Reason 5 and Record 1.5 introduces live sampling
| Posted in Music Technology
Reason 5 and Record 1.5 announcements have continued to appear on the Propellerheads website this afternoon, with the introduction of a new Live Sampling feature forming the latest reveal. According to the developer the new feature will bring back “the art of spur-of-the-moment creative sampling”, which the company says has been lost amid changes in technology and the decline of hardware samplers.
Every day this week has seen Propellerheads introduce a new feature of the forthcoming Reason 5 and Record 1.5 updates, intended to trumpet how substantial the updated versions of the paired sequencing software and DAW will be. The company has led this latest reveal by asking its users to remember a time when “samples were something you sampled and not loaded from your hard drive, when a sampler was a machine that could record samples, not just play them back”.
Propellerheads is promising a return to that kind of functionality with the new Live Sampling feature, reportedly dispensing with the need for “external sample editing software for recording and editing the samples”. All of the sample players in Reason 5, says the developer, will be a fully fledged sampler, allowing users to “hook up a sound source to the rack’s sampling input” and simply start. According to the announcement, users will be able to use inputs ranging from microphones and turntables to an entire Reason 5 mix, simply hitting the sample button and thereby cueing Reason to automatically detect the start.
A built-in editor has also been included to set start and end points, loop points and more. Preloaded samples will work with the system alongside original content, while the results will be stored in the Reason song file and made available for quick recall in a new ‘samples’ pane included in the tool window.
“Live sampling together with pitch detection of root key and automatic zone mapping makes it dead easy to sample an instrument and map the samples across the keyboard,” continues the announcement, adding the promise: “this way you’ll create your own multi-sampled instruments for NN-XT and NN-19 in an instant”.
The continuing depth of the news being revealed on the Propellerheads website is likely to have impressed the production community, with anticipation of each announcement growing to such a degree that today the website was very briefly unavailable due to online traffic. As the manufacturer continues to push home the link between the Reason 5 sequencer and its Record 1.5 DAW companion, speculation is mounting online as to what the final announcement might be tomorrow.
In the meantime, attention is turning to the package of upgrades that have been made available, with purchasers of Reason 4, Reason Premium or Reason Duo able to upgrade for free between this coming Monday and the launch of the new versions. Previous owners will be able to upgrade for a modest fee. More news will be announced tomorrow on Reason 5 and Record 1.5.
About Barney Jameson
A contributor, editor and in some cases creator of more music and pro audio magazines than he cares to remember, Barney Jameson is a veteran of writing about gear, and a pretty keen singer songwriter to boot.
Having started his musical education reading old copies of the Melody Maker while riding the tube to University in the mid-nineties, Barney once sang in a band called Sugarstone, troubling record company chequebooks not quite enough to make it a career option. Instead, he achieved his goal of starting a music magazine of his own when he founded Playmusic in the early noughties. Later on, having exploited VIP access to as many festivals as possible, he wrote about the pro audio industry throughout Europe and the Middle East, travelling to far-flung destinations such as Dubai, Doha and Muscat (nice mountains).
As the latest addition to the DV247 team, Barney has big plans. But when he’s not plotting online domination of the musical instrument world, he keeps himself busy writing songs on a battered old acoustic guitar and playing them to audiences in his home town.
Tags: Reason 5, Reason Live Sampling, Record 1.5