audio filter to compress time

[Alexander Serpico]

This is something that has been quite a thorn in my side…

Way back when in OS8~9 time… there was an application (which i vaguely recall as) “Sound Edit Pro”.
This sound editing app did 2 things which were amazingly useful…
and probably the most useful features of any sound editing programs in existence.

#1. It had the ability to time compress a piece of audio to whatever length you choose,
without affecting the pitch whatsoever (and the end result sounded flawless).

#2. It had the ability to pitch bend. You could set one key frame as the start and one as the end point, and your audio would perform a pitch bend exactly as you asked it to.

This has been a post which i have been meaning to make for over two years, and an issue which i have found dumbfoundedly maddening even longer. Please fellow Studio users, don’t even try to say that STPro can do this…. because it simply cant or wont give the same quality result as this old and outdated little application once did.

Time stretching is a vital asset to (and specially important to commercial) production. Yes you can sort of do it in Soundtrack now, but A) going out of FCP is inefficient when editing audio that is supposed to sync up to picture, and B) the time stretch ability…. well… pardon my french, sucks… sucks quite poorly…. (it riddles you audio file with distorted glitches and or distortion which is unexceptable in a professional environment or for broadcast finishing.

I am curious why Sound Edit Pro vanished off the face of the earth (so if anyone knows why, i would love to know… a quick google search gives me the idea that it became a Windows only App), but those two very important functions have been left as considered non essential and second rate as features by Apple staff for our current FCP Studio setup… I do now see that “Flange” is available in STP, but i have not tried to use it yet. But again i must insist, filters like that and especially time compression are those which are most effective (and i say that with kindness to apple since they make you step out of FCP to do this) in your sequence in FCP.

hopefully this message will encourage other pro/former avid editors to encourage, no, DEMAND that these two features be brought to internal plugins to final cut.

if Apple respects the potential power of FCP, and actually wants it to succeed in the high end pro finishing market, they should really listen to their pro users….. ( as there are a stack of other issues which are still yet to be delt with.}

[Alexander Serpico]

correction, the app was “SoundEdit

[Alexander Serpico]

(the effect was not called flange, it was called “bender”)

[Nick Meyers]

to do it in FCP:

adjust the speed of your audio via Modify > Speed.
then you alter the pitch with the Audio FIlters > AU > Pitch

it;s very un-intuitive, and there are no instructions
and the slider doesn’t tell you what it;s increments are
but another editor & i at least figured out a correlation between speed & pitch:

if we slow audio by 14%, say, (so actual speed is labeled as 86%)
then the pitch goes down,
and we enter a pitch increase in the filter of 280.
that’s 20x the % difference.

we’re always slowing audio, and haven’t tried it the other way, but it probably works?

oh, yeah,
did i mention it sounds crappy?
kind of tinny.
better than what the other poster described

nick

[Marcus Ionis]

Thanks Nick & Alex for your help.
Boy…do I miss my Avid.

Marcus