The Melodyne editor, which promises to make working with audio as fluid as working with MIDI, has long had some impressive technology under the hood. But it’s as the tool gradually matures in terms of workflow and usability that I think it could win some additional converts.

Melodyne 2.0 is a major update to the editor all around, with additional timing and tuning options and better usability, and the addition of ReWire (atop plug-in compatibility) is a big plus for some. It’s easiest to just see the videos, but the overview of what’s new in this release:

• Attack Speed tool for editing transients. (That could make this a lot more interesting creatively.) New Time Handles for changing time in the notes. These tools have special applicability to percussion and vocal phrasing, respectively, but may have some other interesting alternative applications.
• Edit notes in other scales, temperaments, and tunings. (Re-tuning to alternative tuning systems, anyone?)
• Keyboard shortcuts work in plug-in mode, display and highlight is improved.
• Work via ReWire with hosts that lack plug-ins. Read: Reason. And that could make this an interesting companion to Reason’s record workflows.

Now, sure, all of this is often understood to be for people who just want to obsessively correct pitch and rhythm of recorded audio. But I remain interested in creative applications, just because the upshot of this is having audio you can modify after it’s been recorded.

There’s just one bottom line: will this stuff be compelling enough that you add an additional tool to your DAW just to get it? I still have yet to hear from die-hard Melodyne users, so if you’re out there reading, I’d love to learn how you use the tool, particularly if you go a bit beyond the way it was intended to be used. (That’s always interesting.)

US$/€399, $99/€99 upgrade, or free if you registered after October 1. More vids:

If you want to be promptly ignored, the best way to do it is to try to release a new DAW. Aside from the fact that even most musicians don’t know what the word “DAW” is (hint: it’s a big program that puts all your computer production, mixing, and recording stuff in one place), you’re up against the likes of Cubase, Ableton Live, Pro Tools, DP, SONA… sorry, I get tired even just doing the list.

Here’s how to get some attention: be the first DAW to add Celemony’s crowd-awe-ing direct pitch modification, which lets you change the pitch of polyphonic recorded audio, right in the software.

That’s what PreSonus’ Studio One version 2 does. It’s something we’ve been waiting for ever sense we first saw Melodyne. You can now, without the restrictions of a plug-in, edit recorded audio and change pitch without having to leave your DAW, all in “one click” according to PreSonus.

PreSonus isn’t the first to add transient detection, editing, groove “extraction,” and groove quantization – features that let you make rhythmic modifications to recorded audio. Indeed, these features, once exotic selling points, have almost become prerequisites as DAWs leap-frog one another. But as PreSonus adds these features, they promise more seamless editing: to quantize, just group some drum tracks, and quantize; to do groove extraction, just drag and drop. Some tools require more steps; others promise this kind of seamless operation but don’t always work perfectly. This sounds like one to test – made, again, more interesting by the pitch editing changes.

Now, I have only one concern: Melodyne “Essential” is included, and only with the full-blown “Professional” edition; I hope we see the same degree of integration for people who buy Melodyne DNA, the all-stops-pulled “direct note access” editing. WIthout it, the integration is nice, but with it, I might even use the phrase I hate – “game changer.” Updated: Yep, DNA works. That’s a pretty big deal. Other DAWs have “pitch correction” – but I already see many readers share my comparative disinterest in just correcting pitch. Being able to directly edit recorded sounds gets really interesting, by comparison. And whatever other tools may claim, I haven’t seen anything that works quite like DNA, yet. What you need is just a copy of Studio One “Professional,” and a purchased copy of DNA.

Also in this release:

• Comping (making finished tracks out of the best bits of different takes) without switching tools – something I’ve found annoying elsewhere.
• Studio Browser for organizing assets and instruments and effects with search. (Yeah, we’ve seen that in tools like Ableton, Logic, and SONAR; now it’s here, too.)
• Folder Tracks – organize tracks, group and bus in one click. (PreSonus claims this is “exclusive,” though I’m fairly certain you get something like that group+bus function elsewhere. Anyway, it is nice.)
• Edit more than one MIDI track at once.
• New amp models, convolution-based cabinet models, convolution reverb, and an IR Maker for adding your own impulses.

