{"id":8992,"date":"2020-09-10T19:37:08","date_gmt":"2020-09-10T17:37:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathis-nitschke.com\/?p=8992"},"modified":"2024-02-18T21:05:36","modified_gmt":"2024-02-18T20:05:36","slug":"the-story-of-capstan-and-how-it-relates-to-the-new-wowflutter-repair-plugin-in-izotope-rx8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathis-nitschke.com\/en\/the-story-of-capstan-and-how-it-relates-to-the-new-wowflutter-repair-plugin-in-izotope-rx8\/","title":{"rendered":"The story of Capstan and how it relates to the new Wow&Flutter repair plugin in Izotope RX8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Almost 10 years ago, in the first days of December 2010, I was sitting at my then temporary workplace in the basement of MSM Studios Munich<\/a>, a mastering studio for which I had been doing plenty of audio restauration work on the great Sonic Solutions NoNoise system in the late 90’s. One audio problem which was still impossible to repair digitally was correcting wow&flutter, an often frustrating situation. The only thing you could do (and still is the best method today), is to make a proper transfer and try to track the wow&flutter through the bias tone on the tape. Plangent Processes<\/a> have invented and perfected that method. Unfortunately it doesn’t deal with multiple generation pitch problems (the problem needs to be caused on the tape transfered) and since there is no bias tone on records and cylinders, it can’t do anything useful there, either. The biggest problem, however, is to this day that often transfers are simply done badly and the original medium subsequently is trashed afterwards. So a purely digital method was dearly missed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
“What causes wow?” – Ellis Burman of Audio Mechanics giving a presentation about wow&flutter removal techniques at the AMIA The Reel Thing 2012.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

MSM studio owner Stefan Bock and I started talking during a coffee break over their actual restauration project which was impossible to release because of its wow problems. I got curious and started doing experiments with Melodyne which were only half succesful.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>As I knew Celemony<\/a> founder Peter Neub\u00e4cker personally from earlier conversations about experimental sound design, I approached him. I had luck, the problem interested him. Only a stunning 2 days later he came up with the working solution, of course based on his decades of research and development on the Melodyne algorithm which had just led to its ground-breaking polyphonic version, the patented DNA (Direct Note Access). Through DNA he analyzed the polyphonic music material to as many monophonic elements as possible and compared them. If the algorithm finds pitch movement common to all elements, it must be the pitch error and needs correction. If there is pitch movement in only one of the elements, it is, for example, the vibrato a solo instrument and needs to be left untouched.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The birth of Capstan<\/h4>\n
\"\"<\/a>
Capstan presentation during the 2011 AES convention in London.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the core algorithm was such a straightforward step coming from the Melodyne development, it just needed a few more months of improvement and User Interface design, in which I was heavily involved. Capstan<\/a> 1.0 was proudly released and presented during the AES convention in May 2011 in London.<\/p>\n

Since then, this is our product video:<\/p>\n