-a massive library of loops and groove elements useful for almost any production
-very flexible internal effects. Mangle sound to your heart's content!
-stellar sound quality
-ability to import 3rd party libraries and REX files
-tempo-locked one-off triggering of loops or simple drag-and-drop MIDI patterns to your DAW for infinite flexibility
-has been available for many years, loops and some sounds will sound familiar
-MIDI learn can be a little clunky and is due for an overhaul
-The included SAGE converter application stumbles with larger REX conversions.
-The GUI is showing signs of age and is due for an overhaul (searching would be nice!)
from Spectrasonics:
Stylus RMX is a completely new groove-based virtual instrument plug-in for Macintosh and Windows. Stylus RMX is the first product to offer the combined power of Groove Control™ with Spectrasonics Advanced Groove Engine (S.A.G.E.™) technology giving users dramatic new control over groove production and performance. Spectrasonics’ in-house development team created the new instrument from the ground up, with dozens of new features including the ground-breaking Chaos Designer™, a completely redesigned multi-page user interface, a new core library of sounds, all with a focus on realtime groove creation and performance.
New Core library
The massive new 7.4 gigabyte core-library in Stylus RMX has thousands of cutting-edge grooves and sounds that were created by Spectrasonics’ international sound design team, and produced by Eric Persing. The new core library contains nearly triple the amount of sounds originally offered in the original Stylus, and contains all the original material as well. The new sounds and grooves in Stylus RMX offer a much wider range of modern musical genres than the original Stylus. Mixes of grooves are broken down into individual tracks called Elements for flexibility and infinite combinations.
Also new in Stylus RMX are thousands of new Kit modules, 250 Kit patches, as well as user Kit construction….Users can create their own customized multitrack remix grooves and kits, save them into the plug-in, and even share them with other Stylus RMX users on different platforms and hosts. RMX 1.5 even comes with 500 new Multi grooves!
“Xpandable”
Stylus RMX marks Spectrasonics’ first expandable virtual instrument, with a series of five new “S.A.G.E. Xpanders” for Stylus RMX at $99US retail each. Stylus RMX also can be expanded with existing Groove Control CD-ROM libraries and even REX files – which opens the door for musicians to utilize their own audio loops within the powerful S.A.G.E. Environment.
Chaos Designer™
Of the many new capabilities in Stylus RMX, possibly the most innovative feature is the Chaos Designer™. With simple controls, the user can introduce musical Chaos into the groove, which allows it to have constantly evolving variations— giving the impression that the audio grooves are improvising. The results can be subtle or extreme by setting the simple to use controls. A Capture feature allows the spontaneous audio chaos patterns to be made into a MIDI file, dragged and dropped into the host sequencer, and played back again for further editing by the user.