So, the pieces are very similar to what you see elsewhere; PreSonus’ potential here may be how they put it together. I’m certainly ready to have another rival.

I’m always suspicious that fancy pitch and rhythm correction are just there to help you try to perfect imperfect performances. That’s something that can erase the human feel of good musicians, and make for soul-crushingly long editing sessions with bad musicians. (I’ve heard some horror stories on the latter.) But they can also be powerful remix and creative tools, especially if the workflow is improved, and that’s where they can be exciting.

I’ll be watching.

Not So Fast, Copywriter

We’re going to have to have a PR Shame Scoreboard every time a press release says something outrageous. Here’s PreSonus: “Only one DAW on Planet Earth lets you record, edit, mix, master, and distribute your music in an integrated and truly professional environment.”

Uh… no. If you send Studio One to planet Mars, then you can make this sort of claim.

(Maybe because they have SoundCloud export? I don’t know. Maybe “professional” means something that I don’t understand.)

This week:
Moog – I
PreSonus – I
Put a quarter in the jar, please. (I can forgive PreSonus, only because this has the feeling of the sentence you write when you’re exhausted and at the end of the press release: And that’s why we’re just ridiculously awesomely better than anything you’ve ever seen before and now I’m going out for a beer. ###)

So, the hyperbole beast rears its ugly head. But I’ll say this: PreSonus, who entered a category in which it’s nearly impossible to get anyone’s attention, you’ve got everybody’s attention now. And if you pulled it off, Studio One 2 could be the sleeper hit of this week’s AES show.

Because since numerous DAWs let you record, edit, mix, master, and distribute your music in an integrated and truly professional environment, on this crowded planet Earth, you do have to do something to stand out.

Update: PreSonus’ spokesperson responds:

“Oh no? Name another one. The key word is “integrated.” You can master in other DAWs but not using a dedicated mastering suite that’s intelligently aware of and fully integrated with the song editor. You don’t get that with Logic, Pro Tools, Sonar, DP, Live, Cubase, Nuendo, Reaper, or Record. I don’t know what the Martians use, but here on Planet Earth, the statement is true. “

Now, here we’re getting to the point – behind the vague statement is something that gets interesting (i.e., how it’s integrated with the song editor). I still stand by what I said, though – Record, specifically, could claim a fair degree of integration of the mastering tools within their own (different) paradigm. Anyway, I suspect users don’t need to get planetary with this; they care about how it work specifically in their own workflow. So stay tuned as we test this.

VirSyn have announced one of the nicest effects I’ve seen yet on a mobile platform in the form of iVoxel, a vocoder for iPhone/iPod touch and iPad. On the handhelds, it looks like something you could easily hold up to your mouth and rest atop a synth; on iPad, you get a nicely-sized touchable keyboard for control. And they’re clearly hinting at more work to come.

http://www.virsyn.net/mobileapp/

iVoxel isn’t available yet, but it is coming. So, how does this compare to your laptop? You can get VirSyn’s full-blown MATRIX 2 vocoder for EUR119 on sale now, run it on a computer, and get all the advantages of hosting in your existing production software along with more advanced features (which you have to give up on the iPad). That laptop rig is the same one Kraftwerk used, in conjunction with Cubase 4 and a Sony laptop. iVoxel uses the same, superb sound engine – an impressive feat. My guess is – irrespective of iOS, Android, or whatever OS – these devices will really excel once they’re able to provide the same sorts of workflows that the laptop do. The appeal of touch input and the form factor is clear.

Open source pitch correction?

Poor man’s Android AutoTune, anyone?

MicDroid by Ethan Chen is a pitch-correction app for Android. Aside from enabling I Am T-Pain-style effects without iOS, pitch matching could lead to lots of other creative applications – pitch to MIDI, vocally-controlled synths, and more. The code is mostly available under an MIT license.

You can also grab MicDroid from the Android Market, with features like a shiny UI, sharing, recording to SMS, and encoding – and it’s still only in “alpha” state.

