Yeah, there are now such high-quality plugins in Linux. But there’s still no good plugin for manual pitch correction. There is mxtune, which works really well, but I often get crackling in the sound during playback. Ironically, if I play back the part where the crackling occurred again, it’s gone. So, it must have something to do with the plugin. Yeah, a good pitch correction plugin would still be awesome.
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Those would be nice too. 
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Indeed. Pitch correction and vocal harmonizers are the two areas of music production where Linux is still lagging behind, especially when it comes to FOSS solutions.
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Though they still aren’t ready for release.
Right now, you will have better success with upstream:
(Pls excuse the deviation from thread topic)
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I just saw an old video of Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers doing a live version of “Islands In The Stream”.
No pitch correction or harmonizers needed there…
Pitch correction is this decade’s version of last one’s Loudness War : no one except for the producers (and, in this case, the “artists” who can’t sing in tune even if their life depended on it) actually want it.
Might as well just have AI do all the vocals; in 100% perfect pitch and with as many harmonies as you’d like.
/end of rant
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Yeah, I honestly never understood pitch correction. I enjoy the process of recording and rerecording until I’m happy with the outcome (and I’d hope that anyone who wants to make music…actually enjoys making music). Is it frustrating sometimes? Absolutely. But there is a sense of accomplishment when you get that good take and when you’re genuinely happy with the result.
Pitch correction as an aesthetic choice is another thing though. I understand the use of it for that, although I don’t like it myself.
Rant as much as you want, i’m not changing my mind 
. I don’t live surrounded by Dollys Parton. .
And it’s not just strictly singing&music stuff…I’ve time-stretched & pitch-shifted so many things in last five years (started doing more&more sound designing&adds mixing five years ago, it’s my dayjob) so i really need good algorithms for that purpose. For that reason, i can’t do what i do for living in Linux - at least not at a present moment. Saved the day for me countless times.
And i’m not saying anybody should rely or abuse it (especially in music) , but i don’t think using it automatically means abusing it.
I’ve rescued bass guitar take recorded with detuned strings once. Bassist has already sold that bass guitar and got a new one by the time that recording came to mixing stage.
Countless times i fiddled with something seriously detuned and pulled a rabbit out of a hat eventually.
Countless times i left detuned parts be what they are, also.
All I’m saying is - it’s a great tool.
Well like most things it’s a spectrum. Some want full autotune but others simply want to fix that one bad note in an otherwise great vocal or solo. Everyone who wants this functionality can’t be painted with the same brush.
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Yeah, it’s a spectrum and a very wide one.
The things is…I might be wrong for having this opinion, but i always admired and respected wisdom and intentionality in any art. It doesn’t really matter that much to me if the singer didn’t hit that note (for whatever reason - is he trying to sing something out of his range or he’s out of shape/practice) if he or his bandmates created that cool vocal line, and are trying to do it to best of their current ability, then everything is still fine with me.
There’s another paradox…i really hate time&pitch correction process. It’s oftenly time consuming and frustrating, but I’ll still do it (not gladly, I’ll suffer doing it) if there’s no way around it.
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Exactly this. Especially if it’s recorded (rather than live), where you can do multiple takes, re-record certain parts, whatever. And there’s an implicit assumption, at least as a musician, that if you’re making music you…enjoy the process? Like, for me, it’s not enough just to have a perfect piece of music — I want to have made it, authentically.
Hell, for a long time I felt really bad about rerecording certain parts of a song (rather than getting it in one continuous take). I still feel a sense of joy and accomplishment when I’m able to nail it in one continuous recording (even if it’s the nth take or whatever). But for me, the whole point of making music is to…enjoy making music. Whether that’s composing, singing, playing instruments, whatever. Like, the process is part of what I find enjoyable about it.
So to your point @Ljuba, I think I’m of the same mentality that the intentionality and the process, for me, matters just as much as the final output. That’s not to say such tools don’t have a place at all — sometimes they’re used for purely aesthetic reasons.
Fundamentally, imperfections are what make arts human rather than machine (an observation that is sadly becoming ever more relevant with the likes of Suno /sigh).
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Anyways, what’s the new version like stability-wise? Anybody investigated it thoroughly yet? I didn’t have much free time lately to dig into Ardour, but 9.7 did crash on me a few times, mostly while editing midi in piano roll window as i recall, aldo i didn’t find that to be in some repeatable patterns…
?
Check my post early in this topic.
I haven’t had a chance to work with 9.8 long enough yet, but it seems that at least in one case I’m no longer able to reproduce the crash. Both bugs I referred to in the aforementioned post are related to MIDI editing, so it’s possible you were bitten by them too.
I have no information about whether other users can reproduce them, though.
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Good for Kenny and Dolly (RIP). But that’s completely irrelevant to the merits of pitch correction.
Pitch correction is extremely useful. It reduces the number of vocal takes required (especially if you’re not a strong singer), and tools like Melodyne make editing much easier.
It also allows you to do things you simply cannot do with other tools. I’ve seen videos of songwriters write and record a melody in one key, decide to change the key, and use Melodyne to transpose their vocal. That’s way more efficient than re-recording the vocal, and IMO a lot less nerve-wracking (tracking vocals is my least favorite part of the recording process).
