Wave Mechanics Announces Speed Plug-In

(Click for a close-up)

Wave Mechanics, an audio plug-in specialist and Digidesign Development Partner, has just announced its first purely native DSP plug-in.

Speed takes advantage of recent developments in computer processing power to bring very high-quality tempo alteration and pitch transposition of polyphonic audio tracks to the Pro Tools platform. Even though pitch and time-scaling technology has been available for some time, these processes have often been plagued with artifacts, and usually only produce acceptable results on single line instrumental or vocal tracks. Says Wave Mechanics President, Ken Bogdanowicz, "We would often get calls from users asking if they could transpose an entire song, and we would have to explain that current pitch change technology will only work well on one instrument at a time. This, and the rapid increase in computer power, prompted us to investigate entirely new ways of approaching the pitch change problem."

The result of this research is Speed, a new plug-in for the Pro Tools AudioSuite plug-in platform. Now, with Speed, it's possible to change tempo while simultaneously transposing even entire mixes. In this era of loop-based music production, Speed is extremely useful, allowing drum and music loops of different tempos and keys to be used together. Speed is free of the artifacts produced by previous generations of pitch and time change technology, and is very will suited to processing the rhythmic sounds found in today's music, perfectly preserving percussive transients, while maintaining rock-solid tempo accuracy.

Speed can alter tempo from half-speed to double-speed, and simultaneously transpose pitch over a two-octave range. All modifications to the audio can be previewed in real-time. When processing stereo tracks, Speed maintains phase synchronization between left and right channels.

Speed is compatible with Digidesign's AudioSuite native plug-in format, and is available for the Macintosh and Windows NT platforms. Pricing for Speed is TBA. It will also be available with PurePitch, PitchDoctor, and SoundBlender as part of the UltraTools 2.0 bundle.