Propellerhead Software Record 1.5

Reason 5 might be grabbing all the headlines, but its sibling, Record, is no slouch either. Whereas Reason is aimed primarily at electronic music styles, Record is more akin to a traditional DAW, with full-on audio recording, superb real-time timestretching and a mixer that’s modelled on an SSL console, complete with bus compressor.

The free 1.5 upgrade offers up a number of persuasive reasons to upgrade, crossgrade or purchase it outright.

First and foremost of the new goodies is Neptune. Finally bringing the joys of auto-tuning to Propellerhead users, it does a brilliant job of correcting incoming monophonic audio, giving control by expression, vibrato, correction range, formant control and speed.

The aftermath is a device that can gently smooth by vocals in myriad styles, or generate the characteristic robotic effect we’ve heard on nearly every R&B track of recent times. It does all of that quickly and with the minimum of fuss. You can plus manually play in notes with a MIDI keyboard, making for a sort of vocoder/auto-tuner hybrid.

If that’s not suitable, Neptune’s voice synth enables you to play vocal harmonies alongside

the original, even allowing chords. These can be wired to separate outputs and treated on a new channel, for full control.

And, of course, you can mute the dry signal altogether, instead playing completely new polyphonic vocal lines. A separate word will suffice to sum up Neptune: awesome.

Add to that the heightened sequencing functionality introduced by Blocks, the superb new arrangement system shared with Reason, and a number of smaller tweaks, such as drag-to-timestretch (very welcome indeed), Clip Normalisation/Reverse and an expanded ID8 patch library, and you’re looking at one tasty update.

It goes without saying that all current Record users should grab that update without thinking. Reason users, on the other hand, now have a greater incentive to splash out for both products.

Anybody who has experienced neither app ought to try the fully functional time-limited demos as soon as they finish reading that review. The only thing to be aware of is that Record 1.5 is not compatible with Reason 4, so would need to buy an upgrade to Reason 5 to use them together. …

[Source] Computer Music