Rebirth RB-338 – Free Drum Machine

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)

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5 comments:

  1. UNITED KINGDOM, Friday, June 20th, 2008, 11:39 pm

    how the fuk do u download it?
    theres no link in thier fuking website

     
  2. Roys SINGAPORE, Monday, June 23rd, 2008, 7:41 pm

    Over here, click on ReBirth CD-ROM Image. You’ll need to register to access the download link.

     
  3. Ven UNITED STATES, Monday, October 27th, 2008, 6:03 am

    how do i put the image on the cd? I just used nero to do a data cd with the disc image on it, and tried to install it from the cd. it installed, but when i start it it still tells me i need the CD to run it. Maybe i should just use Daemon tools like this website suggests, but I don’t know how. Please help?

     
  4. Roys SINGAPORE, Monday, October 27th, 2008, 9:34 pm

    Hi Ven, if you’re using Nero (I’m using Nero Express 6), look for Disc Image or Saved Project and select the ISO image and burn another disc in this way.

    Let me know if you encounter any problems.

     
  5. beatbeat UNITED STATES, Sunday, June 14th, 2009, 4:21 am

    Does anyone have a code to use to register to access the old program?

     

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