Celemony Launches Capstan Audio Restoration Software
The European AES Convention kicks off today in London, where Celemony Software is among the exhibitors launching new product. Celemony is presenting a new music restoration program called Capstan, which removes wow and flutter from musical recordings of all kinds – whether on tape, compact cassette, wax, shellac or vinyl.
During Capstan testing, the Celemony team unearthed its first musical treasure -- a 1954 recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on a tape plagued by chronic wow and flutter and tape freeze. Restored using Capstan, the new version will be released in '12.
Capstan runs as a stand-alone application under Windows and Mac OS, supports all common two-track formats and will begin shipping in mid June 2011.
The story behind Capstan, according to Celemony, goes something like this…
“For over 100 years, music has been recorded on mechanical storage mediums, and for over 100 years such recordings have been plagued by the same problems: wow and flutter. Who isn’t familiar with the wobbling and warbling, the droning and dragging? Mechanical degradation caused by defective devices or sticking tapes, by aging or defective storage. Furthermore, wow and flutter were for the most part irremediable.
Countless recordings of renowned orchestras, big bands and rock groups are currently slumbering deep in archives because precisely this problem has rendered them unusable. The tapes worthless, the recordings lost to posterity. Until now.
Capstan detects wow and flutter by analyzing the musical material itself, so the medium is of no relevance. In this, Capstan is superior to solutions such as bias tracking, because Capstan still works even if the tape has already been copied several times or digitized only in low resolution.
Being musically intelligent, the Capstan algorithm is capable of recognizing not only the minutest amounts of wow and flutter but also continuous speed variations within the musical material itself and makes possible detailed editing that extends even to drawing in the curve manually. It is based on the patented DNA Direct Note Access technology used in Celemony’s Melodyne polyphonic pitch and time correction software.
Whilst the precise detection of the wow and flutter represents the actual technological revolution, repairing the recording is easy: the musical material is simply played back with the velocity curve inverted. Pure varispeed – guaranteed free from artifacts.”
Capstan runs as a stand-alone application under standard 64-bit operating systems (Windows or Mac OS) and handles all commonly encountered two-track formats. For further information and a film with sample applications, visit capstan.celemony.com
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