Loops, grooves and breakbeats: Powerful sonic building blocks, and great inspirational triggers. No matter what style of music you’re into, you can be sure there’s a loop out there that can spice your track up a little, or lift it to completely new heights.
But handling loops and grooves equals hard work. Hours of pitching and stretching just to get a loop to fit your song’s tempo and timing. And if you need to change the key, you’re in for even more work. In the end, your loops are controlling you, instead of vice versa.
Lucky for you though, help is on its way. From Propellerhead software comes a program that gives you full creative control over your looped material! Welcome to ReCycle – The Ultimate Tool for Sampled Grooves.
Propellerhead Software. (2003). ReCycle 2.0. www.propellerheads.se/products/recycle/
To the uninitiated, ReCycle may seem like a costly one-trick pony, but any musician or producer who works with drum loops will tell you it's an indispensable utility. Version 2.0 includes stereo support, real-time effects, and other loop-taming tricks — making ReCycle as simple or as involved as you need.
Recycle is not a music-creation tool, it's a utility to use in conjunction with a digital audio program or a MIDI sequencer, such as Cubase VST or Propellerhead's Reason. ReCycle converts fixed-tempo loops into the versatile, editable REX2 format, ultimately giving you more artistic possibilities for your productions.
Loops, as the name suggests, are chunks of audio that play over and over continuously. Drum patterns are a popular type of loop (and incidentally, they happen to be ReCycle’s specialty), but adding one to a song requires that the loop’s tempo perfectly match the song’s. Without ReCycle, adjusting a loop’s tempo also adjusts its speed, thus altering the pitch. Recycle slices a drum loop into individual beats (see “Chop, Chop!”, below), creating a REX2 file that allows you to change the loop’s tempo without affecting the pitch (or change its pitch without affecting the tempo).
Simplicity is great, but without manual control, the program would be useless to musicians who really dig into their loops. ReCycle has that control, which is especially important for complex loops, where the program often misses slice points. For example, we fed ReCycle a typically fast and busy drum ’n’ bass pattern. ReCycle inserted more slice points than it could play back smoothly, but after we manually deleted a couple of slice points, the pattern sounded much more coherent.
If you have a sampler (a hardware or software device that records and plays back audio via keyboard or MIDI sequencer), you have an even broader level of customizability. ReCycle can transfer the slices of a loop to the sampler, along with a corresponding MIDI file to your sequencer — this effectively lets you not only adjust the tempo of a loop, but change the drum pattern altogether. Using a sampler, ReCycle can map each beat to a different key on your keyboard to create a construction kit of independent sounds you can use (dare we say recycle) In your own drum patterns.
If you use loops in your music production, ReCycle is a must-have tool. If you have a sampler, ReCycle will change the way you use loops forever. We mean it.
Tokuda, Andrew. (November 2001). ReCycle 2.0. MacAddict. (pg. 52).
Propellerhead Software
Applications
out of 10 (3 votes)
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recycle_2.0_installercds.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
