Zynaptiq is thrilled to now offer the former Prosoniq products TIME FACTORY II Mac, ORANGE VOCODER AU, MORPH AU, and ISOLATE (previously sonicWORX Isolate). Originally founded in 1990, Prosoniq pioneered in the field of applying Artificial Neural Networks to audio processing, voice removal, structural audio morphing, polyphonic time stretching.

TimeFactory 2 has entered the ProTooler kingdom, and it’s said to be good too. Let’s find out The process About half of the TimeFactory 2 window is the “input files” section. Simply click n’ drag any amounts of files you want to preview or modify to this.

There you’ll see some specs such as length, format and play time. The action happens in the “Time/Pitch” section though. When I first looked at it I wasn’t very impressed, you can change length (in percent), pitch, formant and choose whether the change should be applied with transpose or natural pitch. Fortunately there is also an “Expert settings” window that you can click to show. It stayed open the entire time for me since this is where you’re able to change duration, length in frames as well as BPM. Algorithms There’s four algorithms to choose from: MPEX2, MPEX3, DIRAC and ClearScale. I’ll give you a short explanation or each of them.

The MPEX2 was the algorithm used in TimeFactory 1.x and is mainly included for compatibility purpose, in other words, that won’t get much time on the field. MPEX3 is the new algorithm said to be “used in many popular products on the market”, which makes me wonder why I should buy this product if I already have one that uses it. It’s also said to “allow a crystal clear 200% time stretch”.

We’ll put that to the test later. DIRAC offers a variety of settings and perhaps the widest range of parameters that can be tweaked to work well with a particular type of signal Or so the manual says. It also suggests to use it on drum loops because it doesn’t alter the timing structure, and also for doubling vocals or altering the timbre or gender or a voice. ClearScale was developed by the same people who developed DIRAC but doesn’t have any quality parameters since it auto-adapts to the signal. Should be good for beginners.

The cop show theme test The first test was made on an entire mix, a theme sounding like an old cop show or something like that. It’s 32 seconds long but should only be 30, two seconds change in duration, approximately around 6-7% of the time, shouldn’t be a problem. I used the MPEX3 algorithm and set it to poly because it’s an entire mix and not just one voice.

There are several quality settings you can choose here as well. Of course it worked well, that was until I decided to import it into Pro Tools to compare waveforms.

Look at the picture below, do you notice how it have introduced a short pause at the beginning? I was very surprised about this and I’m not sure about the reason for this but I did notice one thing that might have something to do with it. In the expert settings duration is said to be an even 00:00:32:000, that is 32 seconds blank. When I preview it play time is said to be 00:00:31:904. Could it be that it is compensating the time difference with a pause?