Celemony’s Melodyne plug-in could already perform incredible feats of pitch manipulation with audio. But monophonic audio is one thing. Polyphonic audio has long been sound manipulation’s final frontier. With Melodyne 2, it seems Celemony’s audio wizards have finally cracked the problem.

Celemony is showing their new technology at Musikmesse, and they’ve got demos online you can check out:

Direct Note Access

Grab a note inside a chord, and you can manipulate that note directly. Retune it, change timing, adjust formants, change amplitude — timbre, time, and pitch are all accessible. Celemony is largely pushing this as a corrective tool, as that’s an obvious market, but needless to say, creative applications — even creative abuse — become interesting, too.

Melodyne Studio costs US$399 (349 EUR), with various discounts for upgraders, and the technology will be making more limited appearances elsewhere in Celemony’s product line. Now, it is a plug-in — clearly, someday this sort of thing will just be integrated directly in your host of choice, and I’m particularly excited about the day when it becomes a live performance tool. But for now, it could well be worth the cost of ownership.

You’ll have to wait a bit: the new version is scheduled to ship in the fall, though if you buy now, you’ll get the update free. Celemony, I’ll be seeing you at AES, I think.

Compatibility: Mac (Intel/PowerPC), Windows (XP/Vista)

Thanks to everyone who sent this in (Alex, Karsten, Eric, and others)! By popular demand, the demo video SonicState grabbed at Messe, because they’re organized enough to actually be in Frankfurt while I chill out here in NYC:

Finding the perfect audio editor has eluded many Mac users of late. CDM’s resident pro game composer and sound designer W. Brent Latta has given a newcomer a try — and perhaps found the right app for his workflow.

I have a confession to make: I haven’t had a good-quality 2-track audio editor installed on my Mac in several years. You might wonder how I’ve been doing all of my waveform editing during that time…and I might be wondering the same thing.

Back when I was still using OS 9, I ran Peak as my primary editor - it was fast, relatively simple, and, well, one of the only games in town (SoundEdit 16 and Sound Designer II were both discontinued at the time). Under OS X, I never upgraded Peak. It had become too bloated, too complex, and I honestly couldn’t justify spending money on the upgrade with the level of editing I was doing. But as my needs grew, I continued to search for something that ‘flowed’ with my workflow. So I tried demos of other apps - Audacity never worked right with my audio interface, Soundbooth was too rudimentary, Soundtrack was nice until Apple killed the app-only option and bundled it into Final Cut studio, and DSP Quattro, while very capable, just never really resonated with my way of working. I had nearly given up - and was settled on continuing to use Logic Pro and Wave Burner for all of my edits. Deep down I still hoped there was something out there that might, someday, do exactly what I needed, without putting a lot of other stuff in my way. Enter Audiofile Engineering’s Wave Editor.

MacSanta has been making the Mac blog rounds by offering 20% off Mac shareware gems for the holidays. Look closely, and you’ll see a number of nice Mac music tools:

Rogue Amoeba Audio Hijack Pro: At first, you might think this app is just for ripping radio streams. Think again: with powerful effects, routing, recording, and other utilities, it’s a must have addition to your Mac sound toolkit. I use it for recording Max/MSP patches.

Rogue Amoeba Fission: Got an audio clip? Just need to slice it up, add a cross-fade, and some meta-data? This is the tool for you, and it can even edit MP3, AAC, and Apple Lossless files with no loss in quality — meaning it should help you not only manage your music library, but recordings of gigs and podcasts, too. More on Fission here on CDM soon.

Clarion Interval Training: Okay, I’m really glad I’m not teaching ear training this year. If you want to avoid having me as your ear training teacher (I’m tough), use this instead.

Minim: Here’s why these deals are great: I’d never seen Minim before. It looks like a fantastic way to organize lyrics, sheet music, and audio clips of your own music. I’ll be trying this one out and hope to report back soon.

Not on the MacSanta list, but also well worth considering:

Updated: I described Renoise as Windows-only; it runs under both Windows and Mac OS X and is even now a Universal Binary for Intel Macs.

Live 6 isn’t the only hot beta this week. Wally reminds us that Renoise, a favorite Windows/Mac tracker-style sequencer. (See Wikipedia’s explanation of trackers if you’re not in the know.)

Renoise takes what’s great about oldskool software trackers and brings them into the modern software era with the kind of niceties we expect from our music software. 1.8, while only a “point” release, includes some major improvements:

1. New mixer, for controlling DSP effects and, well, mixing. Now with pre/post monitoring. Unique here: keyboard shortcuts for moving DSP effects around.
2. Line in recording for processing DSP in Renoise.
3. Direct sampling, by recording right into the SampleEditor.
4. XML file format.
5. Tighter BPM, smoother automation.
6. A la Live 5, searching through effects Apple “Spotlight” style.
7. FLAC, OGG, MP3 and M4A support
8. Lots of other stuff; see the massive changelog.

If you want to get in on the beta, all you have to do is register:

Renoise - Music Tracking Software

Renoise has two major points going for it: it’s dirt cheap at EUR49.99, and it fuses the precision and speed of tracker editing with modern features. I know there are many loyal users out there; any readers here care to comment?

“I just want to record and edit audio tracks — what do I need?” A lot of the software for recording and editing multiple tracks of audio is, admittedly, overkill for the basic user. That could make the new creation from WinAMP creator Justin Frankel appealing. (More bizarrely, he also created a cross-shaped effects processor called the Jesusonic CrusFX, mixing blasphemy with music production.)

Right now, REAPER is free (at version 0.42); when it hits 1.0 it’ll be “inexpensive” shareware. (No pricing is out yet.) The interface looks a lot like Sony’s ACID, but “lite” versions of ACID often strip out critical features, so it could still be competition.

So does Windows need another audio editing program?