Audio slicing in Cubase involves splitting an audio recording into a number of separate events based upon the locations of the attack transients in the signal. Events produced in this way are tempo sensitive — in other words, when you change the tempo of the project, the split audio events automatically change their positions along the timeline to play back correctly in time. The technique is advantageous because it does not use time-stretching and thus avoids the undesirable audio artifacts that the latter can sometimes produce, resulting in more natural-sounding loops when you adjust them away from their original tempos. However, audio slicing is not very useful for mixed material and legato-style performances: it is best suited to drums, percussion and musical performances with strong attack characteristics.

Propellerheads' ReCycle software was among the first to tackle the idea of automatically slicing drum loops and other rhythmic material into individual beats. Indeed, Cubase recognises ReCycle's REX file format, allowing you to load pre-sliced audio material. Anyone already familiar with ReCycle will find the slicing process similar in Cubase 4. The idea is based around an algorithm that recognises the main attack transients in the audio signal (attack transients are brief peaks in the signal where there is significant and rapid amplitude gain). Once recognised, markers are placed at the corresponding points, thus allowing you to split your audio into its constituent sonic events. The sensitivity of the process can be increased to detect peaks of lesser significance, thus producing more markers and constituent events of lesser duration.

In Cubase, these markers are called 'hitpoints', and each section marked by a pair of hitpoints is known as an audio slice. Based upon the hitpoint positions, audio events can be automatically divided up into audio slices using the Slice and Close button in the Hitpoints section of the Sample editor Inspector. Alternatively, 'Create audio slices from hitpoints' in the Hitpoints submenu of the Audio menu produces the same effect. In the case of drum loops, each audio slice usually contains a single sound or hit. Hitpoints can be calculated either over the whole event or within the current range selection.

Like many things in music...