What Melodyne Cre8 can do

Melodyne is able to change the musical parameters of voices or instruments without any actual influence on the character of the recording. Melodyne detects the pitch and the rhythm, leaving you free to manipulate the audio material at will. Any changes you make are interpreted by the software in a musically intelligent manner and the results always sound natural. Working with Melodyne is as easy as editing notes with MIDI.

Pitch shifting and time stretching were awkward operations in the pre-Melodyne age, too problematical to even bother with unless things had gone badly wrong. In Melodyne, they’re a breeze! You can perform time stretching, pitch shifting or formant correction without even thinking; just grab the notes already recognized by the software and move them around in pitch or time and everything will sound as you would musically expect it to. Or you can move the tempo slider during playback, and you will hear the music accelerate or slow down without this in any way affecting the pitch — just like an orchestra following the conductor’s baton.

Detecting Notes from your recording

You can record single melody tracks like with any other hard disk recording software, or you can import them into your arrangement as audio files. It is not essential that the timing, pitch or musical scale of imported melodies match those of your current arrangement — it's easy for Melodyne to adapt them. If you want to edit a melody, just double-click on it and after a short pause (while the software detects the individual notes) the editor will open. The notes appear in their actual positions in terms of time and pitch, and you will also see the exact phrasing of a melody line.

Now you can simply grab a note and move it to any pitch or time position you like. The transition between notes is handled at all times in a way that makes musical sense, and automatic formant correction always makes the moved note sound the way you expect it to.

Change music while it plays

All changes can be made on the fly even while the melody is running — you will hear your changes take effect as soon as you move the notes. You can also make the moved notes snap to the nearest semitone or to a defined musical scale, or even define a new scale for the entire melody or selected notes by clicking the scale selector buttons on the left hand side of the editor:

With all changes, the phrasing inside a note, e.g. vibrato, will be kept — but you can also edit the phrasing by reducing or adding vibrato or changing the transition curve between notes. Extreme reduction would result in the unnatural ‘straight pitch’ that is a marked feature of many recent pop songs.

Of course, you could copy and paste notes or melody lines to arrange them as a harmony choir. Formants can be adapted to emulate male or female voices and even convert a trumpet into a trombone.

Timing changes on the fly

It’s just as easy to change the timing of a note as its pitch: just grab it and move it to the desired position. Depending on which tool you choose, the notes following the moved note will be shortened or moved backwards or forwards in time. If you time-stretch a note, it isn’t stretched uniformly after the crude fashion of rival software; instead, the attack remains unchanged, so consonants at the beginning of words do not lose their intelligibility and the characteristic starting transients and incidental noise that play a vital part in helping us to identify different instruments are preserved —the sound of the fingernails on a plucked string, for example. Should you wish to, of course, you could change only the starting transients and not the note itself, to change staccato to legato or vice versa.

If you stretch a whole melody, the same applies: rather than performing simple time stretching, it is for the most part only the tonal phase of notes and syllables that is stretched, whilst the starting transients retain their character. For speech, Melodyne will automatically separate the syllables to make time changes consistent. This makes synchronization very easy. The playing speed of an arrangement in Melodyne is completely arbitrary. You could take a short snippet of music and slow it to a hundredth of its original speed – without changing its original pitch, of course — and in this way discover the latent microstructure of the musical events.

Arrange your music as you always wanted to

In Melodyne's arrange window, all your melodies are displayed with all their notes. So you can see at a glance what’s on a track without even listening. Here you can move tracks around, and copy or loop melodies. You can save detected melodies for re-use in another arrangement. Remember, it’s easy to slot a new melody into an arrangement — even one with a different tempo, tonality or pitch.

MIDI playback of your melodies

Detected melodies can be played back via MIDI, including all the controller data needed for an expressive performance — volume, pitch bend etc. The tone generation could be supplied by anexternal MIDI module or else by VST instruments hosted by Melodyne. Naturally you can export your MIDI data as well.

Melodyne Uno, Cre8 and Studio? What's the difference?

Melodyne is available in three versions: uno, cre8 and Studio Edition. All offer the same tools and the same sound quality. While Melodyne cre8 is intended to be used in project and home studios, the 'Studio Edition' is designed more for pro audio applications. Melodyne Uno is a simple one-track version perfect for people looking to edit monophonic tracks of vocals or other instrument recordings.

The differences are as follows: Melodyne cre8 allows you to edit 8 tracks simultaneously and supports files up to 48 kHz and 24-bits sample resolution. Melodyne Uno has the same specs but on only one track. Melodyne Studio Edition can load and edit a virtually unlimited number of tracks and supports up to 32-bit resolution and sample rates as high as 192 kHz.

	Melodyne Uno	Melodyne Cre8	Melodyne Studio
License	single	single	single
Tracks	1	8	unlimited
Max Sample Rate	up to 48 kHz,	up to 48 kHz,	up to 192 kHz,
Max Resolution	24-bit	24-bit	24-bit & 32-bit
Stereo Files	none	playback	playback & editing
Undo/Redo	multilevel (up to 500)	multilevel (up to 500)	multilevel (up to 500)
Retail price	USD $199	USD $399	USD $599

Demo | Examples
Macintosh version requires Mac OS 9 or X
Windows version requires Windows 98, ME, 2000 or XP.