Picth Shifting or Mom & Pop Developers


de la mancha has a nice collection of freeware plugins. The newest release Octav8r is a pitch shifter on steroids. It is really well thought out any versatile. From the site:


Octav8r is a 7-node pitch-shifter that generates 6 differently pitched stereo versions of the audio input added to a ‘dry’ non-shifted signal to generate a richly layered sound. Each node has its own volume envelope and variable state filter plus send controls to vibrato, chorus, delay and reverb effects. The envelopes can be triggered by midi, audio gate or looped in sync with the host tempo.

The primary idea of Octav8r is to create multiple pitch-shifted layers of the incoming audio. With some twiddling you can get creative with panning to generate separation around the stereo field, use envelopes to bring each node in and out at different times and use chorus, delay and reverb to make each node sit differently in the mix. You can use the tempo-sync envelope trigger to create rhythmic gating or pulsing and the envelope toggles to make only some nodes modulated whilst others stay constant. Most controls have midi CC and midi learn support, so with some automation or midi knob twiddling, you can make the output really move around.

features
· 6 pitch-shifting nodes, with octave shifting (-3 to +3) and semitone shifting (-12 to +12, to 0.001 semitones)
· All nodes have independent volume, pan, ADSR envelope, variable state filter, vibrato, chorus, delay and reverb controls
· Node 0 is the ‘dry’ audio at incoming pitch, which also has pan, ADSR, chorus, delay and reverb
· Envelopes can be triggered by midi note, audio gate, a tempo-sync loop or bypassed
· Envelope contours can be changed and set to restart or pick-up at retrigger
· Mix level can be adjusted between dry and pitch-shifted nodes
· Each node can be fine tuned for pitch shift method and buffer size
· Each node, envelope and effect can be switched off to save CPU
· Midi CC support and midi learn for most controls
· 38 presets
· Multi-out version for hosts that can support this feature

A very cool effect that comes with a very reasonable price tag of $15. Which should be even more reasonable to those across the pond with stronger currencies. I like kind of thing a lot. And hope to see more of it. Some finical rewards and incentives for part time developer is a good thing. Developers get rewarded and the consumer gets access to to affordable software. It has work in other areas successfully like utilities and games when devs have had some kind of a mix free and paid software. I don’t think or want free plugins to go away but when a single person or small group of people sell there own product is a good thing successfully, even as a sideline, it is only going to help.

Check out Octav8r it might just be worth the $15 to you. The other free plugins are worth a try also especially the excellent basic64 & truc.

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