Does time or meter repair software exist?

[gm22]

Knowing how sophisticated DAW's, audio software, and plug-ins are these days, I am curious to know if there is such a thing as a repair tool for time. Let's say one was recording a guitar track without a metronome, and the time got away from the artist, is there software that will automatically correct the time by stretching or contracting parts, sort of like Autotune for time?

[mschnell]

I don't have it (yet), but Melodyne is said to be a great tool for such kind of work ("tempo mapping").

-Michael

[martifingers]

That would probably be a little difficult to automate given the subtleties of guitar playing. I could see it doing weird things to anything a bit complicated like, say, this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRHHRjep3E

But who knows? Once I never thought it would be possible to get autofocus on cameras....

[drtedtan]

Vocalign, some versions of Melodyne, possibly Propellerhead's ReCycle (though you would probably need to edit the position of some notes in the Rex file manually).

I'm not sure how any of these would sound if they were doing a significant amount of correction, though. Manually editing the Rex file generated by ReCycle might leave the least amount of artifacts.

[gm22]

Originally Posted by martifingers

That would probably be a little difficult to automate given the subtleties of guitar playing. I could see it doing weird things to anything a bit complicated like, say, this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNRHHRjep3E

But who knows? Once I never thought it would be possible to get autofocus on cameras....

Thanks for the replies. Admittedly, I was not imagining such a plug-in or program tackling really complex material, rather tweaking minor deviations from an otherwise steady beat. I don't think I have need either at this point, but I was just curious.

[Bribedant]

Such a plugin must be able to extract the tempo from the not syncing audio and align it to some reference. I can't see how that possible from for example a vocal track. Manually it's easy. I do this often in Reaper both audio to a new tempo reference or tempo to a not so tight recorded audio.

[mschnell]

If you have a recording not done with a click, I suppose first you need to define which track (if any) is supposed to show the correct timing. Then the Reaper time envelope (in the Master Track) can be adjusted to that track. This should be automatically possible by use of e.g. Melodyne.

Only after that is seems to make sense to adjust any other tracks. No idea if that can be done automatically, but Melodyne might be a candidate for research.

-Michael

[Bribedant]

Hmm, thinking about it, an individual dynamic time envelope for an audio track (not the master) preserving the track's pitch would be a cool feature. I could use such a thing.

[analogexplosions]

you guys know about stretch markers, right?

[mschnell]

Of course. I understand the OP want a fully automatic ("sophisticated") solution (in fact kind of setting the appropriate stretch markers).

Having Melodyne analyze all tracks and then do some calculations on all resulting temp maps and set stretch markers accordingly could be such a solution.

But maybe Melodye even can do a multi-track analyze in such way by itself (I don't have Melodyne, but I am interested...)

-Michael