Cyclone

I only use ACID loops for ancillary percussion in some projects, however Cyclone makes this less of a chore and more of a creative experience because now I can "play" the loops live instead of hunting and dragging across the SONAR timeline.

Basically Cyclone allows you to assign individual loops to MIDI notes, the main advantage being that the loops automatically stretch to project tempo (and also pitch for pitched loops). Once the candidate loops (up to 16 per instance) are all loaded it's just a matter of arming the MIDI track and playing the various loops in real time. You can also mangle/rearrange/tweak indiviual slices, which is powerful, but was not immediately intuitive (to me)

The quality of the stretching is on par with SONAR and ACID, not bad at all.

My main complaint would be that there are two few pads for holding samples (limited to 16 per instance) 24 or 32 would be a better number. Also it's not possible to play loops using the built in virtual keyboard

On a positive note up to 16 stereo outputs are available (enabled by the Multi-output support in DXi 2.0)

Overall I think it's pretty useful instrument, especially if vendors provide pre-packaged loops. I look forward to ACIDizing and loading up high-end performance libraries like Spectrasonics BackBeat and GrooveMasters Drums and triggering these live.Read Review