I call the Hold mode one of the magical features of Chronotron. It makes the sound appear to be frozen in time, while allowing you to continue playback – either forward or backward – so slowly that you can distinguish every single note even in the fastest music passages. You can jump to the demo video below if you want to see it in action right away.

To access the Hold mode, click the button. Once in Hold mode, the Audio Scroller takes control of playback and the real fun starts.

The Audio Scroller

The Audio Scroller, or scroller for short, is depicted below. The center of the scroller represents the current playback position, which in this example is close to 02:14.

You can swipe left or right to play forward or backward respectively, as slowly as you want. This works great with a touchscreen, but if you don’t have one you can still use the mouse or the arrow keys. When using the keyboard, first click on the scroller so it gets the keyboard focus.

The red zone indicates that playback won’t be smooth if you happen to go that far back in time. This zone will appear closer to the playback position right after seeking to a new location within the media clip or after having played backward for a while. You can affect the amount of audio and video to be buffered before hitting the red zone via the setting “Maximum reverse playback length” in the Options pane.

In addition to supporting touch, mouse and keyboard input, the Hold mode can be operated with the Surface Dial.

The Surface Dial

According to Microsoft marketing, the Surface Dial is “a completely new way to interact with technology”, but you can just think of it as glorified jog wheel. It looks like this:

Pushing and holding the Dial brings up a radial menu showing the different things the Dial can control, and the Hold mode in Chronotron is one of them. There are other functions that can be controlled with the Dial, but let’s leave those for a separate blog post.

When controlling Hold, clicking the Dial allows to enter or exit Hold mode. Rotating the Dial is equivalent to swiping on the scroller left or right. That’s all there’s to it.

The Demo Video

This demo video shows how the Hold mode can be used together with the polyphonic note detection feature to make music transcription a breeze. Isn’t that magical?

Start using the Hold mode today and post your stories in the Comments section!

Chronotron is rich in features that allow you to tweak your media clips in all sorts of ways. This post describes some of the app’s lesser-known tricks to keep in your repertoire.

Transpose Without the Chipmunk Effect

When audio material is pitch-scaled by a significant amount, the vocals start to sound unnatural, resulting in something known as the Chipmunk effect.

With Chronotron you can make transposed vocals sound more natural by enabling the Format Preservation option, as shown in the following demo video.

This works best with pure vocal tracks, but as you can see it works surprisingly well with mixed material, too.

The Anti-Karaoke Effect, or Center Channel Isolation

A simple yet effective method for removing vocals from a stereo recording consists on subtracting both channels, taking advantage of the fact that the singer is often mixed right at the center of the stereo image. A lot of apps can do that and Chronotron is no exception.

However, a lesser-known – and neater – trick is to do the opposite, that is, isolating vocals by extracting the audio content that is common to both channels. The video below shows how to use the Solo Channel function to either remove or isolate the center channel when playing stereo material.

The result naturally depends on the way the recording was mixed.

Play Multichannel Audio Files

Remember the DVD-A vs. SACD format war? There used to be a time when multichannel audio was regarded as the future of music, but history took a different turn (unfortunately, some will say).

If you happen to have multichannel WAV or FLAC files, you should be aware that Chronotron can play them! As you can see in the demo video below, channel isolation becomes child’s play.

Fix Audio/Video Synchronization Issues

A video clip having a slightly out-of-sync audio track may not be particularly annoying when watched at normal speed. However, slowing down the clip also causes the audio/video synchronization gap to increase proportionally to the tempo scaling factor. This can become a big deal, for example, when you’re trying to figure out the exact fingering of a fast guitar solo.

As you can see in the below demo, the Video Delay control allows you to perfectly synchronize audio and video so it looks right at any speed.

Use Calculations for Tempo and Key

In the Tempo and Key pane there are input boxes that allow you to enter the desired tempo and key values directly, like 0.5 or 50%.

A good thing to know is that you can also enter formulas there, so for example, if you want to change tempo from 140 BPM to 80 BPM, you could just enter 80/140.

More complicated formulas work too, like 0.5 + 0.2 + 1%, which would result in 71%.

In addition to the above, the Key input box also allows inputting a number of cents by prepending the amount by a sign. A cent is defined as a 100^th of a semitone.

As an example, typing +120 results in pitch being scaled by 120 cents up (i.e. 1 semitone and 20 cents up).

Oops? Don’t Panic! Click the Revert Button

Suppose you have been working on a long playlist, setting parameters for each clip and so on, and by accident you open a new media clip that replaces the whole playlist. Oops.

Don’t panic! Clicking the Revert button – the one close to the Undo/Redo buttons – or pressing Ctrl + Shift + Z will get your original playlist back. See how it works in the following demo video.

This function may also come in handy when performing A/B comparisons.

What do You Think?

If there are other Chronotron functions that you would like to see covered in detail, or if you have your own tips and tricks to share, please don’t hesitate to let me know by posting a comment.