DEVS, can someone please make a PaulStretch AU.

echoopera

It’s not an AUv3, but have you all used AudioStretch?
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/audiostretch/id571863178

Might be worth contacting this dev for AUv3 support as it sounds pretty great from what i remember.

Michael

Curious to hear what you guys think of RubberBand by way of comparison. RubberBand's what Loopy Pro is using (actually, Loopy HD too, recently), and it has a much more compatible license - PaulStretch is gonna be really hard to integrate into a commercial project unless the developer's willing to do a custom thing.

Here's PaulStretch: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/20x.ogg
And here's RubberBand on the same audio, within Loopy Pro: https://drop.michael.tyson.id.au/1619476040/Track-5.m4a

And here's me messing around with it in Loopy:

shinyisshiny

@Michael thanks for the comparison. they do seem very similar, yet I feel like Paul is a little warmer and richer, more full bodied. Seems like there are more harmonics, or even a lush warm verb on the Paul clip. thinking i will get Loopy anyways, as i can always warm stuff up after the fact.

Michael

@shinyisshiny said:
@Michael thanks for the comparison. they do seem very similar, yet I feel like Paul is a little warmer and richer, more full bodied. Seems like there are more harmonics, or even a lush warm verb on the Paul clip. thinking i will get Loopy anyways, as i can always warm stuff up after the fact.

Now you point it out, it does sound a bit fuller with Paul's algorithm... I wonder if he might be open to doing a custom license; I could use Rubberband for the common use cases, and Paul's for the extreme cases.

Poppadocrock

@Identor said:
I'm getting geeky here, and maybe useful information for coding (i'm no coder, but i know a bit of digital information).
A sample is an array of numbers. In 8-bit, these numbers vary from 0 to 255. A zero crossing of a waveform digitally, is 255-128. Let's call that 0.
The start of a complete wave cycle = 0 or 0-x, where the next digit number = 0+x.
Lets call that condition A. It correspondents to an Address number in the Array of the complete recording.
A complete wave cycle = condition A to the next condition A. That can be stored in a new array, lets say Array C (cycle), with corresponding Adress number.
Repeating Array C results in a tone with a character, stored in the data of that Array. The frequency of the Tone is determined how fast you repeat array C.
If you want the pitch of that tone to be the same of the pitch of the sample, you need to read out Array C with the sample frequency of the recording.
Now lets speed down the sample frequency of the recording. When it meets Condition A, on Adress x, It must repeat Array C at that same Address with the original sample speed until it met a new Condition A. When Array C has not finished it sequence when a new Condition A point arrives, It has to finish it, and then Start Array C of the new Condition A at that adress.

Actually, you need 2 data-files. The original recording as a reference, and an image of the recording to scan for Conditions.

This is great info regardless. Thanks.

Poppadocrock

@Michael said:
Curious to hear what you guys think of RubberBand by way of comparison. RubberBand's what Loopy Pro is using (actually, Loopy HD too, recently), and it has a much more compatible license - PaulStretch is gonna be really hard to integrate into a commercial project unless the developer's willing to do a custom thing.

Here's PaulStretch: http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/20x.ogg
And here's RubberBand on the same audio, within Loopy Pro: https://drop.michael.tyson.id.au/1619476040/Track-5.m4a

And here's me messing around with it in Loopy:

Getting an error message on paulstretch audio but maybes it’s an ad blocker or something....

Poppadocrock

Ps I like that sleek look of LPro

Michael

@Poppadocrock said:
Getting an error message on paulstretch audio but maybes it’s an ad blocker or something....

Yeah, he made an ogg file, probably can't be played in your browser. Just click the link.

Ps I like that sleek look of LPro

Thanks!

Poppadocrock

@Michael Thanks man.

Samu

Loopy is starting to get really freaking cool now!

@Michael Will it also do 'midi loops'(ie. piano-roll/sequencer controlling an AUv3) and allow 'freeze/render' to new audio loop?

But the stretch is 'freaky' enough already

Michael

@Samu said:
Loopy is starting to get really freaking cool now!

@Michael Will it also do 'midi loops'(ie. piano-roll/sequencer controlling an AUv3) and allow 'freeze/render' to new audio loop?

But the stretch is 'freaky' enough already

Yeah, it will - after v1.0 though, as I wanna get it out the door before starting work on MIDI recording.

rs2000

A super-simple extreme time stretcher (no limits to extending it even further) without any licensing issues, works as AUv3 too:

Jeezs

@rs2000 said:
A super-simple extreme time stretcher (no limits to extending it even further) without any licensing issues, works as AUv3 too:

How did you succeed to do that?
I didn’t found any speed functionality/slider in Drambo

rs2000

@Jeezs The slider is just a control that I gave the name. The trick is that Drambo's Flexi sampler allows for direct access to the start point of sample playback ("Offset").
By using filtered noise to emulate a fuzzy grain cloud playback model, I can basically scrub through the sample independently from the original playback speed, down to zero if I want to.

Jeezs

@rs2000 said:
@Jeezs The slider is just a control that I gave the name. The trick is that Drambo's Flexi sampler allows for direct access to the start point of sample playback ("Offset").
By using filtered noise to emulate a fuzzy grain cloud playback model, I can basically scrub through the sample independently from the original playback speed, down to zero if I want to.

Clever

JES000000

I would settle for just good phase vocoder plug. I always preferred TimeFreezer to PaulStretch so I’m flexible.

anickt

FWIW Caustic uses RubberBand 😎👍🏼

Svetlovska

Hmmm. Don’t get me wrong, I’m excited for Loopy Pro, and the Drambo thing is clever, but neither of them are close to Paulstretch which is like the quantum realm of audio mangling, where a sample can take literally hours to play through, generating the wildest of ambient weirdness en route. Not to mention the extensive tools Paulstretch gives you in app to mess with elements of that weirdness. So licensing is an issue, I gather, and no real Paulstretch is likely to make it to IOS, and I’ll have to make do with AudioStretch as the next best thing for now. But is there no one who can reverse engineer such a thing?

shinyisshiny

@Svetlovska same. i hope it comes around again eventually

anickt

Just out of curiosity I compared AudioStretch to Caustic RubberBand. The zip includes the original file, the AS result and the CRB result.

