VST3’s produced in reason unfortunately will not work correctly in Reason 12.
I’m afraid that this is a bug in V12 of Reason which the company refused to acknowledge or fix in V12. When the new V13 came out the bug was fixed. This means if you want the bug fixed you must in essence pay for the bug fix.

You will find that the Plug-in will respond normally to the MIDI input for a short time, then will either get “stuck notes” or stop responding to the MIDI input entirely. In some cases the VST will freeze completely.

What is causing the issue?

It’s somewhat technical.
Reason sends every note to the plugin with a ‘note-id’ of zero.

The VST3 specification says:
struct NoteOnEvent {
int16 channel;
int16 pitch;
float tuning;
float velocity;
int32 length;
int32 noteId; // note identifier (if not available then -1)
};

The note-id is like a MIDI key-number in a lot of ways, that is to say that a note-off with noteID of zero should turn off all note-ons with the same noteID.
And since Reason sends all notes with a noteID of zero, that means that any note-off turns off all notes.

Jeff commented on this:

“In the most obvious way:
If you play a 3 note chord in VST3, the note-ids would typically be like: 0,1, 2 and then the DAW sends note-off with note-id 2,
I stop the most recent note (with the note-id 2)

What Reason does when you play a 3-note chord:
note-on 0, note-on 0, note on 0

It would be very very easy for Reason to get this right.
They choose not to.
If a plugin does not support vst3 note-id, then it will not show any obvious problem in Reason.

SynthEdit does support note-id (which is generally a good thing).

The message below was sent to Reason which they chose to ignore, and still not fix the bug.

Scanning VSTs in Reason 12.

It is also a known issue with Reason 12 that VST’s scan incorrectly, and are not recognized properly as Effect or Instrument, this ending up in the wrong category.
This is not a bug in SynthEdit either but an issue within Reason.

Summary.

Reason is known for being “buggy”. Seems they are far more interested in introducing new features no one wants than fixing bugs, some of which have been reported for some time (over 6 months). Oh then the bugs do get fixed, but only in a new version which you have to pay for. Caveat Emptor.

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