Re-Rebirth: ReBirth RB-338, back in the browser

In 1997 Propellerhead put a whole acid studio on one screen: two TB-303-style bass lines, an 808 and a 909, a handful of effects and a pattern sequencer. ReBirth RB-338 is long discontinued, and getting it to run on a modern Mac means Wine and some patience.

So I made Re-Rebirth, a tribute to it that runs in a browser: rb.varyform.info.

What’s in it

• Two bass lines: saw or square, tuning, cutoff, resonance, envelope, decay and accent, with notes, accents and slides per step.
• Drum 08 and Drum 09: the 808- and 909-style machines, with an all-lanes grid to see and paint a whole pattern at once.
• The mixer and effects: level, pan and delay send per channel, a tempo-synced delay, distortion, a compressor and the pattern-controlled filter.
• Patterns and songs: 32 patterns per device, song mode with the song’s automation, and recording of pattern changes and knob moves.
• ReBirth’s own songs: it opens .rbs files from ReBirth 2.0 and 2.0.1.
• It works with a mouse, a trackpad or touch, iPad and iPhone included.

There are no samples: every sound is synthesized live with the Web Audio API. The voices’ settings were fitted by measuring ReBirth’s own renders; no audio from ReBirth is used.

Play the demo song

1. Open rb.varyform.info.
2. Click the RE-REBIRTH logo in the top left corner.
3. Choose Load TGV’s KiloMix ‘98, a song T.G.ViRUS wrote for ReBirth 2.0.
4. Press Space to play and again to stop; stopping twice goes back to the start.

While it plays, drag a knob up or down to turn it (Shift for fine steps, double-click to reset it), and click Automation to see every knob move the song recorded. To open your own ReBirth song, drop its .rbs file onto the page. Songs made for ReBirth mods, with samples of their own, can’t be played.

The original

If you want the real thing, MNX2010’s ReBirth page has kept it going for 25 years: the original ReBirth 2.01, made freeware by Propellerhead, how to run it on today’s Windows and on a Mac, the manuals, mods, and a lot of history.

Re-Rebirth is free, and its code is on GitHub. It’s an independent project, not affiliated with Reason Studios; ReBirth is a trademark of its owner.