User Manual

TIME-STRETCHING AND PITCH-SHIFTING
899
The link between soundbites and their original
source soundbites can be viewed in the Soundbites
window. For details, see “Viewing soundbite
sources hierarchically with ‘By Folder’ view” on
page 38.
HANDLING LENGTHY PROCESSING TASKS
Digital Performer’s DSP processing requires a great
deal of computation, and may be applied to audio
files containing millions of samples, so it may take
many seconds or even minutes to complete a single
command. However, to prevent you from staring at
progress bars, Digital Performer has features that
allow you to be as productive as possible during
lengthy processing tasks:
■ Background processing
■ Audio file analysis that is done separately before
the actual processing and saved on disk so that it
does not need to be recalculated every time you
invoke a DSP task
The following sections further discuss these
features.
Background Processing
Because audio processing can take time, Digital
Performer does all of its file-based processing in
the background, allowing you to continue editing,
playing, or even recording while it’s working.
When you use one of the commands that initiates
background processing, such as Transpose or Scale
Time, Digital Performer immediately creates new
Soundbites for the resulting audio. As long as the
new soundbites are “under construction,” their
waveforms appear as an empty outline in the
Sequence Editor as shown in Figure 78-1, so you
can tell at a glance when they have finished being
constructed.
Figure 78-1: Audio that is being processed in the background is
drawn with a hollow waveform.
When processing is complete, the waveform fills in
solid to indicate that it is finished and ready to be
played back. You can do just about any type of
editing on a hollow waveform, such as cut, copy,
paste, split, and even edge editing. The only
commands that don’t work are ones that require
knowledge of the sample data, such as Strip
Silence.
Editing audio that is “under construction”
After the new constructed soundbites appear, the
Background Processing window will open so that
you can see the progress of the transposition.
However, you do not need to wait; you can
continue editing, recording (audio or MIDI),
playing back, or whatever. It is perfectly fine to
move, duplicate, split, trim, or even edge edit these
unfinished soundbites. However, commands such
as Strip Silence, which need to know the actual
sample data, will not work on these soundbites
until they are done being constructed. This is
described in more detail in chapter 79,
“Background Processing” (page 903).