Hi Alex,
Thanks for the information. I was unaware of audio
quantization--definitely an interesting capability.
What pitch, time stretch and quantization libraries or
Linux audio applications are you aware of that have
these capabilities?
High quality audio pitch, time stretch and
quantization would all be very useful in a DAW like
Ardour. I work on enough projects that require
extensive editing or rebuilding that command line
example applications for a library would be useful.
Alex, are you the person who announced their intention
to develop these types of libraries on the Linux
Consortium mailing list?
ron
--- Alejandro Lopez <alex_osiris(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
Hi again,
Just to briefly explain these two nice techniques as
a couple of you have
asked about them. They are both based on the same
math, a kind of modified
fast fourier transform which enables the software to
stretch or shrink time
without affecting pitch or sound timbre (the
characteristic that enables us
to recognize an instrument).
Note tuning, only applicable to samples of
monophonic instruments: the
software has a freq detector that will find the
nearest note to what is
being played. It will find a starting time, end time
and deviation for that.
Then it will apply this FFT to generate a sample
equal in duration but in
tune. This is done by stretching or shrinking as
appropriate first (this
does not change pitch), then re-sampling to length
which changes the pitch
as required.
Quantizer: only used for samples of percussion
AFAIK, but should be
applicable to other instruments with high attack
like bass and others: first
step is for the software to identify the location of
the notes (that's the
equivalent for MIDI events but this time in audio),
by using a kind of peak
detector this time instead of the freq detector for
the other technique.
Second step is to identify where the notes should
exactly be time-wise. For
this, it's neccessary that the software knows about
the timing of the song /
sample! (basically BPM and desired quantize
resolution). Knowing this, it's
pretty straightforward to "shrink and stretch"
before and after the note so
it falls exactly on time.
These two give best results when the notes are not
too off. This is due to
this special FFT not being a perfect method to
extract exactly everything
that's there, especially high frequencies. Different
implementations of
these use different algorithms, all are based on a
FFT, but some use
different techniques to mask certain side effects
that appear on the
modified sample. Some implementations are very
impressive I have to say, and
they can stretch or shrink to say two times or half
with brilliant results.
All pretty impressive technology which has been
around for a while now..
Cheers,
Alex
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