Rex vs Acid Files

There are lot of advantages to using Rex.

The slices are mapped to the keyboard.

You can easily generate a ton of variations on just one loop.

The Rex player will generate a midi file.

The big disadvantage is you can not make your own Rex files, unless you buy a program for it.

You can make anything an Acid loop inside of Sonar.

Yes - Rex is great. Triggering audio loop slices, but with MIDI events: much more flexibility than Wav. Though with audio snap in Sonar you can do quite a bit with Wav files as well. IMO the best approach is to be able to do both. But if I had to choose only one (like if some really oppressive and overbearing individual moved into my place and successfully forced me to choose one format or the other), it would be Rex.

ORIGINAL: Anderton

REX files are very good for most drum parts, assuming each drum "slice" doesn't hang over to the next slice (e.g., you don't want a cymbal crash that lasts over several beats). This is because there is no real DSP applied to the audio, it is just "chopped" and each slice is played back closer together (for faster tempo) or further apart (for slower tempo).

However, they are nowhere near as good as acidized files for sustained sounds, pads, guitar chords, and the like. Acidized files can work extremely well with drums, but are more likely to change the sound quality over wide stretches.

Either format works better speeding up compared to slowing down.

You may be right about sustained sounds, but the original post was regarding drum loops. Rex files are not really best suited to be used as melodic phrase generators/manipulators. I recently bought a great package of cinematic percussion beds but with some pads and synth sounds as well. It was designed to work with Sylus and came in Wav and Rex format but only the percussion sounds were translated into Rex - for the melodic and pad/drone sounds they only work in Wav format.

When changing patterns with Rex files, it does work best if you can use an occurrence that is the least recent one. Good Rex files tend to be built up a long enough chromatic scale that, in my experience at least, is such that you can choose a hit from far enough back in the loop that it won't interfere with other hits that are going on at the same time - or close to the same time.

Again, we are talking about drum loops here. But for the sake of manipulating percussion hits and samples, the flexibility of Rex files are not matched by Wav.

Hi,
Since you mentioned separate drum tracks, have you checked out the Smart Loops MultiTrack drum loops? You get the separation without having to slice up the loop. In both REX2 and ACID formats... http://www.smartloops.com/products/multitracks/