In what can only be described as a huge landmark in Reason history, the application now incorporates sampling and audio editing. And both are so intuitive that we’d sampled, edited and placed our first sound in less than three minutes, without the help of the manual.

All sample playback instruments in Reason 5 become full-on samplers - NN19, NN-XT, ReDrum, Dr. Rex and so on. Simply assign an input in the audio routing section, check your levels, start recording and hit Stop when you’re done. Reason automatically places the recording in a menu, in which you can either click Edit to begin editing right away, or double-click Later.

Edit and go

The Wave Editor window keeps things simple, offering essential functions like Crop, Normalize, Reverse and Fade at the push of a button - it’s no WaveLab at this stage, clearly, but it’s quick and easy to use. And, of course, the direct integration into Reason brings great benefits.

One of our favourites is back-and-forth looping, which tells the sample to play forwards to the end marker, then double back once, or continue in an endless back-and-forth loop. Also known as ping-pong looping, this was an interesting feature of the old Roland S760 sampler, cited as one of its main selling points by devoted user Roni Size.

Settings like reverse, sample start/end point adjustment and the ping-pong loop modes are retained in the samples even if they’re used in a device other than the one that recorded them, offering loads of creative options.