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Touch up your sound with SoundTouch [w/code]

Screen Shot 2014-10-13 at 11.55.42 AM
So I needed to speed up / slow down an audio stream I had (speech generated with Flite TTS) and naively I thought it would suffice to simply sample it at the right intervals and interpolate.
I quickly discovered that just re-sampling won’t do because changing frequency also changes pitch proportionally. And then I discovered the world of Time Scaling in audio and it’s many algorithms and approaches to change the tempo without changing pitch.
To my surprise there were a number of ready made free libraries that do it, but the first one I tried – RubberBand – did not work out, it had too many dependencies I simply couldn’t be bothered compiling it for the Mac. But SoundTouch, well it had a Homebrew formula so it won by default.
I wrote a little simple wrapper around it, that interfaces nicely with Qt.
Let’s see what’s going on there