Beatcleaver 1.3 is out, now with Time Stretching

Hi guys,

I've just released a big update to BeatCleaver that adds a bunch of new features that many producers have been asking for, including the big one: Time Stretching!

Check out the new BeatCleaver site here!


(BeatCleaver runs on both Windows and Mac OS X!)

New to BeatCleaver? Here's how I described it last year here on the MPC Forums:

BeatCleaver is my new app that's designed to make slicing and sampling as quickly as possible, and I hope it might be useful for you guys. I can see a use case for MPC users where maybe you want to do some editing and sampling on your PC, and then use your MPC for sequencing and live performance. If that sounds like you, I think you might like BeatCleaver.

Some of you might remember back when we were discussing BeatCleaver last year, you guys gave me a lot of good feedback that helped me figure out what to work on next for BeatCleaver. Thanks a ton for that, and as always, I'm open to more feedback if anyone has any ideas on where to go from here!

Ok, so back to BeatCleaver 1.3. There's a bunch of new features, but the main ones that everyone's been asking for are:

• Time Stretching - uses a new cutting-edge time stretching engine, which is great at preserving musical character in harmonic material as well as transients in drum beats (so everything stays punchy!)
• Drag Export Mode - you can drag slices right out of BeatCleaver now and into a folder, your desktop, or a DAW.
• FLAC Audio Support - FLAC has kinda become the format of choice for vinyl rips, so now you can load those into BeatCleaver
• On-the-Fly Slicing - there's a new "Slice at Cursor" button that lets you chop at the current playback position while a sample is slicing, for Just Blaze-style chopping (the shortcut key is S in BeatCleaver).

For the full nitty-gritty, hit up the release announcement on my blog.

What do you guys think?

Could this be a ReCycle killer one day? How do you think it compares to the Maschine 1.8 slicer or the MPC Renny's slicer? And what do you want to see next?

Thanks!
Albert

What's the word on bit depths? Does this still default everything to 16 bit?

Edit: just read your blog.

What about sample rates?

Ok, so to recap - you can now set the bit depth of exported WAVE files to 8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit, or 32-bit.

The samplerate for saving is still 44.1 kHz stereo, but that's way easier for me to make configurable now. (Could be a great candidate for 1.3.1?)

Is that a dealbreaker?

Unfortunately yes.

I work exclusively at 24/48 in the MPC4000. If I could avoid having to dip into Sound Forge via VMware Fusion to chop up samples it would be a massive bonus.

Just bought this yesterday and im lovin it!

time stretching quality is really impressive.

couple requests:

zooming with the scroll wheel is great but it would be cool if you could click and hold the scroll wheel and drag it to scroll to the left or right.

also, it would be cool to be able trim off portions of a sample. like if you load a full song and just want a piece. I understand you can just save a slice as new sample and load that but still would be nice...

Not sure if im missing something but when you render a time stretched sample it doesn't have a dialog box asking what to name it and where to save it?

Only other thing i would looove is a jjos non destructive chop style thing where different slices could overlap each other

Coz wrote:Unfortunately yes.

I work exclusively at 24/48 in the MPC4000. If I could avoid having to dip into Sound Forge via VMware Fusion to chop up samples it would be a massive bonus.

Ok, talked me into it. I've been working on this and I can confirm the next feature update (probably 1.3.1) is going to be able to save to different samplerates (22500, 44100, 48000, 96000, and 192000 Hz):

phx_chronic wrote:Just bought this yesterday and im lovin it!

time stretching quality is really impressive.

couple requests:

zooming with the scroll wheel is great but it would be cool if you could click and hold the scroll wheel and drag it to scroll to the left or right.

also, it would be cool to be able trim off portions of a sample. like if you load a full song and just want a piece. I understand you can just save a slice as new sample and load that but still would be nice...

Not sure if im missing something but when you render a time stretched sample it doesn't have a dialog box asking what to name it and where to save it?

Only other thing i would looove is a jjos non destructive chop style thing where different slices could overlap each other

Thanks phx_chronic! Glad you're enjoying BeatCleaver.

