forge wrote: My girlfriend is a singer and I showed her how to use Live to change the key of her backing tracks, which she was doing happily, and it was probably fine for some of her gigs, but recently I had to do her a new demo so I loaded in the tracks she'd pitched (only changed pitch in complex mode) and they sounded pretty ordinary, so I got the source files and used Waves Soundshifter - and let me tell you the difference was staggering. The waves plug-in was such a long way better.
Pitch shifting is a whole other ball game again, and Soundshifter is one expensive plugin. However, I decided to have a go and see how I fared with this...
So I fired up a demo of soundshifter, along with Live, Audition and Sonar's V-Vocal for comparisson. I tested them on a organ riff, a rhodes chord pattern, and a single acoustic guitar chord (very nice - rich harmonics content
). Here's what I found:
Soundshifter: Very nice indeed. Good clean results up to transpositions of a perfect fourth and sometimes beyond that too. No arguments here!
Live 5.2: Some of the warp modes sounded pretty bad. But "Complex" mode sounded VERY good. On the organ and rhodes it was *almost* as good as the soundshifter. On the guitar chord it was in fact BETTER to my ears up to a trnaspositon of a fourth, but less good on more drastic transpositions, where soundshifter had the edge.
Audition 2.0: I;m a big fan of Audition, and find its timestretching second to none. So I was suprised to find the results with its pitch shift effect quite disappointing on this material. Live and soundshifter were clearly much better.
Sonar V-Vocal (Roland Variphrase): I expected this might be the winner, but in fact I was unable to get anything decent from it at all. Perhaps a user error, or maybe its not designed for larger pitch shifting operations. Also it was very CPU intensive, and on my first attempt it crashed Sonar and I had to reboot!
To conclude, I think that Live came out VERY well in these tests - the complex mode was far better on all three clips than either V-Vocal or Audition. Soundshifter was better in some cases, though given the cost I think it would be hard to justify the investment if you have Live.