ROB WARMOWSKI: Hey everybody. Welcome back to the show floor of NAMM 2007, Winter NAMM 2007 in sunny Anaheim, California. Why do they have the winter show in a sunny area? I don't know, but we're here with the -- with [PH] Carston from Celemony, and we're going to be talking about the Melodyne plugin. Melodyne, of course, is a pretty well known and very powerful pitch correction software product that has been a standalone product for several years, and just this -- in late 2006, Melodyne was released as a VST plugin, so let's talk a little bit about that.

CARSTON: Okay. Yeah. We can take a look at the plugin.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Yea. Why did you go to a VST platform?

CARSTON: Yeah. Well the main thing to do it as a plugin was the user request, so people don't want to leave their host application to do things and so and Melodyne is a huge application which can do 100,000 of things so we have to cut it down a little bit to make it working within a plugin, because in a plugin you have certain limitations and so. Yeah, on the other hand, we saw that people wanted to use it to have to adjust and correct and fix some things, and for that application for fixing your vocals and correct timings and these things, a plugin is a very, very good thing, so we cut it down to the plugin but it took a while to make it working, and also the host applications have developed to a certain technical level to make things like we want to have to do working, so we asked all these guys and they did it for us and so now is the time to have a plugin working on the world, so.

ROB WARMOWSKI: What was your biggest challenge in working with the software development kit that's time before it [SOUNDS LIKE] publishes?

CARSTON: Well, the biggest challenge with that one is that you have a couple of hosts, so you have -- we were supporting VST and Audio Unit and RTAS and there are many, many hosts out and you have to make it working in every host application, and we've spent a lot of time and development efforts and testing to make it working with every machine best without crushing at least these stuff.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Yeah.

CARSTON: And on the other hand, we had to develop a few things about the user interface that I can show you later to make it useable for the user to make it comfortable, so.

ROB WARMOWSKI: Very good. Well, let's take a close look at the VST from Melodyne, or the Melodyne VST rather.

CARSTON: So, if you had a Logic arrangement like this one here -- We'll go track over there. We can listen to that one.

[CARSTON PLAYS DAW PROJECT WITH VOCAL TRACK]

And you wanted to do some editing on that vocal thing here, you can instantiate the plugin on that track, and before you can work with the Melodyne capabilities on that audio file, Melodyne has to understand what's going on musically on that track, so you have to once play, play back the track to show it up to Melodyne, which works like this here.

[CARSTON PLAYS DAW PROJECT WITH VOCAL TRACK WITH MELODYNE ANALYZING THE VOCAL TRACK]

So once we did that, the plugin shows up audio stuff here within the usual notes. You see the scale you're working in and these things, and well, I'd like to show you what you can do with the Melodyne technology if you don't know about that already, so.

[CARSTON PLAYS DAW PROJECT WITH VOCAL TRACK, MANIPULATES NOTES ON VOCAL TRACK WITH MELODYNE]

So you are very free in editing, the timing and the pitch, and for the everyday work we have the catalog macros like this correct pitch macro here. We simply choose how much you would like to correct your stuff and hit OK and all you do is the quantize panel here for correcting your timing things. It's just one click and you've fixed everything up so at a very high sound quality. So that's basically what it is about, so we have this very nice sliders here which show where our audio is, so if you go over that side and don't know, "Oh, I don’t know where the things really are," scroll over to that location, you immediately get to go to what you have, and you can resize the window size of the plugin, so if you have a 30" cinema display, make your plugin 30" so you don't have to fiddle around the small things and all these things.