I haven’t tried this out (and probably won’t as I have the Amazing Slow Downer) but our old friend Tatsuaki Koroda (who developed the wonderful Autotuner) has recently come up with a “Tempo and Key changeable MP3, WMA, M4A, WAV player” called S8 Tunes. (I imagine S8 is an abbreviation of Shakuhachi, which means 1 foot 8.)
If you haven’t tried out the autotuner lately, you’ll find it much changed (available from same URL). It now features note recognition and can record longer passages to display the pitch in graphical format.
Tatsuaki’s time seems to be pretty limited, so naturally enough he puts most of his energy into the PC version, as it satisfies more of the potential users. So the Mac versions always drag well behind the PC, I’m afraid.
The autotuner is a very nice musical instrument tuner (all you need is a soundcard with microphone), particularly aimed at flutes (Tatsuaki makes and plays Japanese style flutes). Not only will it permit you to tune and tell you how far out you are, but you can even play a slow melody into it and it will graph your departure from proper tuning. It also shows a waveform of the notes you are playing and a spectum (FFT or Fast Fourier Transform) of the notes, showing the fundamenal and all the harmonics. You could for instance use this to compare the tonal quality of say you and Matt Malloy (assuming you could isolate one of Matt’s notes from a recording).
A lot of this is covered in the Help notes (which I wrote) but I have to concede that my notes are getting well behind the current version (moving house and workshop to the coast has set us rather behind on a lot of things!).
Whatever interpolation/filter algorithm he uses for the slowdown
is pretty good. Many free slowdowners sound awful once you get
any slower than -20%. In S8tunes, I had to go past -30% before I
got distracted by artifacts that were introduced. And even at 40%
it’s still pretty listenable.
I had troubles with the GUI, though. I couldn’t see the sliders at the
bottom which allow you to change the speed and pitch, nor could I
resize the window so that I could see them. I had to use the scrollbar
to get to the bottom of the window, and when I did, funny things
happened with the progress bar.
It’s a promising project. Thanks for pointiung it out, Terry. I hope
he can get the bugs out of the GUI soon. I’ll have to try the autotuner
when I get home and plug in my mic. It sounds quite interesting!
After some time I can say that s8tunes replaced BestPractise on my computer. The “Play A-B” feature, the playlist with saved values for key, tempo and cents, and sound quality are priceless.
