Melodyne is a software application which you can edit audio in a more musical way than was ever thought possible. In Melodyne, you work with notes – and not with a meaningless wave form. You don’t just see where the music gets louder or quieter but also where notes begin and end and at what pitch they lie.
Note-based audio editing
Melodyne grants you unrivaled access to all the musical details in your recordings and samples – note by note. This is made possible by a sophisticated analysis that delves deeply into your recordings and samples, and recognizes and understands the musical relationships within them: the individual notes and their characteristics, the scales, keys and chords, the timing, the tempo, the tone color. And with Melodyne you can edit all these things intuitively. With vocals, but every type of instrument as well – including polyphonic ones, such as the piano and guitar.
Notes and tools
In Melodyne, notes are represented by blobs. By manipulating these with Melodyne’s powerful tools, you can edit (among other things) the pitch, vibrato, volume, sibilants, length, timing and formants of each note. In this way, you can enhance in a musical yet straightforward manner the intonation, phrasing, dynamics and timbre of a performance. While ingenious algorithms ensure your editing’s almost always inaudible, sensitive, natural.
Why Melodyne is better
That Melodyne sounds so good and is so simple to use is based on two things. The less important is the technology.
The decisive factor is its understanding of the music.
Melodyne identifies the notes and the relationships between them. It is only as a result of this knowledge that Melodyne’s algorithms are able to “think” and operate in such a musical way. The benefits to you as a musician and producer include the famously superior sound of Melodyne and many other advantages that software lacking this understanding of musical contexts is incapable of offering.
Pro Tools and Cubase with ARA: When opening a project with Melodyne, crashes sometimes occurred.
Pro Tools with ARA: Deleting a clip from a stereo track with Melodyne ARA during playback sometimes led to a crash.
All versions under Windows: In the event of a faulty connection with the Celemony server, a crash sometimes occurred.
Studio One with ARA: When using the Fade Tool or closing a session, crashes sometimes occurred.
ARA: Opening a second tab after opening the Sound Editor sometimes resulted in either a blank user interface or a crash.
Stand-alone implementation: Under macOS, invoking the Undo function during a copy operation sometimes led to a crash.
Stand-alone implementation: Crashes sometimes occurred when activating Melodyne.
Stand-alone implementation: The command “Save and Replace Audio” sometimes resulted in a crash when the audio file being edited was at the same time being used and played back in a DAW.
Trial version of Melodyne: Interrupting activation under Windows sometimes led to a crash.
All versions: In the Japanese user interface, an incorrect localization for “Sibilant Handling” was displayed in Note Assignment Mode.
ARA: The ARA mode is now also displayed correctly in the “About Melodyne” window.
Stand-alone implementation: Activating the record-enable function via the track view in the Note Editor had no effect on the track pane, where the Record Enable button remained grayed out.