Cyclone

I've been playing with Cyclone for a few days now. It's a good idea, one that has it's precedent in the Dr. Rex player in Reason, and some hardware samplers such as the Yamaha CS6X. It's really like merging ReCyle and a hardware sampler into one plug-in, only you are using ACIDized loops instead of .rex files. That's okay, as I feel that ACID and Sonar's time-stretching functions are better for sustained material than ReCycle is. However, you can ONLY import ACIDized waves or plain old wave files, no .rex files at all. Once you have the loops in there, you can alter the pan, pitch, and level of each slice, again, very much like Dr. Rex. Unlike Dr. Rex, it pretty much ends there. There are no filters, no LFOs, no nothing to really manipulate the sounds AFTER the slices are panned, pitched, amplified. The GUI is dead easy to understand, and there's a chapter in Sonar's manual on operating it. There are no presets, I've not even seen a tutorial on the disc, unusual for Cakewalk. However, it's pretty easy to figure out, and like the rest of Sonar 2, stable as heck. I suffered a dropout when trying to change the pitch of a slice while everything was playing, but nothing serious. It IS a lot of fun to play with, and having sixteen loops at a time sync'ed up can be a blast. It doesn't tax the CPU a bunch, either. It makes for a nifty arrangement tool, but I can't help but wish you could manipulate the sound of the slices more. It may usher in another rash of "stuttering" sample-based music, ala Art Of Noise, I'm afraid. I haven't had to call Cakewalk's support for some time, but if I did, I'd probably get the same well-rehearsed easy answers I've gotten in the past. It's always the drivers, you know. Seriously, tho', they help work it out in the end. It was a free plug-in with Sonar 2, so VFM is high enough. As a synth/sampler, it's okay, but as an arrangement tool, it really shines, and that's how it'll get used most often around here.Read Review