Greetings! The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Background: Since quite a while ago (at least back to the 80s) you could buy "Music Minus One" records (on 33rpm vinyl then), along with an appropriate printed musical scores.
The idea was that you could buy, say, a piano concerto "Minus One Piano", so it just played the orchestral part, and you would play along on your piano. Likewise say a piano quintett "Minus One Piano", or a string quartett "Minus One Cello".
If you are playing a missing string (e.g. violin) part, you can of course easily tune your instrument to the pitch at which the record-player is playing. Not so easy if you are playing the piano part -- you don't want to re-tune your piano each time! However, in those days you could find record players with a knob which allowed you to change the speed of rotation of the turntable, so you could tune the playback pitch of the vinyl disk.
It seems Music Minus One is still available, but now they're on CDs, not on vinyl disks. And, for personal reasons, what I want is the "Minus One Piano". While I have a few of the old ones on vinyl, the disks are no longer in great shape, and also I no longer have a speed-adjustable turntable.
Therefore, on the basis of the above logic, I'm looking for a program which can play back a CD with adjustable shift of pitch (and that's a "proportional" shift, of course, so that say lowering it by 1/4 of a semitone means 1/4 of a semitone throughout the whole bass-treble range).
Any suggestions appreciated! With thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@wlandres.net Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Mar-11 Time: 17:49:19 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:49:22PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
Adam
On 10-Mar-11 18:26:38, Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:49:22PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
Adam
Thanks. That had occurred to me, but I was wondering if there was a direct method. Also a bit suspicious that DRM-walls might inhibit doing it that way.
Thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@wlandres.net Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 10-Mar-11 Time: 18:32:43 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On 10/03/11 18:32, (Ted Harding) wrote:
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
Adam
Thanks. That had occurred to me, but I was wondering if there was a direct method. Also a bit suspicious that DRM-walls might inhibit doing it that way. cd
I have never seen any CD Protection that actually stops cdparanoia from getting a rip. I've see protection that will slow it down. Maybe I am just buying hugely unfashionable CD's that nobody bothers protecting though :)
The more I think about it the more I think that pitch shifted direct CD playback isn't possible on regular PC hardware, I think any software that did this would have to resort to doing DAE (ripping) on the fly and buffering it. At that point it is going to be subject to the same limitations as far as falling foul of copy protection.
At Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:26:38 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:49:22PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
I would definitely agree that processing audio once it's been copied from the CD will be much easier.
Recent versions of Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ include a plugin for pitch shitfting.
Also, the rubberband library http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/ has quite a good reputation amongst my colleagues. It includes a command line utility http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/usage.txt
Best, Richard
On 11-Mar-11 10:52:58, Richard Lewis wrote:
At Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:26:38 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:49:22PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
I would definitely agree that processing audio once it's been copied from the CD will be much easier.
Recent versions of Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ include a plugin for pitch shitfting.
Also, the rubberband library http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/ has quite a good reputation amongst my colleagues. It includes a command line utility http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/usage.txt
Best, Richard --
Thanks, all, for the comments and suggestions. It looks as though I may go for the rip+audacity method. The rubberband library looks interesting, but I'll keep that on the back burner for the moment.
Feel free to make further comments/suggestions! Thanks, Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) ted.harding@wlandres.net Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 11-Mar-11 Time: 12:07:44 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
At Fri, 11 Mar 2011 12:07:47 -0000 (GMT), (Ted Harding) wrote:
On 11-Mar-11 10:52:58, Richard Lewis wrote:
pitch shitfting.
Thanks, all, for the comments and suggestions.
You're welcome. And apologies for the appalling but---I assure you---genuine typo!
Best, Richard
On Fri, 2011-03-11 at 10:52 +0000, Richard Lewis wrote:
At Thu, 10 Mar 2011 18:26:38 +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 05:49:22PM -0000, Ted Harding wrote:
The nub of my query: is there a program which will play an audio CD, with an option which allows the pitch to be shifted?
Rip the audio and then adjust pitch in software and play back without the CD?
I would definitely agree that processing audio once it's been copied from the CD will be much easier.
Recent versions of Audacity http://audacity.sourceforge.net/ include a plugin for pitch shitfting.
Also, the rubberband library http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/ has quite a good reputation amongst my colleagues. It includes a command line utility http://breakfastquay.com/rubberband/usage.txt
There is more than way to shift the pitch depending on whether or not you want to keep the speed the same.
My understanding is that in a standard CD player a reference clock is available at the sampling frequency, 44.1Khz or a multiple therefore and the speed of the motor is continuously adjusted to get samples to come off the disk at that rate and go though the D/A converter at that same rate. If the reference clock was adjusted the CD would naturally play the disk a different rate and also change the pitch just like changing the speed of a vinyl record.
The same trick can be done if the signal has been digitally extracted though now this involves resampling. You can do this on the command line by taking a wav file, converting to raw with 'sox' and then converting back to WAV and resampling at the same time and lying to SOX about the sample rate of the RAW file. The result is both a pitch shift and a speed change.
To change the pitch and keep the speed constant involves heavier DSP and with more risk of artifacts. This is what rubberband does. Rubberband is used in ardour, an open source digital audio workstation for Linix and MacOS (http://www.ardour.org/).
On the hardware front CD players designed to play CD-G disks for Karaoke usually have the option of changing the key of the backing to suit the singer though on many this is only in semitone steps, not continiously adjustable. These same players will play normal CDs but obviously without any associated graphics.
CD players designed for use by DJs in clubs often enable the playback speed to be adjusted though I don't know whether this usually affects the pitch or not.
Steve.
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