Design idea for audio pitch envelopes

JohanAlthoff wrote on 3/4/2003, 10:29 AM
OK, so.

My idea for pitch envelopes is more or less consistent with Vegas' design that everything should be non-destructive. You just add one pitch envelope for a track, and then you can just draw a smooth curve for playback speed. All events change their pitch dynamically (with visual feedback, just like when you alter the gain or edit the crossfades) and the ending times are, of course, adjusted accordingly. You can still switch the event pitch type to time-stretch, or pitch-shift only. It'll work for all three modes.

Now, the only reason I believe this won't happen until like Vegas 5 is that it would probably cause the need to update the file format AGAIN, and that's not very popular, I guess. Really sad, though. It's one of the last reasons I still have to jump into Soundforge all the time.

Comments

wazer wrote on 3/4/2003, 6:43 PM
Johan!

I understand you very well. I post this letter only becouse dont want you to feel you're alone. You're not...

I have a couple of ideas too, how to make the Vegas more powerful, than ANY other enviroments, but every time i try to ask for an innovation there is no react..

The hope dies at the very end...

w!
Geoff_Wood wrote on 3/5/2003, 1:00 AM
I take it you are referring to a final stand-alone track. Because the concept is logically flawed if there are other 'non-time-enveloped' tracks adjacent.

geoff
PipelineAudio wrote on 3/5/2003, 1:53 AM
YES!!!
JohanAlthoff wrote on 3/5/2003, 10:52 AM
Nope, not really. Think of it as opening the file in Sound Forge and applying the pitch envelope to it, saving and returning to Vegas, but in real time. You'll actually see objects change length in real-time as you edit your envelope. There will be no problem with several parallel objects either; this is all track-based, it has nothing to do with playback speed of the whole song (which would, actually, not prove that much of a challenge either).

Check this out:
http://teetow.shells.se/pics/sf_pitchenvelope.jpg

I think it might work.
wazer wrote on 3/5/2003, 6:11 PM
YES!

That is it! Without the crossfade, of course..
What a perfect WISH!

By the way Johan, did you re-rendered the files what are in the picture?
I'm asking it becouse i think the CROSSFADE that you've used - between the downbending sine and the upgoing one - doesn't gives you the original SINE period.. I prefer in this situations to simply - but perfectly - split and join them together WITHOUT crossfade, at zero crossing or ANYWHERE...

w!
Rednroll wrote on 3/5/2003, 7:42 PM
This is a great idea, but YES, people have suggested this before. The original requests have been a way to simulate a way to gradually slow down the play back speed, like you could do in the 2inch analog Tape days, by putting your hand on the tape and gradually applying pressure until playback stopped. This would be even easier to do now that there is master bus envelopes. You have this same type of ability with VIDEO events and playback where you can draw an evelope and it will gradually slow down or speed up the playback speed, but for some reason we can't have the same type of effect for audio, so you could do both of them together and virtually copy one envelope and apply it to the other. This has been a complaint from the video vegas users for awhile now. The other thing I've been complaining about on the audio side is that for these master bus envelopes there is NO "bypass Envelopes" option....The video master bus envelopes has a "bypass", now how about us Audio users?

Basically the company was once called "SONIC" Foundry, but the "SONIC" features seem to be secondary in Vegas. Protools has some cool envelope tools. I really like the auto envelope draw tool, where you can easily draw a sine wave with 2 mouse clicks. This is really useful on the Pan envelope, where you can create an "autopan" fx and alter the frequency of the panning and where exactly a certain part is panned too. You can almost do this type of thing with the "smooth fade" option in the evelope tools in Vegas, but it's in no way a 2 mouse click option and will take some time to do. Maybe the day they put the "Sonic" back into "Sonic Foundry" we can once again see them as an innovative technology leader like they once where, instead of a technology follower as they are now.

JohanAlthoff wrote on 3/5/2003, 9:40 PM
Ah, yeah, That's just the same wavefile twice, The reason I had the crossfade there was to illustrate that the envelope is track-dependant. I just threw that together in like 30 seconds, it's not from an actual project or anything. Just illustrating my idea.

Well, I guess I'll keep dreaming until the day Vegas devs have time to implement new features on popular demand. Who knows.