Leapfrog Audio, Rephrase

[x_bruce]

I'm writing about Rephrase http://www.leapfrogaudio.com because it's one of those sleeper products that deserves a lot more discussion and consideration.

If you don't remember Reprhase is basically a sample device that reads the volume and pitch of a sample. It also is able to stretch and change length of a sample. The demo samples are a bit same sounding other than the acoustic bass, but once you get the hang of playing the synth it has a world of performance surprises.

It's strange yet scary how real the weird little things it's doing to the sample work. If you have an inkling of interest in how samples can be worked with you own it to yourself to check this gem out. I'll be reviewing it soon and as you can suspect it will be a rave review.

To me this is where we should be going in audio synthesis. The reason Rephrase works so well is because you can make it sound so much like a performance! There's a couple of brass and a vocal sample they've played with and you can make either indistinguishable from the other although there's not much point other than abstract fun.

Give this unique sampler a shot. I was absolutely blown away by it, and I realize some people may think I'm easy on synths; and I am. I appreciate the work all developers put into their work no matter if it's commercial, shareware or free. When I hear a genuine idea that works well and hasn't been done as well as the synth I'm working with, I'm very happy and hope the developer realizes what a great product he has on his hands.

Seriously, spend a few minutes and see what this can do. Try it with drums or guitars; it's amazing how well the playing characteristic comes through. Also, you can edit these characteristics with substantial accuracy.

Well worth your time checking this out. I demoed it in LIVE 4 and Sonar 3.11.

[xanda123]

yeah I've been wanting this for a while I just can't afford it at the moment.

[x_bruce]

It's amazing how well it works in a mix.

The thing that makes it so useful is the ability to set up truly realistic attack envelopes. It's elastic properties are different from anything I've heard in Reaktor any traditional sampler.

It's hard to believe no one else has an opinion on Rephraze.

Maybe if I say I have no financial interests or affiliations with Leapfrog Audio other than sending them a complimentary email.

Lots of people bitch about nothing new, nothing really different and then someone (me in this instance) mentions something and a single person responds. Then I look at a thread about impOSCar, Albino (2) vs Synth 1, Polyiblit and there's dozens of respopnses.

Anyone that thinks Synth 1 or Polyiblit holds a candle to Albino 2 or impOSCar are deluding themselves. The only thing that make Synth 1 and Polyiblit attractive in that situation is they are free. They do sound good and if someone has no desire to spend money they can convince themseles into believing whatever they want.

Albino 2 is a incredibly versitile synth that has few peers anywhere and impOSCar is one of the best emulations of a classic, near-impossible to find instrument prior to it's release. People bought into the whole Bob Moog hype with Arturia's MMV which is a very good sounding synth and well worth considering for the Moog sound, but you don't hear a peep about the developer of the original OSCar helping to design patches for impOSCar and saying wonderful things about it. That rarely gets mentioned.

But folks will go on with people taking sides about some of the better freeware to be found actually holding up to either impOSCar, which is a bit more limited but also has a vastly different character than the free synths discussed, and no contest whatsoever vs. Albino 2.

And then back to something original, and no one has any thoughts other than xanda123 and I. I wish I could have gotten a transcript of the people who were raving about it last night, but they don't participate on internet bulletin boards.

How about this; tell me a synth that's doing what Rephrase does. I can't think of any, and I'm familiar with lots of software synths. Or maybe like the SQ4 thread, this one will drop out in obscurity so people can concentrate on the more important, burning issues, like what the best 303 clone is or if there's a good sounding Virus clone...

[Yossarian]

x_bruce,

have you tried Melodyne? If so, how would you compare the two? I’m very interested in Rephrase but never seem to get round to trying the demo. I would be very interested in hearing from someone who’s used both as they seem to do similar things but in slightly different ways.

/Yoss

[mn]

I own Rephrase, and I demo'd Melodyne about a year ago. Melodyne is probably Rephrase's closest relative, at least in my head. Differences I can think of:

Melodyne is not a plugin, it's standalone. But it does have this thing called Melodyne Bridge, which I assume is sort of a Rewire type implementation. This wasn't active in the demo, so I don't know any more about it. Rephrase is a plugin. It seems part Melodyne, part Sampler. The idea is once you have imported the audio, you export MIDI notes into the host. If you then just play them, the audio is played basically unchanged. But the idea is to change them and the audio that is generated. See next item.

With Melodyne, you worked directly with a waveform view drawn in a MIDI like piano roll sort of view. To extend the length, you drag, to change the pitch, you drag. Basically like MIDI. If I remember correctly you can change the amplitude (volume) this way also. Rephrase, again, acts a bit like a sampler or slicer in that you drag MIDI into a host MIDI channel that then triggers the audio you imported. Don't change the MIDI, it plays back basically unchanged. Move a note around in MIDI, and the "sample" audio changes pitch accordingly.

Melodyne allowed you to create harmonies just by selecting in the waveform, and (I think) Ctrl-dragging up a few steps. You can obviously do the same thing in MIDI, but the ease depends on your editor/piano roll.

Melodyne had no built in effects or anything that I remember. I don't remember well enough to comment on audio quality differences.

All that said, I don't think it's necessarily fair to compare Rephrase to Melodyne becuase it costs much less. But they are pretty similar.

