Owner's manual

MIDI

Enable MIDI to control the pitch and envelope of the effect via MIDI. You will need a

host that is capable of transmitting MIDI to effect plug-ins in order to use this fea-

ture. Please read the documentation for your host for information on how to set it

up. When enabled, Bitspeek will play only when it receives MIDI and it will transpose

the pitch according to the MIDI notes it receives. Turn down the Tracking parameter

to zero to achieve a vocoder / auto-tune like sound. If you set the Frame Rate to

zero (with Sync disabled), Bitspeek will "freeze" the formants on MIDI note on, allow-

ing you to create interesting "stroboscopic" audio effects. Finally, Bitspeek supports

Pitch Wheel messages (one octave up and down) and the MIDI Sustain Pedal can

also be used to "freeze" frames while playing.

Pitch

You can transpose the outgoing audio by -36 to +36 semitones (-3 to +3 octaves).

Hold down the shift-key while turning the knob to make finer adjustments down to a

single cent in precision.

Tracking

Determines the amount by which the source signal pitch affects the synthesized

audio, from 0% to 200%. At 100%, the processed audio will follow the pitch intona-

tion of the original audio as exactly as possible. (Sometimes though, the tracking

detects the wrong octave, especially on source material with extremely low pitch.) At

0%, the pitch will stay fixed and produce a robotic vocoder-like quality.

Detune

There is a second oscillator which can be used to achieve a fat detuned sound or

for chord-like effects. The second oscillator is transposed from the first by +0 to

+1200 cents, representing a range of up to one octave.

Noise

This parameter adjusts the balance of "voiced" vs "voiceless" sound. At the default

setting +/- 0%, Bitspeek attempts to follow the balance of the source signal, so that

"voiced" sounds (like vowels) produce distinct tones while "voiceless" sounds (such

as consonants) produce noise. By turning Noise all the way down to -100%, all

noise will be removed from the output audio. By turning Noise up to +100%, the

output audio will consist only of filtered noise (sounding like a loud whisper).

Using Bitspeek in your Host

The DSP algorithm in Bitspeek is monophonic but experience has proved that com-

patibility with monophonic plug-ins is lacking in many major host applications.

Therefore we decided to wire the plug-in for stereo input and output, although it will

simply mix the two input channels and the output audio will be the same for both

channels.

Due to the nature of the algorithms a constant audio latency of 13 ms is added.

Most modern hosts compensate for this latency during playback.

Playing the pitch of Bitspeek with MIDI notes is great fun, and most hosts support

routing of MIDI effects. Here are a few quick instructions on how to set things up in

some popular hosts.