Do we have an all-purpose Reason thread yet?

so when i have a song i want to pull a sample from, my usual process is to load the song into garageband, cut it down to the part i want to sample, export it as an aif, pull the aif into recycle, set the parameters of the sample, then export it so i can play it in reason.

now all of a sudden garageband isn't properly loading songs in, it says "importing file" or whatever but doesn't actually pull the song in. but i'm wondering if there's better software i should be using or an easier way to cut the song down and then export it as an aif before pulling it into recycle. preferably cheap/free for mac.

What version you using?

looks like Audacity is available for mac. i've used it at work (both for job-related audio editing and to prep a sample for music at home) and it's pretty good/easy/free.

Yeah, I use Audacity for this on my Mac. No problems.

ok cool I've used audacity before

Getting Reason 7 next week!! So excited, I'm booking a day off to play around with it.

All I need now is a copy of Soundforge (I miss Soundforge). That's still the best self-contained audio editor right?

I've been using Reason Essentials for a few years, but I had to reinstall it recently because I had my hard drive replaced. It was working fine for a couple of weeks, but now it's doing this thing where it's trying to stretch all of the tracks to the tempo, even though I'm not using the stated tempo. It makes everything sound choppy and off-beat. I tried hitting disable stretch for the tracks but it doesn't help. Even if I start a new song and record in audio live, it tries automatically to stretch it and it sounds shitty. I can't find a way to universally disable stretch. I feel like since it started out of nowhere I must have accidentally changed a setting but I'm not sure what setting it would be. Any ideas?