The underlying library on MicDroid is called AutoTalent by Tom Baran, and if you’re not terribly (or exclusively) interested in Android, that library is available under GPL2 on any platform. That gives you the ability to create all sorts of creative voice input applications on various platforms. Check out both from GitHub, and if you’ve got an Android, you can give MicDroid a try whether you’re a developer or not:

MicDroid @ github

http://web.mit.edu/tbaran/www/autotalent.html [MIT research page]

AutoTalent free plug-in downloads for LADSPA, Mac AU and VST, and Windows VST – stability may vary

Tom describes Autotalent “as the result of a week of recreational signal processing.” And yes, if you’re a PhD candidate at MIT’s DSP group, “recreational” and “signal processing” can actually go together.

I’m excited to mess with these plug-ins, though, because to me the generic pop music effects you hear all the time are just the tip of the iceberg. Experimental vocals, ho!

Updated: Via comments, Paul Davis points us to a more up-to-date “fork” of AutoTalent, Talented Hack. It features improved detection, MIDI input (for greater control of pitch correction), MIDI output (so you can use this as a pitch-to-MIDI plug), and generally cleaned-up code. It also runs as an LV2 plug-in, which is far more convenient on Linux. But even just having cleaner code alone means it’s probably a smart candidate for swapping into the Android tool (cough, cough).

Sonic scientist Peter Neubäcker of Melodyne has been wowing Internet audiences for some time with the automagical powers of the company’s Direct Note Access (DNA). The vision: manipulate individual pitches as easily as MIDI notes, even in polyphonic passages of a single instrument. At NAMM last month, the company showed the first product, Melodyne editor, due to ship in the spring for US/EUR 349.

There’s just one little catch: a solo developer has beaten them to the punch, at least prior to them shipping their DNA flagship editor tool. And if you want it right now, it’s yours for 25 Euros. (The final version will cost 99 Euros.)

Jonathan Schmid-Burgk, sole developer and a student at Harvard, announces:

The time has come to announce the release of the world’s first published polyphonic tone manipulation software. The dream of musicians to isolate single notes out of chords and so to manipulate most forms of recorded audio has come true on the 20th of January 2009.

Shell out EUR25, and you get a Mac VST plug-in that can manipulate audio easily. With monophonic audio, you can create polyphonic harmonizations. You can isolate and manipulate individual harmonics – meaning not only can you do pitch manipulations, but presumably sound design, as well. You can change individual notes or chords in recorded audio, to fix mistakes or (more interesting) actively recompose audio.

I feel about this the same way I do about Celemony: this gets really interesting when you use it for sound design. For some inspiration, skip this post and head straight for the sound samples on the site:

VisualVox polyphonic 0.9 [improvisator.de]

Via the awesome rekkerd.org

Also check out his Harmony Improvisator which creatively generates harmonies from MIDI input – an interesting thing to mess around with even for those of us who know / have taught (ahem) classical harmonic theory

Now, VisualVox Polyphonic isn’t without some catches, as you’d expect from the solo-student cheap alternative:

• It’s Mac-only and VST-only for now. (Just keep in mind, though, that means not only Cubase works but things like Ableton Live on the Mac, as well.)
• Jonathan warns that there are still some bugs, there are big temporary files, there are occasional glitches in the algorithm, and it doesn’t quite sync properly with hosts, requiring exports.
• The interface isn’t as slick or fancy as Celemony, and may be slightly less convenient for editing.
• Update – people are having some significant hosting issues with this. (Your mileage may vary, though the fact that this was tested in Cubase tells me those folks may have better luck.) So stay away if you don’t like bugs – this isn’t a final release. We’ll have more as this evolves, okay?

But here’s why I’m anxious to test it, nonetheless:

• It’s cheap – meaning it might be more open to people just curious to experiment. (I actually wonder if he shouldn’t keep the EUR25 price and make up for it on volume.)
• No iLok dongle, as required for Celemony. Correction: Celemony also allows challenge/response — so you have a choice.
• There are some interesting fine-tuning options for the algorithm and manipulation parameters. That could make this more interesting for sound design – and something even Celemony users might want to run alongside the more polished tool.

In other words, none of this is likely to dampen enthusiasm for Celemony, but that’s a good thing: more is more better. Could this mean the floodgates are about to open for creative sound design tools that mess with audio in new ways? Hey, I hope so.

If anyone tests this, we’d love your report – and sound examples.

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:

MESSE08:Melodyne Blows Our Minds