Audacity Forum

Hi. I'm the author of the sbsms library/effect. Sorry for the issues you've all been experiencing.

I've spent some time on this project in the last few days after over a year of neglect, but it has mostly been on optimizing. It should be several times faster with my recent changes which I will submit once I resolve (hopefully all of) the issues in this thread.

Anyways, I just wanted to thank people for the bug reports and let people know I'll be working on fixing them now. Due to the nature of the algorithm, it may take a little time to resolve everything.

I committed changes to svn which seem to fix all the issues. I am a bit unsure about the track length issue, since I didn't do anything to affect this and frankly don't understand how that could affect anything. I also made the effect quite a bit faster, and made a few changes to the effect dialog.
I would appreciate it if anybody else were to test my changes - but you need to update to the latest svn, of course.

Just updated - It does seem faster, and no crashes yet
Just one thought - the interface is quite a lot longer (vertical height) than before - will people with small screens (800 x 600) be able to reach the "OK" button?

Update:
I spoke too soon
Audacity has just crashed when applying sliding pitch and time.
Selection was about 10 seconds from the middle of a 25 second stereo track.
I was using extreme settings of max slow to max fast and max pitch increase to max pitch decrease with transient sharpening.
It looked like it was going to process the selection, but after about 1 second Audacity crashed (disappeared).

stevethefiddle wrote:Just updated - It does seem faster, and no crashes yet
Just one thought - the interface is quite a lot longer (vertical height) than before - will people with small screens (800 x 600) be able to reach the "OK" button?

Thanks Clayton for adding a % control for pitch! But yes on Ubuntu at 800x600, you can just see the Dynamic Transient Sharpening box, but the OK and Cancel buttons are off the bottom of the screen. Looks like you will need the controls for both tempo and pitch to be side by side?

stevethefiddle wrote:Audacity has just crashed when applying sliding pitch and time.
Selection was about 10 seconds from the middle of a 25 second stereo track.
I was using extreme settings of max slow to max fast and max pitch increase to max pitch decrease with transient sharpening. It looked like it was going to process the selection, but after about 1 second Audacity crashed (disappeared).

I tested in Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.04. The following short selections processed almost instantaneously inside a 5 minute track instead of taking unreasonable time or freezing/crashing as before (initial tempo/pitch =0):

(A) 1 second selection: final tempo = - 90, final pitch = -12
(B) 200 ms then 100 ms selections: final pitch = -12
(C) 100 ms selection: final tempo = - 90, final pitch = -12

Then I tried (D) 10 seconds in middle of a 25 seconds track @ tempo -90 to +150; pitch +12 to -12 with sharpening off; then (E) those settings on a 5 minute track. Those were both OK on Windows and Ubuntu (the 5 minute track took about 6 minutes to process on each OS).

When I turned sharpening on and repeated (D) and (E), I got a replicable crash on both OS'es towards the end of the process. The Ubuntu console says segmentation fault.

If anyone wants to test the above changes so far, they are in the latest Nightly Builds.



Gale

I forgot to test the transient sharpening option. I'll look into that now, and I'll change the effect dialog to be side by side / more space efficient.

I committed a change would should fix the transient sharpening crash - the effect was trying to go backwards in time in certain cases, and this broke some buffer stuff. I had to change the way it works, so the results will sound a little different now.
Also the dialog box is restyled.

Do these changes show up in the Mac nightly builds?

Edit: Seems like I may have answered my own question. Using Audacity 1.3.13-alpha-Jun 7 2010, selecting 2 seconds out of a 30-second track and applying the most extreme settings works OK, but if I set "Dynamic Transient Sharpening" it crashes.

As an aside, applying this effect to generated noise produces interesting sound effects.

-- Bill

billw58 wrote:Do these changes show up in the Mac nightly builds?

Edit: Seems like I may have answered my own question. Using Audacity 1.3.13-alpha-Jun 7 2010, selecting 2 seconds out of a 30-second track and applying the most extreme settings works OK, but if I set "Dynamic Transient Sharpening" it crashes.

Clayton has committed his attempted fix for the transient sharpening crashes so please update to the next Nightly then you can see if the fix works for you. I'll try a bit later on for Windows and Linux.


Gale

Hi Clayton

No crashes now for me, and selections of a < 1 s in a long track still OK, but behaviour oddities mostly on Windows.

On Windows 7 and Ubuntu, I tried (D) 10 seconds in middle of a 25 seconds music track @ tempo -90 to +150; pitch +12 to -12 with sharpening off. Then I undid and tried the same with sharpening on. Then I did (E) those settings on a 5 minute music track with sharpening off then on. There is no crash in any of those cases on either OS.

However on both OS'es, a negative pitch change is interpreted as positive and vice versa.

Significant problems on EDIT: WIndows XP, 7 and Ubuntu irrespective if project rate is 48000 Hz or higher.:

• A tempo change (only) now affects the pitch - you can verify that with any constant tone.
• The pitch change moves too far too fast at the start if there is no initial pitch change but a final change. If I generate a steady 2 minute tone at 440 Hz (A above middle C), select from 5s to the end and ask only for a final reduction of -12 semitones, as soon as 5s is reached there is an abrupt jolt upwards to (something like) B above middle C. On Ubuntu the start of the changed area clearly still sounds like A.
• There is always silence at the end of the result if I apply the effect to the entire track, although no audio is apparently truncated. This silence is at the end of the track even if I only apply a +12 to -12 pitch change (the number of samples remains correct).

Would it look better if you put the initial/final tempo change side by side as now but in one static box, similarly with the initial/final Pitch shift? With four boxes I was somehow getting confused and expecting the "Initial" changes side by side (which I don't think would be as good).


Thanks,


Gale

- First off, I fixed the inverted pitch shift - that's embarrassing.
- I got to testing with constant tones, and remembered there was an issue with sidebands - I fixed this, so now there's no amplification with constant tones - it should also work better in general.
- While I was looking at constant tones I noticed it had a glitch at the beginning of the selection, so I made it look at samples before the beginning of the selection (when available) so the transition is better.
- I changed the effect dialog again according to Gale's suggestion.
- I __haven't__ fixed the windows 7 issues yet. I won't submit changes until I have done so - hopefully in the next few days.

Thanks for testing - hopefully everything should be in order soon.