See what you think. Anyone who has PaulStretch or any other app to try, feel free to compare.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/h2gain50i9wbt2r/Caustic-AudioStretch.zip?dl=0

Samu

I actually like Koala’s stretch, take a short sample, set bpm very low and stretch it to 8 bars, bounce and repeat 😎

Svetlovska

@anickt : I took your unstretched sample into Paulstretch. At maximum length, it would run for over an hour.

Koala, AudioStretch, Caustic, yes, all cool for typical time domain and pitch shifting stuff an octave or so either way. But for anyone out there who is maybe thinking PaulStretch is in the same category as these, it really isn't: it's literally orders of magnitude different. PaulStretch atomises sound, taking it into places you never expected.

By way of example. This is the first word of your clip, "For".

At regular speed, according to Audacity, it runs just under half a second.

Paulstretched: six minutes.

Rather beautiful, if you are into drones. No effects used.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QEnYDb5KsKiAvL-3irzfeq6fVRcATzed/view?usp=sharing

u0421793

Back in the very early 90s I had a Mac IIsi on which I did a lot of my music then using a simple sequencer (Passport AudioTrax http://www.muzines.co.uk/articles/too-good-to-be-true/9341 ) and one of the things I experimented with was some of the IRCAM-related experimental software for Mac back then.

Specifically there was one program which could take an audio file and break it down into what it called ‘tracks’, where a track was a description of whether/how long a certain frequency was present in the sound. Thus, it was a frequency-domain analysis rather than a time-domain analysis (which you’ll be familiar with from Nave or some of the Virsyn products) and analysed the spectrum for presence of energy in a vast range of discrete frequencies and recorded this energy as times and durations. Consequently, as the analysed sound was now a bunch of temporal numbers, all the program needed to do was to multiply up or divide down all the numbers at once and therefore shorten or make longer the sound without affecting the pitch at all. I was stretching audio to insane lengths (prob all 8-bit 22KHz, but that was perfectly good enough). I’ll have to dig out an old song I used which made artistic use of this (using dialogue recorded off the radio).

icsleepers

Even if there was no Paulstretch AUv3, which I think would be kind of difficult to implement, wouldn't one that's 'offline' be acceptable? I thought I recall seeing the algorithm behind it at some point? I might have made that up...

I'm not super into ambient stuff but there is something very warm and magical about the Paulstretch output

Svetlovska

@icsleepers : I would positively prefer an offline app over a real-time AU, as I can’t see how such extreme analysis could be performed in real time with other time dependent apps without unacceptable latency issues.

A standalone should still allow real time tweaking of it’s internal filters, processing order, octave and harmonic sliders however, as Paulstretch does, as it is only with a live, evolving sound you can tweak in real time that PaulStretch comes into it’s own, as a kind of audio microscope you can mess with to find the sweet spots in your mangling.

celtic_elk

I wonder how efficiently one could mimic this effect with a granular synth and a really slow LFO controlling the grain start point. It doesn't meet @Svetlovska's offline-processing preference, though.

sonosaurus

@Svetlovska said:
@icsleepers : I would positively prefer an offline app over a real-time AU, as I can’t see how such extreme analysis could be performed in real time with other time dependent apps without unacceptable latency issues.

A standalone should still allow real time tweaking of it’s internal filters, processing order, octave and harmonic sliders however, as Paulstretch does, as it is only with a live, evolving sound you can tweak in real time that PaulStretch comes into it’s own, as a kind of audio microscope you can mess with to find the sweet spots in your mangling.

I got Xenakios's PaulXStretch ( https://xenakios.wordpress.com/paulxstretch-plugin/ ) built and working on iOS just now.... the UI could definitely use some major refinement for touchscreen use, but it's something! In order to make it available to the public I would need to get both Xenakio's and Nasca Octavian Paul's permission, because they hold the copyright and would need to add a GPL license exception for distribution on the app store.

It really is such a cool piece of classic software... the results are great... take almost anything and turn it into awesome ambient music. Being able to tweak the parameters and hear the results in realtime does make sense... it's just the source input that needs to be pre-recorded or pre-loaded, or manually sampled. I can think of some extensions that would make it auto-sample the latest live input periodically, or on demand use the last X seconds of input retroactively.... but it works because it crossfades the inputs and the output is still smooth.

wim

@sonosaurus if you decided to go ahead and try to get a GPL exception, I'm sure you would get many people here to lobby on your behalf. If there is any way to do that without just being annoying to the copyright holders.

shinyisshiny

@sonosaurus oh man,, ur killing me! what can we do?!

anickt

@Svetlovska said:
@anickt : I took your unstretched sample into Paulstretch. At maximum length, it would run for over an hour.

Koala, AudioStretch, Caustic, yes, all cool for typical time domain and pitch shifting stuff an octave or so either way. But for anyone out there who is maybe thinking PaulStretch is in the same category as these, it really isn't: it's literally orders of magnitude different. PaulStretch atomises sound, taking it into places you never expected.

By way of example. This is the first word of your clip, "For".

At regular speed, according to Audacity, it runs just under half a second.

Paulstretched: six minutes.

Rather beautiful, if you are into drones. No effects used.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1QEnYDb5KsKiAvL-3irzfeq6fVRcATzed/view?usp=sharing

That is nice. 😎👍🏼