine.

LiveSet's Impact and Reloop modules plumb new territory in Reason automation. Impact stores complete setups (levels, sends, pan settings, solos, and mutes) for Reason's mixers. You can assign MIDI notes to switch setups, and switching can be quantized to force setups to change only at bar lines, for example.

Reloop is an on-the-fly manager of markers (called Points) and regions (called Blocks) in Reason songs. It accomplishes that by moving Reason's song-position and loop-boundary markers as necessary. In short, it's the remix feature that you always wished was built into Reason. You can assign Blocks and Points to MIDI notes and quantize their triggering. A clever catch-up option remembers the time spent in a loop and jumps the same amount of time ahead in the song when it exits the loop. You can download a save-disabled, time-limited demo of LiveSet at the PeterTools Web site. LiveSet 1.5 should be available by the time you read this, featuring a new Tam Tam module that handles dynamic tempo changes and numerous additional enhancements.