Prosoniq Time Factory Released
September 25, 1999
Steinberg Soft-und Hardware GmbH, a leading provider of
professional music and audio technologies, today announced the release of the
Prosoniq TimeFactory™ for both the MacOS and Windows platforms. Time Factory
is program dedicated to perform high quality near-lossless time and pitch scaling
on monophonic and polyphonic music signals. TimeFactory uses the latest advances
in DSP technology to achieve time scaling amounts of up to one third of the original
length, corresponding to a time stretching factor of 133% and more (or pitch scaling
of up to 5 semitones) without audible loss in quality. This is as much as slowing
down a complete music piece from 120 BPM to 90 BPM, or vice-versa.
Conventional
methods used in todays DAW software and commercial applications either suffer
from unpleasant harmonic distortion, timing inconsistencies and echoes even at
small time scaling ratios, or introduce severe smearing or reverberation that
makes the results unacceptable for professional audio purposes when applied to
complete musical pieces.
TimeFactory offers unprecedented audio quality, easily outperforming all known
applications in both quality and achieved time scaling ratio. With TimeFactory,
the user chooses the tempo of their recording at a result that is indistinguishable
from the original within a large range of scaling ratios, without endlessly tweaking
dozens of parameters. Whether time scaling individual sound files of a recording
session or the final mixdown, or processing classical or 'drum & bass' style
music, TimeFactory is a simple click-and-go application for Mac and PC with straightforward
user interface and easy to use batch processing capabilities. It accepts sound
files in AIFF, SDII (Mac only) and WAVE file formats of any word length and sample
rate, even 24bit 96kHz or split stereo files.
Prosoniq's proprietary timbre Wizard algorithm allows for natural pitch shifts,
avoiding the common 'munchkinization' syndrome heard when trying other software
to do pitch shifting. TimeFactory is based on Prosoniq's proprietary MPEX (Minimum
Perceived Loss Time Compression/Expansion) algorithm that uses an artificial neural
network for time series prediction in the scale space domain to achieve high end
time and pitch scaling.
TimeFactory requires either an Apple PowerMacintosh with at least PPC 603e
processor running @ 120MHz, 604e or a G3 or a Windows Pentium-II with 266 MHz
or better, Windows 95 with DirectX 5.0 or higher.
TimeFactory will be available from Steinberg Dealers Worldwide in Q4 1999 at
a MSRP of US $499.00.
For more information, visit the Prosoniq web
site at www.prosoniq.com. | 
