Ircam Ts Thoughts And Questions Options

[JT3Jon]

Playing around with this for about 30min now on a variety of material and first off, make sure you adjust the settings for your audio material (i.e. monophonic, polyphonic, etc) but just as importantly make sure you adjust the oversample rate as needed. I was comparing TS straight pitch shifting vs the Waves Soundshifter which I got on sale recently, and at first I was very disappointed in TS and all its artifacting, but simply upping the oversample solved this problem.

It seems in general I can make TS sound as good as Waves SoundShifter (which IMO is the BEST pitch shifting plugin I've used), but you have to be very carful with the FO max settings as this makes a HUGE difference in the sound. I also like the ability to change the formant which I find helpful in bringing back some of those overtones that seem to be lost when pitching down more than -3 semitones.

Plus TS has awesome time stretching as well! I wish there was some way though you could make it beat related instead of multiples of the file. For example, it would be cool to tell it I have a loop at 120bpm and I'd like to make it 130bpm. Right now this is impossible which makes it frustrating to use in a musical context. Perhaps this might be possible in an update? Comparing extreme time stretching (anything over double IMO) vs the Free PaulStretch, PaulStretch wins hands down. It seems I cannot get TS to not sound glitchy when stretching that large, even on sources that do not have heavy transients. Maybe there are settings I'm missing?

BTW, I find the manual very poor. Sure, it explains in one or two sentences what each knob is suppose to do, but I must admit I'm not an audio scientist, so most of it is over my head. It would be helpful if the manual just went into more detail, or gave examples of when or why you might adjust specific parameters. I also watched the two videos I could find on youtube and both were interesting, but not very good in actually explaining the product. Hopefully someone at IRCAM might be willing to do a video showing what the different knobs do to actual material, and give specific examples of when and why you might adjust parameters. Its easy enough to just move knobs and hear what they do, but with a tool like this it might be helpful to hear from the actual developers of why they were included, what their purposes are, and maybe some real world examples of their use. A primary example is the use of the spectrogram. I find it very odd this is even included at all, as unlike izotope RX, it seems you cannot select anything in the spectrogram, nor does it seem to update at all when you actually pitch shift the file, or adjust the formant, etc. So why is it even there? Just for looks? Same with the musical data, etc. If these dont update as you make changes in the plugin, I dont really see their usefulness, other than to make the plugin look cool?

Of course, the biggest disadvantage is that its a stand alone app and not a plugin. Anyone know if a plugin version is in the works?

Must admit I'm still undecided on picking this up. Will have to demo it more. Anyone know exactly how long its on intro price for $99? IRCAM website says through mid October, but I believe Dont crack say its only through Sept 30th?