Stream Deck + Plugin for Reason
Reason Remote
Your Stream Deck + follows the device you select in Reason. Select a Thor and the dials become Thor's oscillators, filters and envelopes. Select a SubTractor and the deck switches again. Values go both ways, so the touch strip shows where each knob actually is.
The Product
Reason Remote is sold on the Elgato Marketplace in two editions. The full version is $20 and covers 27 Reason devices, from SubTractor and Thor to Europa, Grain, Humana, the Umpfs and the Combinator. The free Lite edition covers 8 of them, including every instrument in Reason Free, with the same Document page, Master mixer and piano. Both use the same Reason setup, so moving from Lite to the full version means swapping one Stream Deck plugin for another.
The Challenge
Reason does not tell anything outside itself which device is selected, and a Stream Deck plugin can only switch to profiles it ships with. The bridge is indirect: a Lua codec inside Reason watches which device has focus and sends a small identity message over a virtual MIDI port, and the plugin turns that into a switch to the matching bundled page.
That constraint shapes the whole architecture. Profiles have to be bundled with the plugin rather than authored by the user, which means the layouts for every supported instrument are generated ahead of time from a single source of truth and packaged with the plugin.
How It Is Built
TypeScript Plugin
A Node plugin on the Elgato Stream Deck SDK resolves the incoming identity to a bundled profile and drives the switch. It also draws its own dials, mixer strips and piano, so no other plugin is needed.
Lua Remote Codec
A Reason Remote codec maps each device's parameters and reports selection changes, assembled from source fragments and syntax-checked as part of the build.
Generated Profiles
Hardware profiles and all key artwork are generated from per-instrument definitions, so a layout change is a data edit and a rebuild rather than hand-editing binaries.
One-Command Release
A single command versions, builds, tests, validates against Elgato's rules, packages the installer, and renders the store listing media.
Build Something Like This
Automate Pros builds Stream Deck plugins, MIDI and control surface integrations, and the generation pipelines that keep large sets of device layouts consistent. If you have hardware that should be driving your software, or a manual workflow that would be better as a single key press, we would like to hear about it.
Not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Reason Studios AB or Elgato. Reason and all Reason device names are trademarks of their respective owners. Stream Deck is a trademark of Corsair Memory, Inc.
