Time stretch tool

Hi,

I do not mean to sound repeating, but all my posts from yesterday were accidentally deleted, so this is now unofficially my first post :wink:

Liquid time stretching is an important feature that caused many Cubase SX users to upgrade to SX3. This sort of realtime scaling would be a very welcome and competitive feature.

I donā€™t know how much trouble it would be to implement this, but what Iā€™d really like to see is a dialog box for the current non-realtime timestretch feature where you can input a stretch factor like so:

Current BPM: [x]
Target BPM: [y]

If you know the BPM of multiple tracks you can easily shrink/stretch them to the same tempo without manually searching/counting/stretching.

Hereā€™s how I would do it:

Given multiple 4-bar regions, each with a different tempoā€¦

Set Ardour tempo to the song tempo you want.
Turn on the Grid
Set Grid mode to ā€œbarsā€
Select the time stretch tool

Now grab the end of each of the loops and drag them so they ā€œsnapā€ to the grid on bar 4. Now all of the loops will be time-stretched to the same length.

Would that work for you? Or am I missing the point somewhere?

On top of this, apart from BenLoftisā€™s solution, thereā€™s another case where this simple dialog that wonā€™t even require major changes would definitely save a hassle.

Imagine 3 full songs with different speeds you want to chop and mix. All of them have a certain intro with no clear rythm info, with different lengths. One or two have a different speed intermezzo. By using this dialog, you wouldnā€™t have to search-and-chop-and-loose-and-count for every section to make it fit.

I agree with the OP. Since most loops I buy are tempo-designated it makes best sense to have a dialog utility to stretch multiple files. I often want to test dozens of possibly useful loops, and manually changing tempos for many loops becomes tedious quickly.

Best,

dp