Prosoniq Time Factory Released

September 25, 1999 -- Steinberg Soft-und Hardware GmbH, a leading provider of professional music and audio technologies, today announced the release of the Prosoniq TimeFactory™ for both the MacOS and Windows platforms. Time Factory is program dedicated to perform high quality near-lossless time and pitch scaling on monophonic and polyphonic music signals. TimeFactory uses the latest advances in DSP technology to achieve time scaling amounts of up to one third of the original length, corresponding to a time stretching factor of 133% and more (or pitch scaling of up to 5 semitones) without audible loss in quality. This is as much as slowing down a complete music piece from 120 BPM to 90 BPM, or vice-versa.

Conventional methods used in todays DAW software and commercial applications either suffer from unpleasant harmonic distortion, timing inconsistencies and echoes even at small time scaling ratios, or introduce severe smearing or reverberation that makes the results unacceptable for professional audio purposes when applied to complete musical pieces.

TimeFactory offers unprecedented audio quality, easily outperforming all known applications in both quality and achieved time scaling ratio. With TimeFactory, the user chooses the tempo of their recording at a result that is indistinguishable from the original within a large range of scaling ratios, without endlessly tweaking dozens of parameters. Whether time scaling individual sound files of a recording session or the final mixdown, or processing classical or 'drum & bass' style music, TimeFactory is a simple click-and-go application for Mac and PC with straightforward user interface and easy to use batch processing capabilities. It accepts sound files in AIFF, SDII (Mac only) and WAVE file formats of any word length and sample rate, even 24bit 96kHz or split stereo files.

Prosoniq's proprietary timbre Wizard algorithm allows for natural pitch shifts, avoiding the common 'munchkinization' syndrome heard when trying other software to do pitch shifting. TimeFactory is based on Prosoniq's proprietary MPEX (Minimum Perceived Loss Time Compression/Expansion) algorithm that uses an artificial neural network for time series prediction in the scale space domain to achieve high end time and pitch scaling.

TimeFactory requires either an Apple PowerMacintosh with at least PPC 603e processor running @ 120MHz, 604e or a G3 or a Windows Pentium-II with 266 MHz or better, Windows 95 with DirectX 5.0 or higher.

TimeFactory will be available from Steinberg Dealers Worldwide in Q4 1999 at a MSRP of US $499.00.

For more information, visit the Prosoniq web site at www.prosoniq.com.