You’ve heard Justin Bieber mangled into gorgeous ambient cascades of sound. Now, you can experience the magic of PaulStretch as a free plug-in.
It may give you that “A-ha” moment in ambient music. You know:
The developer has various warnings about using this plug-in, which for me make me want to use it even more. (Hey, no latency reporting to the DAW? Something weird in Cubase! No manual? Who cares! Let’s give it a go – first I’m going to run with scissors to grab a beer which I’ll drink at my laptop!)
Specifically:
The plugin is only suitable for radical transformation of sounds. It is not suitable at all for subtle time corrections and such. Ambient music and sound design are probably the most suitable use cases.
You had me at radical / not subtle.
Okay… yeah, this was probably meant for me:
You can use it two ways: either load an audio file, and just run PaulStretch in your DAW, or use it as a live processor on inputs. (That’s weird, given what it does – hey, there was some latency. Like… a whole lot of latency.)
It’s on Mac and Windows but code is available and Linux is “likely.”
https://xenakios.wordpress.com/paulxstretch-plugin/
If you want the original:
http://hypermammut.sourceforge.net/paulstretch/
https://github.com/paulnasca/paulstretch_cpp
That does other nifty tricks, like binaural beats and additional stretch modes. And it’s more reliable than this plug-in. The one catch: building for Windows and Linux is easy enough, and there are pre-built binaries available, but Mac users are mostly on their own. There was one project a few years back – but it seems it hasn’t been updated. (The blog post explains some of the complexity):
http://music.cornwarning.com/2011/12/07/new-paulstretch-os-x-build/
But the plug-in I think just became the easiest way to use it. Now go forth and make long sounds and chill to them.