Customer Reviews

Propellerhead ReCycle 2.1

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3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

You truely don't get the full power of Reason until you buy ReCycle.

I find that most of the negative reviews of ReCycle are from NUBS who didn't even know what it was for in the first place!

This program is essential if you already own Reason. I own Reason 5/Record 1.5 and ReCycle 2.1.
I use an AKAI MPD26 as my MIDI interface, which is just like a traditional sampler the way I have it set up.

1. The interface is very user friendly as you would expect from Propellerhead.

2. You don't need to be a Hip-Hop artist to take advantage of ReCycle - This is a natural way to Decimate your own bass/kick tracks for speaker pounding bass.

3. Artists today resample their tracks a ton of times to produce their final sound. Simply putting effects on your instruments isn't enough.

4. Looping is a must! Even non loop-based music is created by making a loop, altering starting and stopping points in the loop (as a creation process), then converting it back to a regular composition.

5. Think about it, ReCycle ads another major effect to your audio tracks that you can't get without it. For me it's just another necessary creation tool regardless of the genre.

As far as that NUB who said this product was a waste, he doesn't have enough common sense to realize the greyed out features were because he was using the "TRIAL VERSION."

If you think ReCycle is only for taking a sample and chopping it up, you are sorely mistaken. It's the secret that your favorite artists possess, which you are constantly looking for.

I don't even scratch the surface of what ReCycle is capable of with this review, but I feel the need to inform potential buyers. If I made my decision to buy or not to buy ReCycle based on the current reviews, I would have been misinformed.

Happy Shopping

After using Reason 5 and basking in it's splendor, I had wanted to check out Recycle and work with some samples within Reason and saw the Propellerhead intro video on the product and wanted to check it out. I'm happy I took advantage of the trial version first because I found the product difficult to work with and in the end, turned back to my other tools for dealing with sampled material.

While the interface of Recycle looked promising, most of the .WAV files I imported into Recycle were not editable and in all cases, most of the controls were greyed-out which frustrated me to no end and help in the forum on that issue didn't produce results. More annoying however was Recycle's inability to properly detect BPM information from the imported tracks. Your only option in Recycle to assist this process is to enter the amount of bars in the sampled item but unfortunately even with that info, Recycle still couldn't calculate BPM. With such an expensive product, the user should have the ability to instead enter whatever BPM is desired and Reason should be able to then adjust that track on the fly to match the desired BPM. It's also baffling why Recycle only accepts bars as it's measurement and should allow you enter other criteria to accomplish this. I use another product called VirtualDJ that does this easily by clicking the sync button, no need to enter BPM, bars or anything. Other products like Traktor also do this so I don't see why Recycle can't make this process even easier when Recycle's only use is to deal with sampled material!

In the end, I uninstalled Recycle and instead work with Reason independently and dump my Reason portion into FL Studio or Abelton and then add my vocals and samples there. There may be more potential to this product and maybe the learning curve for Recycle is greater than Reason ironically, but in the end my frustration with Recycle made it's possible strengths not worth learning about as the product was not as intuitive as you would be led to believe.

As any other products, it is possible to buy a used ReCycle. When you do so, the seller needs to properly transfer the license to you. Seller will be able to transfer the license only if he owns a valid license from propellerhead. Educational version of ReCycle cann't be sold.

In my case, the seller mentioned that a proper license transfer will be done. I believed it and bought it. But during the license transfer process, the manufacturer (Propellerhead) updated me that I've bought an educational version of ReCycle and the license cann't be transferred. Obviously I cann't use the product now and need to return it to the seller. I sent several emails about this to the seller, through Contact Seller option in Amazon. No reply from the seller. I contacted Amazon and Amazon is investigating the issue. It is so frustrating situation. Hope to get this issue resolved soon.

Please beware if you are buying a used ReCycle. As far as the product, I use different sequencer (not Reason) so I need to go for ReCycle to work with grooves. I guess ReCycle is a good choice for that.

Update : Thanks to Amazon, got the refund except for the return shipment. Thats Ok. Learned a good lesson :)

The best part about this software is the fact that it comes with a lite version of Reason which has all the basic functions you can make some use out of. The Recycle software just makes the task of narrowing down snares and high hats and whatever immediately by taking the whole sample and separating the percussions hit by hit. This is cool but saves about 10 minutes worth of effort... how many versions of the same snare hit can you need? It does not cut down on variety!!!! This aspect is still up to the composer and their patience.

This program is NOT recommended if you are looking for a replacement for fruity loops. Fruity Loops had a very user friendly approach to sequencing with the colored bars that you could expand and move around. Fruity Loops had a user friendly interface that easily distinguished the vital parts of creating your music. ReCycle has nothing in this department. All of the Fruity Loop-similar components were found in the lite version of Reason that was included... which an argument might be made in buying recycle if thats what you're looking for on your mac.

The mac desperately needs an equivalent to Fruity Loops if not a version of Fruity Loops on mac. Reason is cool, but it is a replica of stacks and physical equivalents. The interface for Reason is a recreation of actual equipment that you can by in music equipment stores down to the quarter-inch wire placement. Why in this age of technology, do I need a recreation of that? I don't need the limitations of physical equipment like not being able to have an unlimited amount of presets to create... Reason's ReDrum only has 32. Fruity Loops was unlimited... because it wasn't trying to clone actual drum machine mounts.

Get over it Reason! This isn't what WE need! We need simple programs that deliver our vision without the distraction of applying your program to real-life counter parts... eventually those real-life counterparts are going to imitate computer software like Fruity.

Do not buy this program if you don't have money to burn. It is falsely represented as a mac alternative to Fruity Loops. You will be disappointed.

The only saving grace is an (essentially) $100 dollar lite version of Reason. Otherwise, this might not be worth it or get the full version of Reason which might be worth it. My advice is to download a demo to see for yourself, but don't be fooled by any bs about this being a mac equivalent to Fruity Loops.