Auburn Sounds announces Inner Pitch shifting plugin

PRESS RELEASE — Grenoble, France — Auburn Sounds, setting itself up as a plugin company committed to originality, reliability, simplicity, and sound, is proud to announce availability of Inner Pitch — pitching it as a fun-to-use pitch-shifting plugin with a very high-quality, natural sound staying true to the source material, prioritising the intent of the input performance with destruction as an option only — in both self-explanatory Inner Pitch Free and Inner Pitch Full versions, the latter including additional features for unlocking the best possible pitch-shifting quality and lowest CPU usage at the best possible price.
As a colourful effect that preserves movement and life in its users’ tracks — unless they are intentionally hellbent on destroying them, that is, Auburn Sounds’ spectral pitch-shifting plugin, Inner Pitch, was explicitly created to be equally at home when working with any sound source — be that a single instrument, two voices, or a full mix with next to no trade-off when it comes towards favouring either monophonic or complex material — since the company succeeded in effectively applying the brakes to the internal parameters that would otherwise impose this (unnecessary) choice.

Clearly, Inner Pitch can typically be used for pitch shifting — settings range between -24 (-2 octaves) to 24 (+2 octaves), but also formant shifting — similarly, settings range between -24 (-2 octaves) to 24 (+2 octaves), as well as synthesizing hellish-sounding soundscapes, reinforcing bass or treble, track-doubling, and creating endlessly ascending or falling sounds, for instance.
Inner Pitch is as easy to use as it is fun to play with two octaves of pitch, thanks to its no-nonsense GUI (Graphical User Interface) implementation. Its unmissable PITCH control clearly sets that all-important pitch shifting to taste and an associated L/R SHIFT setting shifts the left and right channels with an offset difference to enlarge the stereo image by creating anti-phase and width, while the pitch settings panel boasts TONAL BOOST — with TRANSIENT or non-transient (TONAL) settings that can also be BALANCED; STEREO LINK — keeps the phase aligned in the left and right channels while pitch-shifting, FULL fully preserving the existing stereo image and 0 providing a cleaner but ghostlier-sounding result (without a ‘centre’); and FORMANT allows for shifting formants between those -2 to +2 octaves. On top of that, COLOR adds three distortions that can all be used at once: RATE — simulates a lower sampling rate; GAME — goes through an ADPCM game codec called QOA (Quite OK Audio), resulting in a subtle video game-like sound; TUBE is a simple parallel wave-shaper that sounds good on just about anything.
A feature-rich DELAY panel is also at hand, helping users to dive deeper into exploring the creative possibilities on offer with Inner Pitch — delay time being set with either the TAP button or an associated 2D panel where feedback can also be set; DIF (diffusion) adds reflection to the delayed sound, turning it slightly into reverb, while the panorama of the delayed sound can also be affected, as can alternating it between the left and right channels (ping-pong).
It is also possible to change the three-band gain and two-band crossovers to modify the EQ shape of the wet signal using the SPECTRUM panel, and, last, but by no means least, the OUTPUT panel’s WET slider mixes the delayed, distorted, and pitch-shifted wet signal with the unaffected and compensated dry input, while GAIN is a final output volume gain slider that applies to both.
Only on the Inner Pitch Full version, QUALITY provides an additional quality mode for pitch-shifting with three modes: MAX — preserves more transients at the expense of being more CPU hungry, STD — balanced default, and SOFT — economical mode with a more noisy mode that is still sometimes the best-sounding mode that is the most CPU friendly. Again, available only on the Inner Pitch Full version, TIME DIV sets the STFT (Short-Time Fourier Transformation) overlap as another quality pitch-shifting mode — IIx overlap can be used to save CPU usage, sounding less reverberant yet useful for transients at the expense of tonal parts, though it sometimes ends up being the best-sounding setting, surprisingly; IIIx overlap is the default and most balanced-sounding setting; IVx overlap sounds more precise when working with transients and high-end material, albeit at the expense of more reverberation and CPU usage; Vx overlap is even more precise when working with high-end material, albeit at the expense of even more reverberation and CPU usage; and VIx overlap, which does not appear to be best for any application in particular.
Put it this way: Who better to position both versions of Inner Pitch in the Auburn Sounds plugin pantheon, then, than company CEO Guillaume Piolat:
While the Graillon pitch-shifting engine is still competitive in 2023, its Digital Signal Processing core was created almost seven years ago — in 2016, then left untouched so as not to break sessions. Although our DSP process has continuously improved with the release of Couture, Panagement 2, Renegate, and Lens, we knew we could do much better. As a result, Inner Pitch provides state-of-the-art pitch-shifting quality for any type of source material — not only voice — with an incredible 17ms of latency. This is a milestone for us, and a testament to Auburn Sounds’ unique know-how in audio DSP. We believe that it is possibly the best-sounding pitch-shifting engine available today. That said, you don’t have to trust us blindly, but rather test our claim for yourself by using Inner Pitch Free on any project without a time limit or any added noise; needless to say, it has a lower maximum quality, but you can get a feel for what the Inner Pitch Full version would be like.
Inner Pitch Free is available for free, while Inner Pitch Full is available to purchase at an attractive (time-limited) introductory promo price of $29 until 20 October 2023 — rising thereafter to its regular price of $38.67. It requires macOS 10.12 or later and an AU, VST, or AAX plugin host.
https://www.auburnsounds.com/products/InnerPitch.htmlThe post Auburn Sounds announces Inner Pitch shifting plugin first appeared on macOS Audio.