The Download Munkey : Download This, Download That :)

Propellerhead Software’s software drum synthesizer Rebirth RB-338 has been discontinued since 2005 and is now released as freeware at the Rebirth Museum. It emulates the Roland TB-303 Bass Line Synthesizer (think Acid House) and the TR-808 and TR-909 Rhythm Composers (think Techno & Drum N’ Bass), more commonly known as drum machines. If you’re into electronic music, then you must have heard of these legendary machines.

This program mimics the interface of the actual machines which really gives you the feel of actually manipulating the various knobs on the real machines. Unfortunately as the software was developed ten years back in 1997, the maximum size of the program is fixed at 800×600 so you will get impossibly tiny knobs and buttons to click on (keyboard input is available) if your monitor is set at a very high resolution.

The myriad of knobs, dials and buttons on the interface may be bewildering at first but the comprehensive user manual in PDF included in the download does help a lot. As with most music making software which try to recreate the actual machine on the computer screen, using the mouse and keyboard to try to manipulate the knobs and buttons in real-time is not exactly an fulfilling experience. (Remember you can use ten fingers on the actual machine ).

However, it’s good fun for people like me who have always wanted to fiddle with drum machines but had no chance to try the real thing. If you love electronic music, percussion or just plain curious, do give it a try.

The above screenshot was taken from the Wikipedia article for Rebirth. You can see a bigger screenshot here.

Free to download from The Rebirth Museum (requires registration). Download is a 200+ MB CD image (ISO format) via BitTorrent only. You can use Daemon Tools to mount the CD image as a virtual CD-ROM or burn it on a CD to install Rebirth (final version - 2.01)