Can you drop tempo in half w/o much audio quality loss?

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mdripps1
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:47 am
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Can you drop tempo in half w/o much audio quality loss?

Post by mdripps1 »

I've got a project where I need to identify beats in symphonic recordings. I'm doing a lot of beat adjusting in the sequence window which works great.

However, I'd like to be able to set the tempo to half of what it is so I can accurately place beats. When I do that, the audio sounds terrible, with a lot of aliasing. I've been scouring the manuals and can't find the answer.

What I've tried is Scale Time, set it to 200% and check 'Time-scale audio.'

Perhaps this is a lot to ask, but I downloaded a demo of Live 5 and at half speed it sounded pretty good (I had to set Warp to Complex), and was useful for this purpose.

Can DP do this?
mastermix
Posts: 297
Joined: Fri Oct 15, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: MacOS
Location: New York City

Post by mastermix »

Melodyne

http://www.celemony.com/cms/?id=336

Listen to the demos -- mind-blowing -- including
ployphonic pitch shifting.

Kris...
Last edited by mastermix on Mon May 08, 2006 3:19 pm, edited 1 time in total.
mdripps1
Posts: 20
Joined: Tue Mar 14, 2006 8:47 am
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Post by mdripps1 »

Melodyne looks cool indeed.

I was hoping I could change the tempo of a single mp3 file (or wav, or any other fomat) in DP, without having to buy other software.

I downloaded Live 5, and could drop the tempo in half without much problem. I also checked out the Amazing Slow Downer, a $45 dollar app and it can change the tempo of an mp3 on the fly, going even below half speed. (http://www.ronimusic.com/).

I don't need DP to retain the sound quality, but I don't want it to sound all jumbled and aliasing, as I'm just trying to put a tempo map to a file and want to be extremely precise.

Even if I have DP slow down the audio by 20%, the sound quality is becoming unusable even for beat analyzation purposes. That seems crazy to me. I must have some settings wrong or something.

Should DP be able to change the tempo of audio, w/o changing pitch on a polyphonic recording? Melodyne, Amazing Slow Downer, Live can, and those are just the one's I've tried so far.

Baffled...

I hope someone's got the answer and that I'll be using this emoticon, ':oops:', because that means the answer will be simple and I'll be off and running.

Mike
Splinter
Posts: 945
Joined: Wed Oct 20, 2004 10:01 pm
Primary DAW OS: Unspecified

Post by Splinter »

DP's timestretching algorithm is terrible and very dated. It's basically useless all but for the most minute adjustments. It was cutting edge when they released it like 5 years ago, but needs to be completely reworked.
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