PITCHMAP Takes Musical Composing to the Next Level

“A remixer’s dream come true” you might call this recent development created and marketed by newly founded company Zynaptiq out of Hannover, Germany, that we’re proud to be associated with.

PitchMap is not just your regular kitchen pitch shifter – it is a tool based around music recognition that actually de-mixes and pitch shifts instruments in a mix at the same time. Oh, and did I forget to mention: yes, it does all of this in real-time, on an off-the-shelf Mac (Windows support is being worked on). Not only allows this tool to correct for off-key arrangements after all the musicians have left the stage to do more interesting stuff and join the festivities in the VIP lounge. It also allows for real-time manipulation of all your favourite hits to suit your personal mood and preferred musical style – directly by interacting with them on your own MIDI keyboard. It’s like you had all the musicians right at your fingertips performing to your commands. If you ever wondered what Michael Jackson’s “Stranger in Moskow” sounded like after he had his 3rd round of Gorbachov Vodka you can use PitchMap to change the scale accordingly to compensate for the “drift”, or, if you’re so inclined, you could listen to any classical recording being played in another key or mood.

Check out their video and web site at http://www.zynaptiq.com and if you’re on a Mac make sure you give their free demo version a spin.

With this tool, you too can change the laws of physics!

The DSP Dimension Releases Free Pitch Shift AudioUnit Plug-In “DiracFxAU”

Mainz, Germany, September 14th, 2011 – The DSP Dimension, one of the leading providers of DSP technology for music and speech applications today announces the release of “DiracFxAU”, a free pitch shifting plug-in for the Apple AudioUnit platform based on its new DiracFx API. DiracFx is a high performance pitch shifting and time stretching algorithm that allows changing pitch and speed of audio signals independently of each other at very high quality and very fast speed. Optimized for use on mobile platforms DiracFx uses no trigonometric operations and is available for iOS, MacOS X, Windows and Linux. A feature-limited DiracLE edition of the SDK is available to developers at http://dirac.dspdimension.com (this distro also contains the AU plug-in), a professional version can be licensed from The DSP Dimension upon request.

DSP Dimension Releases Dirac 3.5 – Introduces DiracFx API

Mainz, Germany, September 13th, 2011 – The DSP Dimension today announces the immediate availability of version 3.5 of its award winning cross-platform time stretching and pitch shifting library DIRAC. Version 3.5 is a free update for licensed users and adds new features to the Dirac core and the DiracRetune API, such as key mapping and automation callbacks. It also introduces “DiracFx”, a new API that offers transient-aware time stretching and pitch shifting for polyphonic music at unprecedented speed and unbelievable quality. DiracFx is the world’s first time stretching algorithm that does its DSP magic without using trigonometric functions, resulting in dramatically increased performance over traditional FFT based methods.

The free DiracLE library has also been updated and now contains a free DiracFx AudioUnit pitch shifting plug-in for MacOS X 10.5 and higher (32 and 64bit Universal), that can be used with all AudioUnit aware host applications on any MacOS X system. Plenty of example projects for Linux, MacOS X, iOS and Windows are included with DiracLE, which can be downloaded for free from http://dirac.dspdimension.com

DIRAC Version 2.2 Available

December 8th, 2009 – The DSP Dimension is proud to present version 2.2 of its critically acclaimed DIRAC2 time stretching and pitch shifting software that enables developers to include the ability to change the speed and pitch of voice, instruments and music in their applications. Version 2.2 fixes the following issues and is a recommended for all users of the software on all platforms:

v2.2.0 [0912080900]

  • Fixed volume offset for certain quality/lambda settings
  • Fixed excessive bass and DC response for frequencies < 20Hz
  • Fixed bug that caused the formant scaling to be always reciprocal to pitch in STUDIO
  • Optimized kDiracLambda1 (voice mode)

The new version of the free LE variant is available from the DSP Dimension download page at http://www.dspdimension.com/download/

Pitch Shifting Using The Fourier Transform

cubeWith the increasing speed of todays desktop computer systems, a growing number of computationally intense tasks such as computing the Fourier transform of a sampled audio signal have become available to a broad base of users. Being a process traditionally implemented on dedicated DSP systems or rather powerful computers only available to a limited number of people, the Fourier transform can today be computed in real time on almost all average computer systems. Read more

Time Stretching And Pitch Shifting of Audio Signals – An Overview

cubeThis tutorial gives a brief overview of the most popular algorithms used for achieving time stretching and pitch shifting in a musical context, along with their advantages and disadvantages. We provide audio examples to demonstrate common artifacts and effects associated with these processes, and provide pointers to papers and other resources on the net. Read more