To me the obvious uses (and the only things I've really done with Rephrase) are:

pitch correction - it's a bit of an AutoTune, minus forced scales, etc, in that you can correct sour notes. I've fixed a few flubbed bass notes here and there and some vocals.

harmony generation: I've taken vocal parts of mine and created harmony type vocals just by adding MIDI notes

slicing/sampler - it's not really a slicer or sampler but nonetheless it does behave similar to both

misc audio - you can "extend" or sustain notes and things of that nature

[x_bruce]

Some other things I've done with Rephrase:

1. Created completely different attack partials and changed instrument qualities using pitch, volume and stretch

2. Created completely new instruments by using the provided tools in Rephrase.

That's why I'm so pleased with it, besides it's utility work it is an amazing synth if used outside it's normal boundries, or at least it's typical ones.

[DwarfNebula]

x_bruce, big up!

very good writing here! btw that albino/synth1... thread is really embarassing.

i agree with you on albino2. to me - with no experience on synths - its very easy to handle (most important), has a good sound and fits great into the mix. when trying it the first time i found it a bit boring and put it aside.
i then bought some more intersting stuff like adder, kubik and wusik. and i really adore em. but these are harder to grasp and i had problems made them fit into a song (most of the time they overtook the whole thing, which you all can hear in a few days ).
at a time i installed the albino demo again, and found quite sum sounds i had in mind/that fitted at the first try. lucky me, a kvr member who switched to mac sold it on here. "bought!"
albino is a must have. unbeatable when it comes to usability.

augur is the only free synth i tend to use a lot. shiney! (donated)

i must admit that i bought rephrase ~one month ago and just did sum testing without using it in a tune.
but i will check it out again the next weekend.


mn:

misc audio - you can "extend" or sustain notes and things of that nature

thats what i did with a bass loop. nice

[shamann]

I was interested in this one when it came out, but I couldn't get the demo to work at all. I see they've made some updates to fix some Win98 problems, so maybe I'll try it out again.

As for the Albino/ImpOSCar thread, those kinds of battles are what Internet forums are made of. And I think the point there is that so many people don't understand how to use the tools they have. If the question is do I have to buy a synth to make any kind of music well, then the answer these days is no. You do have to pay for specific qualities/features/etc, but you can stretch freeware pretty far.

You're right Bruce, those who complain about the retread of tired ideas should get on board something like RePhrase, but I have a feeling many of them are more just looking to complain.

Cheers,
Steve

[Yossarian]

What I want to do is pretty much what the Uberschall Liquid instruments (which use the Melodyne engine) are about, i.e. take snippets from pre-recorded instrumental performances, string them together and re-phrase them to create new melodies. I’m hoping this would make it possible to put together e.g. more convincing saxophone parts than using a multisampled instrument as all the note transitions, slurs, trills etc. will be taken from an actual performance.

Melodyne seems better suited for this as it’s basically an audio editor. With Rephrase I guess you would have to assemble the audio snippets in an audio editor, import the resulting file into Rephrase and then do the re-phrasing. Is that correct?

BTW, I see the Liquid instruments work as plugins, hopefully this means that a plugin version of Melodyne isn’t too far away.

/Yoss

[original flipper]

HI

As a Rephrase owner I have to say that it is a very nice program that allows you to manipulate sound files in many ways, I am not a great one for off-line working but this will see lots of service.

I have spoken to the developer about the possibility of something similar in vst format this would lead to some really interesting real time mayhem!

Getting back to Rephrase though I have used it to tweak vocals to nice effect but the possibilities as stated by others are endless and I think this will be a program that can only go from strength to strength.

Flipper.

[klagga]

Hey cool it x_bruce I guess you were just unlucky that some people where asleep or out when you wrote your nice post yesterday.

Rephrase has been on my list since before it came out as a better priced alternative to Melodyne, at least for my needs (pitch shift, for example).

As soon as I´ve got the money, I´ll buy it.

[Gymnopedies]

HMMMM....
I smell a Group Buy 'bout to poke it's little brown head out.

What Say?

[shamann]

I've had a chance to play around with the demo. It is very cool. It's very easy to get working with quickly, something that I always appreciate.

Here's a very short snippet of something I banged out with it using a sample of some noise I recorded. Very fun and easy to turn out musical sounds with it.

Few things that feel like they're missing:

• no looping facility that I can see. For me that's a bit of a show stopper, as I tend to make use of looping patterns a lot.
  
  would be nice if there was a transport marker that showed playing position. Would help with making precision edits.
  
  no stereo functions aside from pan. This might contradict its design, but I could see a lot of potential for making slight changes to each stereo channel, like asynchronous stretching. But I imagine this would require some work and extra CPU abuse.
  
  no modulation other than the tremolo function. At the very least, it would be nice if the tremolo could be mapped to more than the three parameters.

This is a very nice way of twisting your samples about, I am considering it, but the absence of loop points does kind of cool me to it.

Cheers,
Steve

[lawapa]

Group buy? When this was first announced I ask some questions. I usually don't jump to fast since it takes a while for all the bugs to be worked out. But the main concept was very good. And it sounds as if it getting better. That's a big plus it works as a plug in, can tune files, and has the ability to do more as well.

[shamann]

So are there any more users of Rephrase around here? Would like to here how anyone has gotten on with this after a while of use.