Phonograph archive project - Pitch testing / adjusting app / "auto tune" app?

[panjandrum]

OK, try to keep this short:

I have no music-theory experience whatsoever, but I am trying to test and correct pitch from a special project and trying to find a way to do so.

I need something that can listen to entire songs, not just vocal tracks, and tell me if they have correct pitch and if not then to correct them.

The project: I have a great fully-functional crank phonograph and a large collection of records. I actually want to record them to a lossless audio format as played from the device itself, as a way of archiving that experience. (Eventually I'll put a speaker under it and attach an iPod - so I can play songs that sound exactly as if they were being played on the phonograph itself).

In this era the records weren't necessarily "78s" - there were a variety of speeds, and the phonographs had a mechanical speed / pitch adjustment. All of this works. The failure is me - I can detect pitch problems just fine (i.e. bad live singers) when something is off-pitch from a correct source, but I really can't tell if I have a record spot-on - I can only tell if it's pretty grossly playing at the wrong speed.

Anyone have a product to suggest? Ideally I would be able to make recordings that are close to correct, and then be able to pitch-correct the entire thing after the fact.

 

[xb2003]

This is probably not the ideal place to ask this.. there has to be subreddits dedicated to this sort of thing. I myself have never tried to do exactly what you are talking about, but I might be able to point you in the right direction.

Recording the records to a digital format isn't difficult, there are a number of record decks that serve as an analog->digital converter and produce excellent quality results if the record is still in good shape. Adjusting of pitch via playback speed (or what would have been rotational speed) shouldn't be hard either. About any DAW has this ability. Something like Logic also has the ability to adjust the whole recording by pitch without changing speed, but of course this introduces digital artifacts.

I couldn't tell if you were wanting to adjust separate instruments in the recording independently.. like to adjust the vocalist pitch because they were off.. or something like that. If this is what you are trying to accomplish... well... there are a couple of products out there that claim they can do it. I'm familiar with one- Celemony's Melodyne. It's not cheap. Not sure if there is a demo that you could use or anything else.

But... I'm going to be honest, you probably aren't going to like the results the Melodyne gives you. The more you adjust on things the more artificial they sound.

I'd check and see if you couldn't find an audiophile subreddit or forum that would be able to give you more specific advice. I'm a live audio engineer, but not a huge audiophile. There are certainly people out there who have done this sort of thing and could give you better advice.