Warp mode and sound quality

King Frydai · Post by **King Frydai** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:21 am

I'm mixing Brazilian drum n bass. Many of the tunes sound pretty jarbelly in the vocals on beat match and flam alot in the drums when I use tone or texture mode. It's pretty noticable to my ears. Complex is too expensive in the CPU department and tends to make my computer do weird things. Besides, I don't like the sound of the complex mode anyway. I am using MP3's a lot. Do MP3's warp poorly? Wuz up?

-KF

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:53 am

repitch mode

sounds like vinyl.

King Frydai · Post by **King Frydai** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:00 am

I find repitch mode can make some songs sound really "pitchy" - especially a vocal track that is holding a note.

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:05 am

Well you cant have your cake and eat it too.

If you want extreme realtime timestretch with less artifacts, the penalty is CPU cycles (see: Complex Warp Mode). If complex mode makes your computer do wierd things, perhaps you need a faster one.

If you don't want a penalty of CPU cycles, you take more audible artifacts instead. If complex mode did not require more CPU cycles, we wouldn't have so many warp modes. All have pro's and cons.

I recommend re-pitch to those DJing with Live, as it sounds the most like pitching tracks for tempo matching purposes, like vinyl DJs do.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 5:34 pm

Tadaaaaa!
Beats mode! It's the one that preserves transients the best.

And what's with the sonic artifacts anyway? Might I point out that converting uncompressed audio to MP3 is not free of introducing audible side effects either?

I'm not saying you can't DJ with MP3s though - you can. If you do the compressing yourself, consider OGG vorbis. The encoding is slow, but the fidelity is much better at similar compression ratios. And Live can read it. (And "OGG" sounds cool I think, kinda Martian.)

subterFUSE · Post by **subterFUSE** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:16 pm

Beats mode is only good if you are not changing the tempo a large amount from the original.

If you move away from the original BPM too much, it gets artifacts bad.

Repitch and Complex are the only ways to go if you need to change the BPM a lot... although Repitch might not work for you, because it may make vocals sound funny... (ie too high or low, depending on direction)

I use Repitch for about 99% on tracks, and use Complex on ones where the original BPM is much higher or lower than my typical session tempo.

djsynchro · Post by **djsynchro** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 8:08 pm

Well I use beats mode mainly, and as correctly pointed out, there is a problem with repitch: The pitch changes.

I know from my vinyl days, some slow records that you plus 8, and they start to sound all thin & shit because they get transposed up to far.

Down is usaully cool on big systems, we all love B.I.G. bass no?

So there you have it... changing the speed of a track a lot comes with artifacts. In the meantime, out there on the dancefloor, some of them are so high that they didn't even notice you took over from the last DJ

AdamJay · Post by **AdamJay** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 8:12 pm

here's a tip... though it might not help you in a live setting, but for production...

Freeze your tracks with Complex Mode warped clips.
you'll get the cpu back.

have fun!

sqook · Post by **sqook** » Fri Dec 02, 2005 9:13 pm

AdamJay wrote:here's a tip... though it might not help you in a live setting, but for production...

Freeze your tracks with Complex Mode warped clips.
you'll get the cpu back.

have fun!

Also, you can bounce a complex warped clip down to a new tempo, render it to disk and just keep it warped in beats mode. That way you can actually have access to the track again.