User Manual

TIME-STRETCHING AND PITCH-SHIFTING
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■ Selections within a pop-edited soundbite in the
Sequence Editor.
■ Soundbites selected in the Soundbites window.
You are not limited to thinking about your edits
one soundbite at a time. If you want to transpose a
whole track, or even your entire sequence, it’s no
problem. On the other hand, if you just want to
correct the pitch in a small section of a soundbite,
make a pop-edit selection. If a soundbite appears
in many different places in several tracks or even
several sequences, and you want it transposed or
time-scaled in all those instances, just select it in
the Soundbites window and make the edit there.
All of Digital Performer’s DSP commands make
sure they don’t create any more new audio files than
they need to. If you transpose a selection that
includes the same soundbite 10 times, Digital
Performer only transposes the soundbite once, and
replaces all 10 occurrences with the new soundbite.
Or if you have selected several soundbites that
come from neighboring or overlapping parts of the
same audio file, they are all processed together, and
only a single new audio file is created.
On the other hand, if you are applying a rubato
tempo map to 40 repetitions of a drum loop,
Digital Performer is perfectly happy to create how
ever many new soundbites are necessary – whether
it’s 2, 10, or 40 – as a result of a single command.
EDITING MIDI AND AUDIO TOGETHER
As a digital audio sequencer, Digital Performer is
designed to give you a seamless, integrated
environment in which to create music using both
digital audio and MIDI data. Accordingly, most of
Digital Performer’s DSP operations can be applied
to MIDI data in the same operation, so that you do
not necessarily need to be concerned with the type
of data being edited, and so that you do not have to
do two separate operations to achieve a single
effect. For example, if you want to transpose your
entire piece of music up a whole step, you can select
all tracks, MIDI and audio, and choose Transpose
from the Region menu.
CONSTRUCTIVE EDITING
All of Digital Performer’s DSP functions are
“constructive” edits. Digital Performer never
modifies your original audio files. When you
transpose, time-scale, spectral-shift, or tempo-
adjust an audio selection, Digital Performer creates
new audio files to hold the new audio data (except
when using the Transpose window’s “Transpose
audio by adjusting pitch automation” option – see
“Audio transpose options” on page 572). This
means you can always go back to the original if
need be; it’s always your decision, if you want to
delete original source material.
In order to help you work faster, Digital Performer
doesn’t waste your time with dialog boxes asking
you where you want to put the new files, and what
you want to call them. Audio files are automatically
created in the same folder as the original, with a
name that indicates which soundbite or audio file it
is based on. If you want to rename or move the file,
you can feel free to do so at your leisure.
AUDIO QUALITY IS PRESERVED
Digital Performer keeps track of where a soundbite
came from. For example, if you time-stretch a
soundbite, creating a new audio file at the new
tempo, Digital Performer remembers its original
soundbite. If you then time-stretch the already
stretched soundbite, instead of just stretching the
already-stretched soundbite again, Digital
Performer refers back to the original soundbite to
create the very latest version. The same is true for
pitch-shifting. This allows you to freely time-
stretch and pitch-shift audio consecutively as many
times as you like without worry about artifacts that
may arise due to multiple time-stretch or pitch-
shift operations applied to the same audio. The
results will always be the same as if you time-
stretched or pitch-shifted the original soundbite.