rbpitch: Rhythmbox Pitch/Tempo Shifting

[allquixotic]

I am glad that everyone finds this to their liking.

Please provide feedback and suggestions when you use this software. If your experience is less than ideal, tell me what needs to be improved. As you can see from the history of this thread, user feedback has been a major catalyst for actual improvements in the software.

Right now I am pretty busy with other stuff, but any requests that are both reasonable and sound might get implemented somewhere around May.

And if you know Vala/Gstreamer and want to provide patches for anything -- cleanups, bugfixes, features -- I would be more than happy to review and integrate them.

[Paul41]

I like the slider changes you made to the last version (being able to adjust range) but one thing that went away with that was the ability to type in a specific number. I use to be able to reduce the tempo for example to 50% by typing it in the box, now the only way to change is with the slider.

[long2dance]

Hi guys,

I am a Linux newbie but have been looking for alternative to ******* for ages. I need ability to slow or speed music (dance professional)

rbpitch seems to offer what I need so I followed instructions as posted and all went well until line

patch -p0 < rbpitch/patches/ubuntu/9.10/Makefile.am.patch

Error - No such file or directory.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and notice reference to 9.10 in line but I
cannot find equivalent directory in 10.04

Any assist with easy instructs would be much appreciated

[allquixotic]

Hi guys,

I am a Linux newbie but have been looking for alternative to ******* for ages. I need ability to slow or speed music (dance professional)

rbpitch seems to offer what I need so I followed instructions as posted and all went well until line

patch -p0 < rbpitch/patches/ubuntu/9.10/Makefile.am.patch

Error - No such file or directory.

I am using Ubuntu 10.04 and notice reference to 9.10 in line but I
cannot find equivalent directory in 10.04

Any assist with easy instructs would be much appreciated

I'm afraid you are following outdated instructions. On page 3 of the thread, I posted the updated instructions: click here to see them.

Please let me know if this doesn't fix your problem.

Thanks,

Sean

[long2dance]

Great, install worked perfectly.

On using rbpitch I have set 'slider bounds to +10/-15% and + - 6 st but the sliders do not seem to change. Have I missed something?

Also in future release is it possible to have display reflect slider adjustment values in real time?

Otherwise it appears to be exactly what I have been looking for - at last it is maybe goodbye ******* for most of me needs - hooray.

[allquixotic]

Great, install worked perfectly.

On using rbpitch I have set 'slider bounds to +10/-15% and + - 6 st but the sliders do not seem to change. Have I missed something?

Also in future release is it possible to have display reflect slider adjustment values in real time?

Otherwise it appears to be exactly what I have been looking for - at last it is maybe goodbye ******* for most of me needs - hooray.

Sounds like I have some bugs to fix, but I'm glad it does most of what you want. I will try to reproduce the two issues you raised, and if I can isolate the problem, I will fix it.

Subscribe to this thread via email. I will reply again when I've made some enhancements. I expect I'll have some time to work on this in May, but I can't say when exactly.

Thanks,

Sean

[rdingram]

Thank you for your work on this project.

After following the installation instructions on 10.04 when I start Rhythmbox I receive multiple pop-ups informing me that Rhythmbox was unable to load any of the plugins, including the rbpitch plugin. Any ideas why this would happen?

Thanks for any help.

-- EDIT --

Well I feel like an idiot. I had downloaded and compiled in a subdirectory of ~/.gnome2/plugins and left all of the files there. When rhythmbox was loading it was trying to open all of the plugins in the compile subdirectories. After I moved that folder out of the plugins folder everything is working.

On a side note, all tempo shifting software I have used in Linux produces very "choppy" playback. Is this normal? I know that the few that I have used in OSX are not as noticeably choppy. Thanks for any advice!

[allquixotic]

Thank you for your work on this project.

After following the installation instructions on 10.04 when I start Rhythmbox I receive multiple pop-ups informing me that Rhythmbox was unable to load any of the plugins, including the rbpitch plugin. Any ideas why this would happen?

I was getting this on my local box for 10.04 as well; I merged rhythmbox master into the rbpitch git repository and it now seems to work. Much like rbpitch itself, the rhythmbox master is experimental, so don't be surprised if there are regressions.

As a side note, it is highly recommended to run sudo aptitude hold rhythmbox to prevent further upgrades to Rhythmbox after compiling rbpitch. Otherwise, if you install updates without scrutinizing the list, you will possibly install an Ubuntu rhythmbox update that is incompatible with my build.

Thanks for any help.

