Reason Studios' Recycle is now free, along with a competition: https://www.reasonstudios.com/recycle , or skip straight to downloads: https://www.reasonstudios.com/download-recycle

Looks like it requires an account (of course it does, what doesn't these days...?).

Well, I'm not complaining, it's still a good piece of software for quick chopping of samples, and REX is well supported. Would be awesome if it still supported samplers, but can't have everything.

Requirements:

Mac

• MacOS 10.15 (64-bit) or later
• Intel or Apple Silicon Mac with multi-core processor
• CoreAudio compliant audio interface or built-in audio hardware

Windows

• Windows 10/11 (64-bit) latest update
• Intel or AMD or Windows on ARM CPU

 

Funny that you need to make an account and have Windows 10/11 for a 31 years old program that worked in W95. Yes, it was released in '94. Now they have decided to make it "free"? They figured they could make a buck or many thousands with data collecting and whatnot. Thanks, but I'll continue to use AiR's release. Recycle has a really useful function to send/receive samples over SCSI to samplers...

 

ReCycle is probably turning legacy. Tho it might be ironic considering how old this thing is, it's expected that a 2025 update wouldn't be compatible with previous Windows iterations, haha. I actually had quite a fun time messing with it earlier today; it's like a breakbeat pit stop. Even though almost every DAW nowadays has some sort of transient detection technology, I felt that ReCycle still offers a handful of valuable workflow features.

 

Soon as I read this, the first thing that popped into my head was "... annnd now some asshole somewhere is gonna try to run it on an Apple II." I'll never not be amazed at people's fetish of dragging out deprecated systems to see what modern programs they'll tolerate.

 

Maybe Win 10/11 is just needed for some grafic sh*t

 

My guess as to why it requires (at least officially) W10 onwards is because they're building it crossplatform (macOS Intel/silicon, Windows Intel/ARM), and to do that they have to use toolchain versions which do not support older ones.

As for the account, create one using fake data or just fetch the installer from somewhere else, it's not like it requires a login and an online check to run.

 

I use more and more integrated "transient detection" slicing in my DAWs instead of specialised plugins.
Same with drum samplers : a track for each drum part and use separate plugins on each track, instead of using a drum sampler.

More choice, more integration.
And no "DAW in a DAW" workflow.

Having a plugin sequencer inside a DAW sequencer being the ultimate nightmare

They are probably trying to "catch" some ppl in their "Reason" ecosystem like this.
But on my side, i was burned once with their "closed mind" around Reason ... and not going back to ANY product from them.

Telling ppl for years and years "No VST in Reason", "No audio in Reason" ... and at the end they done it
Too late for me, i was already far away.

 

I´m not so much into Slicing and Sampling loops.
but is there any advantage from Recycle compared to builtin Samplers and Slicers for example in Logic or Ableton?

 

Probably the most useful function in it 'now' is its ability to communicate with hardware samplers.... I've used Recycle since it came out in the 90's and it was a miracle when it did, as it saved so much time and did things that used to take me whole afternoons in seconds, and in smart ways....

 

If you like to chop up samples in Ableton and use them with Ableton's own devices then there's zero advantage. I haven't used Logic for this so I can't comment, but I'm pretty sure the situation is somewhat similar, maybe someone who does chop with Logic can feed in here?

But neither of them export the chops in a self-contained format, so you can't get your warp markers out of Ableton. So with Ableton if you want to use them elsewhere (like, say a sampler plugin), then what you will get is the slices as separate WAVs and a MIDI file.

The biggest advantage of Recycle is the REX format that works in a lot of places, and you need Recycle to create them.

 

Very good point.
So i could Chop with Recycle in DAW1 and use it directly in DAW2 when i use Recycle again.

 

No. The changes and additions in the Logic 10.5 update made Recycle redundant, unless you are using a hardware sampler or some external plugin that loads Recycle files.

They removed SCSI support in Recycle 2.1, so it's no longer even useful for hardware sampler users after that anyway. You have to use v2.0.

Use Drum Machine Designer in Logic to slice, create the midi triggers data, and each slice will be in a Logic Q-Sampler instance with an audio channel created per slice and all of them feeding a Summing Stack mixer channel to control and fx all channels at once.

They copied the entire workflow.

 

Last edited: Apr 3, 2025 at 8:11 PM

That was great , I was using that all the time with a Mac PPC running OS 7/8 and an Akai Sampler . Still have both but did not switch them on for years . decades ? Feels like yesterday , time flies

 

The problem with using SCSI for most Mac users was you can't fit a SCSI card into a laptop or a mini. The only option became using a Castlewood usb->scsi adapter cable, and when people figured that out they started price gouging on them. $175 for a cable, on eBay only.

Now we have older scsi2sd or ZuluScsi options, but it's still not as nice as just zapping something out of Recycle directly to your sampler was. Or using a $10 scsi card to do it.