Specifications

Chapter 21: Pitch 123
Crossfade This control adjusts the crossfade
length in milliseconds to optimize performance
of the Pitch plug-in according to the type of au-
dio material you are processing. The Pitch plug-
in performs pitch transposition by replicating
or subtracting portions of audio material and
very quickly crossfading between these altera-
tions in the waveform of the audio material.
Crossfade length affects the amount of smooth-
ing performed on audio material to prevent au-
dio artifacts such as clicks from occurring as the
audio is looped to generate the pitch shift.
In general, small, narrow-range pitch shifts re-
quire longer crossfades and large shifts require
smaller ones. The disadvantage of a long cross-
fade time is that it will smooth the signal, in-
cluding any transients. While this is sometimes
desirable for audio material such as vocals, it is
not appropriate for material with sharp tran-
sients such as drums or percussion.
The default setting for this control is Auto. At
this setting, crossfade times are set automati-
cally, according to the settings of the Coarse and
Fine pitch controls. The Auto setting is appro-
priate for most applications. However, you can
manually adjust and optimize crossfade times
using the Crossfade slider if necessary. For au-
dio material with sharper attack transients, use
shorter crossfade times. For audio material with
softer attack transients, use longer crossfade
times.
Minimum Pitch This controls sets the minimum
fundamental pitch that the Pitch plug-in will
recognize when performing pitch transposition.
Use this to optimize the Pitch plug-in’s perfor-
mance by adjusting this control based on the
lowest fundamental pitch of the audio material
that you want to process.
On audio material with a low fundamental pitch
frequency content (such as an electric bass) set-
ting this control to a lower frequency (such as
30 Hz) will improve the Pitch plug-in’s perfor-
mance. The most important thing to remember
when using this control is that the fundamental
frequency of audio material you want to process
must be above the frequency you set here.
The range of this slider is from 15 Hz to 1000 Hz.
The default setting is 60 Hz. Adjustment is tied
to the current setting of the Maximum Pitch
control so that the minimum range is never less
than one octave, and the maximum range never
more than five octaves.
Maximum Pitch This control adjusts the maxi-
mum fundamental pitch that the Pitch plug-in
will recognize when performing pitch transposi-
tion. To optimize the Pitch plug-in’s perfor-
mance, adjust this setting (and the Minimum
Pitch setting) based on the highest fundamental
pitch of the audio material that you want to pro-
cess. The range of this slider is from 30 Hz to
4000 Hz. The default setting is 240 Hz.