I played around with adding scrolling left and right by holding middle click. I got that part working OK but zooming with that method is a little buggy. It's gonna take a bit more work to get that good enough to put into a release, so we'll see! (Getting the regular scrollwheel zoom and zoombar to feel right took me forever )

I agree about the trimming thing. I've gotta figure out a nice way to do that, going to put some thought into it.

Re: asking to save the timestretched file - right, that makes total sense. Before it was saving to a temporary file instead, but I've just changed it to what you suggested. That'll be in the next update.

Lastly, do you have a good youtube video I can watch to see how the JJOS non destructive chop works? I'm curious about how it does overlapping slices...

Thanks for the feedback!
Albert

app looks good!

any thoughts of midi implementation in future releases ? to clarify in case question is too broad. it'd be nice if the application was capable of doing xxx amount of slices and they can be triggered via midi while the application is rewired in host app such as live for example

keep up good work

for overlapping slices, maybe you could have a sort of list or set of slots (one for each "chop" or section/sample piece... and each of those would have it's own start/end points and who knows.. maybe eventually some other parameters some day.

That way.. say in a break, you could have the first slice be the entire original sample (say a drum break so you remember what the original sounded like in a folder of cuts)



that might be cool..


I was wondering though, the drag and drop slices... let's say you did the thing you mentioned where you are slicing a .flac file from a vinyl rip.. (as you said, many people rip vinyls into flac format) ... when you do the drag and drop... does that count as an export? IE: does the resulting file get converted into a .wav file? That would be a major time saving feature.. it would also turn your program into a converter at the same time essentially... not sure if that was mentioned on the site because I didn't go to it..


also, you mention updates and things you are planning for future releases. Does a purchase now equal getting those updates for free? Or is it a pay to upgrade model?


Last but not least.. the most important question... when you launch the app.... does it make an awesome cleaver slamming sound upon startup?

asantoni wrote:Lastly, do you have a good youtube video I can watch to see how the JJOS non destructive chop works? I'm curious about how it does overlapping slices...

Not sure if there's anything that shows it clearly, but all that happens is that the start and end points shown just reflect the currently selected region. So if region 1 of your sample had

Start:0, End:500

and region 2 overlapped the end of region 1, when you selected region 2 you'd see the start/end points change to something like

Start: 343, end 750

I can send you a few JJOS wavs if you want so you can examine the headers. Also look at this

http://webs.ono.com/rcastilla/jjchop/index.htm

http://jjchop.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/ ... ive-chops/

Lastly, do you have a good youtube video I can watch to see how the JJOS non destructive chop works? I'm curious about how it does overlapping slices...

not the best video, but, from JJ himself....

konc3pt wrote:app looks good!

any thoughts of midi implementation in future releases ? to clarify in case question is too broad. it'd be nice if the application was capable of doing xxx amount of slices and they can be triggered via midi while the application is rewired in host app such as live for example

keep up good work

or even juust as to be able preview slices using a midi controller?

@ asantoni

Huge thank you on the Justblaze style chopping!!! purchased it 2day..HUGE work flow improvement as far as chopping is concerned!!!

phx_chronic wrote:

konc3pt wrote:app looks good!

any thoughts of midi implementation in future releases ? to clarify in case question is too broad. it'd be nice if the application was capable of doing xxx amount of slices and they can be triggered via midi while the application is rewired in host app such as live for example

keep up good work

or even juust as to be able preview slices using a midi controller?

This would be nice + a possible rex support?

Could definitly be a Recycle killer! Recycle hasnt really changed much in years..

sbtst6 wrote:

phx_chronic wrote:

konc3pt wrote:app looks good!

any thoughts of midi implementation in future releases ? to clarify in case question is too broad. it'd be nice if the application was capable of doing xxx amount of slices and they can be triggered via midi while the application is rewired in host app such as live for example

keep up good work

or even juust as to be able preview slices using a midi controller?

This would be nice + a possible rex support?

Could definitly be a Recycle killer! Recycle hasnt really changed much in years..

+1