ReBirth is the program that made Propellerheads famous; it was a brilliant emulation of the wildly popular Roland TB-303 bass and TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and paved the way for Reason. Today, Propellerheads is putting that legacy to rest, discontinuing the application from 1997 and opening the ReBirth Museum.
Among lots of other goodies, mods, and assorted downloads, the Props are releasing the ReBirth disc image free of charge. Now the bad news: ReBirth never did run in OS X, so Mac users will want to have an older machine to run this.
Surprisingly, though, the Props have finally brought ReBirth to the world of Reason, with a free refill version of ReBirth for Reason users. [Download link] It’s 100 MB of all the ReBirth sounds plus the mods, for Reason 3 (I’m assuming they’ve made use of the Combinator). I have to go check it out to see if it can fully replace the experience, given much of the appeal was ReBirth’s interface. I certainly wondered when Reason 3 still included a module for linking to this defunct app.
Notice what they’re not doing: no open-source code, folks, and I seriously doubt you’ll see that in future. Music Thing spotted this first; additional discussion on that post.
Go enjoy all the downloads. ReBirth is dead, long live ReBirth.