rbpitch: Rhythmbox Pitch/Tempo Shifting

[Catscrash]

http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty-updates/rhythmbox unten amd64 / i386 als Link nutzen, das ist allerdings nicht das einzige Paket was du brauchst, um die installation abzuschließen musst du noch mindestens 4-5 andere Pakete da suchen und installieren

€dit: if any non-german-capable readers are interested (sry, i mixed up the forums when I answered ): http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty-updates/rhythmbox use the amd64 / i386 links in the bottom, but be prepared to download another 4-5 other packages from that page to complete the installation

[teledyn]

http://packages.ubuntu.com/natty-updates/rhythmbox unten amd64 / i386 als Link nutzen, das ist allerdings nicht das einzige Paket was du brauchst, um die installation abzuschließen musst du noch mindestens 4-5 andere Pakete da suchen und installieren

vielen Dank

[Catscrash]

woups, sry for answering in german before, i completely got mixed up with the forums...

[teledyn]

woups, sry for answering in german before, i completely got mixed up with the forums...

not a problem: that's why god invented Google Translate; I understood your instructions and followed them through and now I have pitch and speed control, and that's the main thing Thanks again for your help, in any language

[Catscrash]

a word of warning though: (i knew it was a really dirty workaround) unfortunately most other plugins don't work, since there's apparently a problem with the combination of the oneiric python and the natty rhythmbox... well at least pitching works

[teledyn]

so close but not quite: installing the rhythmbox 0.13 does give me a sort of pitch controller, but it is the one that is a popup that measures changes in tenths of a percent (!?) whereas the one I wanted was the display of convenient slider controls that would increment in the more intelligent and domain-friendly integer semitones and rate change by relative position of the slider (what is a 200% tempo actually mean? 3x?)

and then the plugins were broken causing my package manager to be broken unless I also downgraded the rhythmbox-plugins, but the plugins depend on libmtp8 version 1.0.6 and all the archives no longer have the libmtp-common_1.0.6 that it requires, so the package manager would stay broken, and sadly I'm unable to allow that for this particular installation, so I'm back at square one.

And now I'm thinking perhaps I am not in the right place! Is this discussion about the rate-changer that appears as a pitchfork on the row of control icons that then pops up that dialog with the tenths-of-percent controls? Highly awkward for my purposes, I need to be able to shift a tune by integer tones with as little motion as possible (because I am playing at the same time) and ditto with the tempo, I need to just click something simple and increase the metronome speed by an incremental but significant amount, eg when practicing passages and wanting to start slow but then play "a little" faster on each success, and 1/1000th of the current tempo is outside of the range of detection for my ears I'm afraid

so I guess I'm back at square one and will have to start investigating that other slider-based rate controller's code and learning about the rhythmbox api to somehow get to where I'm wanting to be

Thanks for the help anyway.

[allquixotic]

Hi,

so close but not quite: installing the rhythmbox 0.13 does give me a sort of pitch controller, but it is the one that is a popup that measures changes in tenths of a percent (!?) whereas the one I wanted was the display of convenient slider controls that would increment in the more intelligent and domain-friendly integer semitones and rate change by relative position of the slider (what is a 200% tempo actually mean? 3x?)

The one you're referring to is rbpitch, which is the software I wrote.

rbpitch does indeed support integer semitones; actually it supports fixed-point, double-precision semitones. The underlying library I use to provide the support, libsoundtouch (which in turn is exposed in gstreamer-plugins-bad as the "pitch" element) exposes all three values -- pitch, speed and tempo -- as double-precision values from -10.0 to +10.0. So I have to translate these using some algorithms I obtained from the author of libsoundtouch, since I am not mathematically inclined enough to know how to do it myself. You can see these algorithms in the source code of rbpitch; do a find for "xlate" in the rbpitch-plugin.vala sources ( at http://launchpad.net/rbpitch )

As for the meaning of the percentages for tempo/speed: these are just percentages converted from the underlying library's native double values (-10.0 / 10.0). So 0.0% means don't touch the value; 100% means multiply it by 2x; 200% means multiply it by 3x; etc. I admit this doesn't make a whole lot of sense and I should probably offset it so that 100% means don't touch the value. I can do that for the next version.

and then the plugins were broken causing my package manager to be broken unless I also downgraded the rhythmbox-plugins, but the plugins depend on libmtp8 version 1.0.6 and all the archives no longer have the libmtp-common_1.0.6 that it requires, so the package manager would stay broken, and sadly I'm unable to allow that for this particular installation, so I'm back at square one.

rbpitch itself doesn't depend on libmtp8; you must be talking about the separate "rhythmbox-plugins" package, which is unrelated to rbpitch.

