Monday, May 2, 2005
Pitch-Shift Songs with Chronotron
Posted by Jason Dunn in "SOFTWARE" @ 02:30 PM
"Chronotron is an improved version of the popular DSP plug-in that allows you to manipulate tempo and pitch separately, in other words, it allows you to change the tempo of the music without affecting pitch ("time scaling" or "time stretching/warping") and/or change pitch without affecting tempo ("key change" or "transpose"). Based on a phase vocoder, Chronotron is the first plug-in to deliver high quality audio in real-time at reasonable scaling ratios. This plug-in requires Win98/Me/2000/XP and Windows Media Player 9.x and/or Winamp 3.x (or greater)."
This is something I've been seeking a very long time - a real-time pitch-shifting tool for Windows Media Player. Several years ago I was using a tool that worked with Winamp (if memory serves) but I wasn't able to find anything that worked with Windows Media Player. If you're not a musician, or an aspiring Karaoke singer, this won't be a useful tool for you. If you're like me, however, and get asked to do songs that are a bit outside your range, a tool like this is useful for pulling it back (or pushing it up) into your vocal pocket.
Chronotron is simple enough to use: there are two sliders, key and tempo. The key slider is used to change the key of the song, up or down, measured in cents. Being the utter dunce at theory that I am, I had to look up what cents were :oops: because I'd normally think in terms of tones and semitones when moving a song up or down. The tempo slider works in a similar fashion, only it controls the percentage of tempo. If you want to slow the song down, you slide the tempo down by 10% and the tempo is slower without changing the pitch of the song. You can adjust the key by 1 cent increments, and the temp by 1% bumps, so this tool is quite precise.
Overall, the tool works quite well. The audio gets "warbly" when you shift it, but I've yet to find a tool that doesn't do that. The audio level drops a bit as well when you shift, but turning it up compensates for that. What would make this tool even more useful would be a way for it to output the pitch-shifted song to an MP3 or WMA file but CD burning. All in all, well worth the $26 price tag if you find yourself wishing you could pitch-shift a song in order to learn it.
This is something I've been seeking a very long time - a real-time pitch-shifting tool for Windows Media Player. Several years ago I was using a tool that worked with Winamp (if memory serves) but I wasn't able to find anything that worked with Windows Media Player. If you're not a musician, or an aspiring Karaoke singer, this won't be a useful tool for you. If you're like me, however, and get asked to do songs that are a bit outside your range, a tool like this is useful for pulling it back (or pushing it up) into your vocal pocket.
Chronotron is simple enough to use: there are two sliders, key and tempo. The key slider is used to change the key of the song, up or down, measured in cents. Being the utter dunce at theory that I am, I had to look up what cents were :oops: because I'd normally think in terms of tones and semitones when moving a song up or down. The tempo slider works in a similar fashion, only it controls the percentage of tempo. If you want to slow the song down, you slide the tempo down by 10% and the tempo is slower without changing the pitch of the song. You can adjust the key by 1 cent increments, and the temp by 1% bumps, so this tool is quite precise.
Overall, the tool works quite well. The audio gets "warbly" when you shift it, but I've yet to find a tool that doesn't do that. The audio level drops a bit as well when you shift, but turning it up compensates for that. What would make this tool even more useful would be a way for it to output the pitch-shifted song to an MP3 or WMA file but CD burning. All in all, well worth the $26 price tag if you find yourself wishing you could pitch-shift a song in order to learn it.
