Recycle 2.0 In the House!
Versatile loop construction program from Propellerheads

by JD Mars

I got hip to the Recycle program a few years ago in a roundabout way. Using a MIDI interface, an Akai sampler and Recycle 1.6, I discovered the wonder that is the MIDI sample dump. I was skeptical of what Recycle was purported to do, and where it might fit in to my world. Though I had read production stories where people mentioned "bringing it into Recycle and 'slicing'," conceptually it defeated the reason that you would use a live loop.

Back in the day, with an Akai S-1000 sampler, I was a sampling fool. I used it for flying in vocal tracks, editing instrument solos, and of course the infamous sampling of drum and instrument loops. If a drum loop's timing was off, I could chop it up and manipulate the triggering, but this was only occasionally successful while being an extreme pain in the neck. The live quality that a loop gave to a track was important to a lot of people, especially those who ate, slept, and did you-know-what by the MIDI clock.

I thought that Recycle would change that live quality back to something that was drum machine precise, and hence robotic. How wrong I was. Not only did I find myself locked into a harder and deeper groove, but with a new ability to manipulate that groove. I was an immediate fan.

That was with Recycle 1.6, which was a mono program. Recycle is now stereo in version 2.0, and is brought to you from those Propellerhead folks in Sweden, makers of software synth programs such as Reason and ReBirth. Recycle, as you may have gathered, is a loop construction tool. Recycle is designed to work with quite a number of popular hardware samplers, but also to integrate seamlessly into Steinberg programs. Propellerhead products were at one time distributed by Steinberg, but are now handled by Midiman, Inc. Recycle 2.0 "the ultimate tool for sampled grooves" is currently available, with an MSRP of $179.95.

The Program
Mono (you ask)? In these modern times of not only stereo but multi-channel sound?

Recycle takes a piece of audio and analyzes it rhythmically. If its dynamics are distinct enough, and the designated area to-be-analyzed is one measure in length, Recycle will open the file and immediately "slice" it into its individual rhythmic hits while giving you a tempo readout that it determines from the length and the rhythm. As if that weren't enough, when you export the newly sliced file, Recycle will assign a MIDI note for each separated sample, plus create a MIDI file with the assigned MIDI notes in a one bar loop set to the proper tempo.

In the case of a drum loop, each drum beat is now an individual sample, and can be panned at will. The mono program worked just fine, but needless to say, the stereo version has been long anticipated. The Propellerheads describe version 2.0 as a complete rebuild of the Recycle program. What it does is fairly straightforward, so the new controls and interface are rather enhanced but pretty much the same as previous versions. That's a good thing.

Manipulations

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Recycle will analyze the audio that is brought into the program, but offers many ways to argue with the verdict. The area "to be analyzed" can be adjusted, which can be critical when the tempo needs to be determined by the Recycle program. Often, sampling with a hardware sampler, you'll leave just a touch of the downbeat on the next measure, which helps in audibly identifying the loop point. With a loop construction tool like Recycle, you want a clean, precise loop without any added time.

If your loop is two bars long, you'll want to instruct Recycle that it needs to be judging eight beats, not four. Beyond that, the individual slice points can be moved, added or deleted, and the sensitivity can be adjusted for fewer or more slices. The slice points are visual markings that tell you where the loop will be chopped.

Exporting the file is when the actual chopping at the slice points occurs. You can also tell Recycle that when it chops up the samples upon export, you want each individual sample to extend a little longer, which can be done by varying degrees. So rather than each sample ending where the next one begins, they overlap as much as you tell Recycle to extend the sample. Once the loop has been exported and is now triggered by separate MIDI notes, this overlapping makes it possible to play with the tempo and never hear a sample cut off because the sample is too short. Playing with the tempo after a loop has been sliced in Recycle doesn't change the pitch, because timing of the loop is now controlled with MIDI, not with pitch shifting.