-- EDIT --

Well I feel like an idiot. I had downloaded and compiled in a subdirectory of ~/.gnome2/plugins and left all of the files there. When rhythmbox was loading it was trying to open all of the plugins in the compile subdirectories. After I moved that folder out of the plugins folder everything is working.

Ouch. Glad you figured it out.

On a side note, all tempo shifting software I have used in Linux produces very "choppy" playback. Is this normal? I know that the few that I have used in OSX are not as noticeably choppy. Thanks for any advice!

I'm not sure what you mean by choppy. I do occasionally notice some artifacts for a few frames when I change the pitch or tempo, but while the music is playing (without changing the pitch/tempo/speed) I don't get choppiness at all.

Please confirm that you get choppiness when rbpitch is enabled, and not when rbpitch is disabled? Is that the case? If so, please also post your system specs (CPU, RAM, sound card).

You can further debug the rbpitch pipeline on the CLI:

gst-launch-0.10 -v filesrc location=/path/to/any/audio/file.mp3 ! decodebin2 ! audioconvert ! pitch tempo=1.10 ! audioconvert ! autoaudiosink

In the above, replace "/path/to/any/audio/file.mp3" with a real filesystem path (absolute or relative) that points to an audio file that your gstreamer has a codec for. Some stock sounds are in /usr/share/sounds usually.

The output may record anomalies (such as overruns / underruns) and also the clock sync calculations done when the tempo is not 1.

[allquixotic]

Hi folks,

I just made a new commit to the rbpitch git repo. The following changes have been applied:

• The slider updates the spin buttons immediately when dragged, so you can see how the sliding affects the value in the spin button. However, there is a delay of 1 second (on top of PulseAudio's default buffer size of 2 seconds) between commits of the slider value to GConf and GStreamer. The reason for this delay is two-fold: One, I have actually managed to crash the program (somewhere within GStreamer) by setting the pitch/tempo/speed values many times per second. Dragging the slider, if I didn't control it, would have the effect of setting the value many times per second. Two: there's likely to be an extreme performance hit / thrashing with that kind of rapid commit logic. It is much easier on the system to only commit to GConf and GStreamer once per second. I am now investigating clever ways to get Rhythmbox to optionally request lower latency from Pulseaudio, to cut down on the delay when it does update. This feature was requested by long2dance in this post; you're welcome.
• It is possible to edit the values in the spinbutton if they are formatted with "st" or "%" at the end. Previously, you had to delete the "st" and/or "%" to get the value to take effect. Now you can just single left-click inside the numeric value, type the value you want, and hit Tab or click on another field, to have it take effect. Under the hood, I basically tied into the GtkSpinButton input signal handler to parse the string value and see if it matches a regular expression that is aware of the "st" / "%" semantics, and extracts the numeric value out of it. This feature was requested by Paul41 in this post; you're welcome.
• More comments added to tangly code sections.
• Change uses of `weak' to `unowned' in Vala (syntactical change)

If you already installed a previous version of rbpitch, change directory to the place where you originally checked out rbpitch, then run from a terminal:

make clean
git pull
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --enable-vala --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var && make && sudo make install

The above steps are upgrade instructions for people who have installed rbpitch before. For a clean install, keep reading. If the upgrade fails for some reason, you can always follow my original instructions. This will take up more bandwidth and time, but otherwise is the same. I don't mind the extra bandwidth usage; feel free to do it that way if you like.

The rbpitch UI is pretty great now, wouldn't you say? There are a few more things to polish (there always are...) but I think this is progress. It's nice to satisfy user requests, too.

Finally, this was tested on Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit. Since I am the sort of guy to prefer newer software and shun older software, I hereby withdraw my willingness to support rbpitch on Ubuntu 9.10 and earlier as of today. You are free to try rbpitch on Ubuntu 9.10, and it may in fact work -- but if it doesn't, I will not go out of my way to backport it. Either way, let me know your results if you try it. I would be interested to know whether or not it works on 9.10.

If, on the other hand, you have any problems with rbpitch on Ubuntu 10.04, that would be something I'd like to know right away, and I will work with you to make it right.

Thanks,

Sean

[Deadite81]

Cool plugin, thanks.

Seems to work as advertised, although I've tested it for only a short time. Once I set the speed to around +300% Rhythmbox crashes. I can only assume that my PC can't keep up with that! I have an older AMD X2 @2.5 GHz and onboard nvidia sound card. I have no reason to need the music that fast anyway Just thought I'd mention it if no one else has already. Thanks!