Arguing that Kenny and Dolly didn’t need it is as immaterial as arguing that they didn’t need a DAW.
I find your insinuation that those who use pitch correction are not artists extremely insulting. That is as ridiculous and short-sighted as arguing that you’re not a “real” musician if you use MIDI instead of “real” instruments. Pitch correction is simply a tool to make it easier to accomplish certain tasks in the studio. It doesn’t affect your ability to make great art.
And at the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what your (or anyone else’s) opinion of the technology is. The reality is that it is now an industry standard, and both the Linux and open-source audio ecosystems lag far behind the commercial offerings on other platforms. We need a viable open source alternative to Melodyne, not only for the abilities it gives us, but to be competitive with the offerings available on Windows and Mac. I’m not saying Ardour has to develop that alternative (it’s probably outside the project’s scope), but someone does.
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I don’t think you’ll ever be able to match Melodyne. A friend of mine has Melodyne 5 Studio and he inserted a WAV file of organ and vocals and Melodyne read out all the notes. I could have changed the organ voice. But there were certainly at least 4-5 notes always at the same time. It showed me all the notes. Incredible!
Normally, for everyday use, pitch correction for a single voice would be sufficient.
Personally, however, I don’t think it’s the job of the Ardour developers to implement a manual pitch correction. Because I think it would be extremely time-consuming.
This is my last post in this thread about pitch correction, since we are really getting off topic.
Seem to me Ardour is pretty feature rich right now. Wouldn’t it be great to do a bug-free, super stable no frills no thrills polished up version 9.9 before venturing into new, unexplored waters of even more exiting fresh features? Something that you’d really have to sweat to make it crash?
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I agree that Ardour’s devs shouldn’t focus on implementing manual pitch correction. Reading back through this thread, it’s kind of weird how we got on about that. It started from a joke post.
If any new features are implemented in the near future, I would like to see chord editing expanded to include the other features from Cubase, like I said in my original post.
Perhaps I’m a bit optimistic, but I’m holding out hope that we’ll eventually have a FOSS Melodyne alternative. Melodyne is a very powerful example of just what can be done with this sort of stuff. It’s simply a matter of finding out how it works and putting in code. Much easier said than done, I know, but one can dream. Or maybe a disgruntled Celemony employee will leak the source code one day and we won’t have to do any reverse engineering.
Though if that’s not possible, I’d settle for something that’s as good as ReaTune, but FOSS. I really just want something that sounds natural and is easy to use. Though transposition would be cool also for songwriting and generating harmonies.
This is my last post about pitch correction also. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
I guess I’m just always hungry for new features. Ardour 9 has been really exciting because each new release is making it easier to make music “in the box”. I want to see that continue until Ardour’s finally on par with a tool like Cubase or Live.
But of course, I also want Ardour to be stable (though 9’s been pretty stable on me so far). I guess it’s just a matter of finding the right balance between new features and bug fixes. 
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Well, in the beginning i wanted Ardour to be on par with Cubase also. Now I don’t. I want it to be good (which it generally is) and reliable (this supposedly could be a little better). When i started using Cubase i may have used about 70-80 percent of it’s functions…right now, in this newer versions, i’m using about 30-40 percent and if you ask me, it’s interface is cluttered with stuff i generally don’t need. I constantly have the feeling that greed from both sides (user and manufacturer) is driving its development straight to hell.
Ardour’s way of doing things is ok, we need to make better use of it and overcome its (and our own) limitations.
Might be a little radical idea, but i suspect, in this day and age, it’s not that weird. Simplify your process as much as you can and make it work smoothly in conjunction with you inner self - i know this sounds like some half-assed eastern philosophy .
So basically, for the next release, my wish is just bug fixes until bug extermination, and as much quality of life improvements as possible.
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I guess what I’m trying to say is that I want Ardour to be a fun and useful tool for both writing and recording music.
I’ve never used Cubase myself, but from what I’ve seen it appears to have a lot of features that are designed for composing directly in the DAW. Ardour’s starting to adopt some of those features, but I still don’t think it’s the most inspiring environment to write in.
I agree strongly with simplifying my process, which is what I’m trying to do. Although I’m a guitarist by training, recently I’ve just been plugging my MIDI controller in and making music in the box. I would like to see more features that help with that style of composing (such as the chord assistant), so I can write faster and have more fun doing it.
I do not agree, however, with the idea of “making better use of it and overcoming its (and our own) limitations”. I want a DAW that allows me to transcend my limitations, enabling me to make any kind of music I see fit, and not being burdened by my own shortcomings as a performer or by arbitrary constraints set by the software’s creators.
I’m sorry if this is not the most concrete explanation. Some of what I’m describing here is a bit abstract and hard to put into words. But I hope it gives you a better idea of the direction I would like to see Ardour go in.
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That will likely be version 9.12… There is somewhat of a history of the last ‘.12’ release of a series being a battleship and having a long release life while the devs work on the ‘next big thing’. I have to admit that almost all of the newer stuff (Cues, Piano Roll, Record Window etc.) is pretty much lost on me, but it is great to see the devs response to the grocery list given by the community for sure.
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