Ableton Forum

anyone familiar with recycle? Doesn't Live do the exact same thing?

Propellerheads website currently has a number of artist profile videos that show Recycle in use, which I think will definitely help you answer this question.

I think (and I am not an expert here) that the major difference is that when you load a clip in Live, it inserts slices where it thinks the beats are for tempo-stretching purposes. In Recycle, it inserts slices around every single sound to be mapped to a MIDI keyboard for manipulation and playback. So the processing of sounds are different.

Again, this is what I think from what I have seen, but I am not an expert on Recycle.

Yes, in Recycle, the samples aren't really stretched, they just start at different times depending on tempo.

So if you have a kick drum sound, it will sounds the same no matter which tempo you play it at, but if you slow it down considerably, there will be silence in between your samples.