Cyclone anyone?

It was one of those instruments that was actually better than most non-sonar users thought but never seemed to appeal to the demographic that seems to dominate Sonar users.  In theory it is a drum and bass or jungle producers dream, but I have only seen one poost ever directly mention those genres here.  Here are a few videos on it:
 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB4dwRc90mE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtXYX1Ire6E
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxVr4DNJrBA
 
 
I think one of the reasons it faded into obscurity is there are now many programs that do what it does but more intuitively. Rex files will map to a number of synths included with Sonar and can be triggered and manipulated in ways that are more familiar to most users.  This was actually better than Beatscape even though Beatscape was supposed to be a major improvement.  This program actually worked.

Yes and no. The all-in-one concept was probably new but the method was in practice since early 90's. Recycle is probably the granddaddy of successful dedicated slicer software.  This pretty much skips the step of having to rearrange the slices on a piano roll.  I think if this had come out in 1994 it would have dominated. By the time It came out the producers most likely to use it were set in their methods.  It's a shame because it actually seems to be stable functional once you get the hang of it.

I've used it many times in the past, I liked the way I could combine loops and swap slices within each one, or set different loop returns to create polyrythms.
Unfortunately it got old, for instance it doesn't support drag and drop from sonar browser, it doesn't support 24bit samples. Hoping to upgrade I dropped it for Beatscape, and it didn't work. Now I use Dim Pro, Loop contruction view and Matrix view to manipulate loops within sonar.