Rubberband LV2 plugin versus built-in pitch shift

Getting Stuff Done Hints and Tricks
#1

I ran into something interesting and would like to get thoughts here. I have a karaoke file which I imported into Ardour. I needed to both slow it down and lower the pitch, so I followed my normal procedure and used the stretch tool to slow it down and added the Rubberband pitch-shift LV2 plugin to do the pitch shift.

Interestingly, the audio sounded slightly off. On a hunch, I tried the pitch shift tool built-in to Ardour (which also uses Rubberband) and that sounded much better.

I’m curious why this happened to be the case and whether the built-in tool uses different settings from the plugin or something. I tend to prefer the plugin because I can interactively play with the pitch correction (to figure out the best pitch), but I’m wondering if using the built-in tool is actually a better idea, or at least what the differences are.

#2

A plugin only sees a short window of audio at a time as audio passes though in realtime. This can be insufficient context for good quality pitch shifting.

The pitch-shift tool in Ardour allows to analyze the whole data first before applying the actual effect.

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#3

Huh, that’s interesting, thanks!

My workflow going forward will probably use the plugin to get a sense of which pitch works best for me and then pitch-shift using the built-in tool. That should get me the best of both worlds :slight_smile: