Reason and Live demos are great but are crippled in order to inspire purchase (or cracking?) of the real product. They both limit the time they are awake as well as disable saving and rendering.

The latter can be easily worked around if you have ReWire host — like ACID 4.0

When you don’t have several $100 dollars for these programs, even a half hour is better than nothing. What can you do in the half hour?

1. In ACID select Insert/Soft Synth… to open a list of VST and Rewire instruments on your machine.
2. Select the “Rewire Devices” tab
3. Double click on the first entry (say Ableton Live Mix L\Mix R) — you can safely close the window that comes up after that.
4. Open the Ableton Live demo (or whatever you selected in the previous step).
5. Click through some useless dialogs and you’re ready to drop some waves into the Live mixer, run some fx on them and start playing around.

Remember the following things:

• You have to put the slave (Live or Reason) into a mode where it will remember your performance
• Make sure you have “Show Bus Tracks” checked in the View menu of ACID
• The tempo and song related data is being by controlled in ACID (it is the master)

Once you have a performance you like, go back to ACID and solo the bus track with Live or Reason and “Render As…”.

Don’t bother getting too fancy in these demo versions because after the demos time-out all your settings will be completely lost.

If nothing else it will give you a great idea about whether the next time you want to upgrade ACID or put pressure on albeton and Propellerhead to support cross-product-upgrades.