User Manual

CHAPTER
897
78 Time-stretching and pitch-shifting
OVERVIEW
This chapter gives you a brief overview of Digital
Performer’s audio time-scaling and pitch-shifting
capabilities. It then discusses the following
important topics that are common to all of Digital
Performer’s Digital Signal Processing (DSP) tasks:
ZTX™ audio processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897
Selecting audio for processing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 897
Editing MIDI and audio together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 898
Constructive editing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 898
Audio quality is preserved . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 898
Handling lengthy processing tasks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 899
ZTX Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 900
Soundbite preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 901
ZTX™ AUDIO PROCESSING
Digital Performer’s ZTX™ time-stretching and
pitch-shifting technology has been developed by
(and licensed from) Zynaptiq GmbH
(zynaptiq.com). ZTX represents cutting edge,
state-of-the-art audio time-stretching and pitch-
shifting DSP technology developed and refined
through years of advanced research and
development by the renowned audio DSP
engineering team at Zynaptiq.
With very high quality results, Digital Performer’s
ZTX capabilities give you the ability to:
■ Change the pitch of audio without changing its
tempo
■ Change the length or tempo of audio without
affecting the pitch
■ Change the tonal quality (the formants) of audio
without affecting pitch or tempo
■ Transpose pitched audio with or without the
traditional “sampler” effect
Digital Performer can use these basic abilities to
make it easier for you to do more complicated
things:
■ Apply a tempo map (e.g., ritards and rubato) to
audio that was recorded at a fixed tempo
■ Change audio that was recorded with a tempo
map to play back at a constant tempo, or with a new
tempo map
■ Easily make the sequence play at the tempo of
imported audio
■ Quantize or groove-quantize audio
■ Transpose audio and MIDI together in a single
operation
■ Quantize or groove-quantize audio and MIDI in
a single operation
These operations are discussed in detail in the next
few chapters. The rest of this chapter explains
several important things you should know that are
common to all DSP operations.
SELECTING AUDIO FOR PROCESSING
Most of the DSP commands allow you to select
audio data in all of the usual ways. Unless stated
otherwise in the chapters that follow, all
commands work with all these types of selections:
■ Selections of whole soundbites, in the Event List
or Sequence Editor.
■ Time-range selections, in the time ruler of the
Sequence Editor or the Track Overview. If a
soundbite crosses the start or end of the selection
time range, only the part of the soundbite within
the selection is affected.