REX has its limitations thus a loop played back too slowly will suffer “gapiness”. The effect becomes more pronounced the slower the user plays back the sound. This mild echo effect is only heard when a loop’s playback speed is slower than the original source file. Each slice has a simple delay effect that allows the sound to trail off at slower-than-the-source BPMs. Recycle uses a bit of trickery to fool your ears. If a 120 BPM loop were played back at 100 BPM, you would hear the gaps between each sound and if you were to play a 100 BPM loop at 120 BPM, it might sound very choppy as sounds may overlap each other. There’s a few minor algorithm tweaks to make this sound slightly better than if the sound file was simply chopped up into relevant pieces and played back at that speed. The slices are triggered based on the BPM, relative to their position. This allows for loops to be any beat length such as 1 bar and half bars (6 beats at 4/4 time), and other applications will correctly understand the BPM.Ī user then assigns the hit points, which create slices. Įxample: if we know a 5 second clip has 8 beats then:ĥ (seconds) / 8 (beats) = 0.625 (seconds per beat)Ħ0 (seconds) /. Recycle uses a combination of using an assigned BPMs and hit points. The user can manually assign how many beats are in the actual sound file, and then Recycle can calculate the BPM of sample. Recycle is an audio application with a singular function: convert loops into Recycle (.REX/.RX2) sound files, which can be used with a wide range of DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) such as Cubase, Logic, Protools, Ableton, Reason and plenty more. Recycle modeled itself cleverly after the slicing techniques, and created a file format based on the slicing techniques that were performed manually often on hardware samplers like the AKIA MPC series. This also allowed clever musicians to cut up a loop and trigger it back in the same order at different BPMs in the same order as the original. A drum track could be divided up into individual percussive hits and played back any way the musician saw fit, regardless of BPM. The effect allowed digital musicians to trigger samples and create their own arrangements. A loop would simply be a repeating sound file and not easily stretched.Ĭlever in the early/mid 90s, producers in the electronic music fields (Hip hop and electronica) often would use hardware (and sometimes software) samplers to cut up a particular sample into slices, and then trigger them manually. Any musician looking to use pre-made loops or create their own loops were limited by the technologies of the time. The problem was that the loops were locked to the BPM (tempo) of the original source file.
Loops and loop formats pre-date Recycle, distributed in a variety of ways, such as AKIA sound disks, Audio CDs, WAVs and so forth. Recycle was developed in the late 90s, a time when CPU power was much more limited, time stretching algorithms weren’t nearly as sophisticated, and real-time stretching of samples was non-existent.
Propellerhead Software (best known for Reason) started out originally developing two pieces of software, ReBirth RB-338 (which emulated Roland TB-303 synthesizers, a Roland TR-808, and a Roland TR-909 drum machine in a virtual rack) and Recycle. The Short and Dirty History of Recycle …and sample time stretching I found this statement interesting as Recycle isn’t the same as time stretching (and I’m willing to bet Blueprint knows this and knows it quite well) and its worthy of a blog post in itself. I’m even willing to say that if you’re a guy who samples, taking a week or two to master the warp function in Ableton will completely change how you do music -, Five Differences between Reason and Ableton Live I had tried an earlier version of Ableton and didn’t think their sample warping was that strong. I happened to be browsing, the blog of rapper/beatsmith Blueprint and came across the following quote in quick overview of Reason vs Ableton Live:įor years I thought that Reason & Recycle had the sample game on smash.