Stylus Classic

Just picked this up. I find that the interface needs some work as well as the way Stylus works in general. For instance, you preview a loop from one list, and then if you want to use that loop in a "recycle" fashion, you have to find it and load it again from another list, then you have to go to the Windows start menu, find your way through that and dig through several more levels of folders to find a corresponding midi file to drag and drop on Stylus...Just to get control of the individual slices! Then do it all over and over again for each loop you want to use. This is honestly pretty bad. I have to wonder why they chose the Windows Start menu for the midi files and on a Mac it's in the Apple menu. Since I'm using FL Studio, I pointed FL's internal browser at the location of the midi files to make it somewhat less tedious. I'm surprised they couldn't figure out a better way to integrate the midi files than dragging and dropping them from the Windows Start menu.

As for the samples themselves, I didn't find more than a few that were inspiring after listening to everything from 120bpm down. I'm also surprised to find that some of the drum parts aren't separated properly. There are parts with, for example, kick and hi hat mixed into one slice with no way of separating it. I expect that when I slice up beats myself, but not from an expensive soundset. It also doesn't have multi-outs so serious mixing of these drums will involve a lot more work unless you output the drum loop to wave, reslice it and load it into a something like Battery. The way it stands currently, all drum parts will be on a single mixer channel.

Stylus will be a very good tool when they get these things sorted, most importantly, multi-outs for the slices. Right now, I'm thinking that I'm gonna preview loops with Stylus, and reslice them with Beat Creator to make Battery kits simply to get each part on it's own channel. I'm hoping that a future update wil address this serious shortcoming. I think it's almost impossible to mix drums on a single channel which gives Stylus a very large minus.

The one thing very unique about it is that you can take a beat from 120 bpm down to 75 bpm and it still sounds pretty good. There are also a few other nice tricks up it's sleeve which are demonstrated on the demo video.

Overall, I'd say it's a good value for the money depending on how you plan to use it. For me, I have to get each drum part on a separate channel so I'm looking for the best way to achieve this. If this gets added in a future update, I can probably deal with the dual menus for previewing, vs dragging/dropping midi files from another menu.Read Review