Generally I can't recommend downgrading packages within a system. Because I work on rbpitch in my spare time, and because Rhythmbox has been changing a lot lately due to being ported from the Gnome2 to the Gnome3 platform (and those changes broke my plugin code), I've been having to spend a lot of time reworking rbpitch to be compatible with newer versions of Rhythmbox.

And now I'm thinking perhaps I am not in the right place! Is this discussion about the rate-changer that appears as a pitchfork on the row of control icons that then pops up that dialog with the tenths-of-percent controls?

Yes. It's called rbpitch, hence the title of this thread.

Highly awkward for my purposes, I need to be able to shift a tune by integer tones with as little motion as possible (because I am playing at the same time)

What do you mean "integer tones"? You can easily pitch-shift by arbitrary semitone values using rbpitch. Just click in the box and type "1" or "2" (delete what's there) and it'll adjust accordingly. Does this not work for you?

and ditto with the tempo, I need to just click something simple and increase the metronome speed by an incremental but significant amount, eg when practicing passages and wanting to start slow but then play "a little" faster on each success, and 1/1000th of the current tempo is outside of the range of detection for my ears I'm afraid

...Which is why the configuration panel for rbpitch allows you to fine-tune the min/max range of the adjustment. Some people want the full range, and some people want a small, restricted range. I can't satisfy both extremes simultaneously, so I made it an option. Please configure it to your discerning needs, and let me know if it helps.

so I guess I'm back at square one and will have to start investigating that other slider-based rate controller's code and learning about the rhythmbox api to somehow get to where I'm wanting to be

The only "other" plugin I'm aware of is scaletempo. The problem with scaletempo is that it hasn't been upgraded to work with the Gnome3 version of Rhythmbox. Is it this one you used previously?

Anyway, scaletempo is much less featureful than rbpitch, and I don't think it's been maintained since about 2008 (at least based on what's on the page). I'm here now, and actively working on rbpitch to get it working with the Gnome3 version of Rhythmbox, which will work with Ubuntu 11.10 and Ubuntu 12.04 once released. And of course, the previous releases of rbpitch for prior versions of Ubuntu will not go away, although I will cease maintaining them due to the age of those releases.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

[allquixotic]

To those of you are worried about the timeline for this next release, please take a look at the milestones and other stuff on the launchpad site for rbpitch. Also a little teaser of what's to come; if you can read source code, take a look at this: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~smcnam/...e3/revision/14

[teledyn]

Thanks so much for the thoughtful and detailed reply -- I have been missing this code so badly in my music studio, I do hope from your hints here that I can get it going, and I'm anxiously awaiting the up-to-date release; I know first hand how frustrating it can be when you labour over something in your spare time and get it going and then the coders of the lower-level code change something that breaks all your work and throws you into a panic-mode of development, and I think it is pretty low of the Gnome3 people not to provide a backwards-compatible interface or at least a transitional glue-code library, but sadly I think we see this gonzo-coding style far too prevalent in modern computing. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned (I first learned on Fortran IV and LISP)

So while I am frustrated and feeling abandoned, it's not directed to you so much as it is at Gnome3, and, well, we've all been in this situation before and it all works out eventually. I only wish my Gnome chops were up to speed enough to help you bring that about faster.

[allquixotic]

Thanks so much for the thoughtful and detailed reply -- I have been missing this code so badly in my music studio, I do hope from your hints here that I can get it going, and I'm anxiously awaiting the up-to-date release; I know first hand how frustrating it can be when you labour over something in your spare time and get it going and then the coders of the lower-level code change something that breaks all your work and throws you into a panic-mode of development, and I think it is pretty low of the Gnome3 people not to provide a backwards-compatible interface or at least a transitional glue-code library, but sadly I think we see this gonzo-coding style far too prevalent in modern computing. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned (I first learned on Fortran IV and LISP)

So while I am frustrated and feeling abandoned, it's not directed to you so much as it is at Gnome3, and, well, we've all been in this situation before and it all works out eventually. I only wish my Gnome chops were up to speed enough to help you bring that about faster.

Well I generally get motivated when I know others are anticipating my work product, so I'll try extra hard to get this worked out before the weekend's over

Been wasting a few hours trying to get an Ubuntu VM going with 3d support on Fedora 16... fool's errand; too many details to work out... now I'm settling with 2D and just trying to get rbpitch compiled hehe.

Haven't decided yet if I want to build a debian package on Ubuntu first, or if I should just bite the bullet and implement GSettings and then work on the debian package...

Eh, I guess I'll work on GSettings. But first, some dinner