EdGrip wrote: ↑27 May 2021
In general. The S950 had it in 1988, 33 years ago. That's nearly as long as I've been alive. Yet none of the Reason samplers do, and it's not a niche function.
Well, yes and no. Some of those old machines have time stretch, but never in real time. It's basic destructive sample processing, and a slow one at that. If that's what you want, you can process your samples in whatever sample editor you like and import to Reason.
For real-time sample stretching (or pitching up or down without altering the length, same thing really), the technology has gotten a whole lot better, but it's never going to be great. The results are very dependent on your settings being perfect for whatever source material you use (a drum loop needs very different processing from a string sound). And at best, it still produces a pretty garbled mess when you stray far from the root key.
Also, it's quite processor intensive. If you have 40-50 voices stretching in real-time, it adds up.
The only way to get a clean, ungarbled pitched version of a sample is to do what we've done for decades - play it back faster or slower. Yes, for a wide keyboard range you need to multisample (the more samples the better), but odds are that what you are reproducing would have a different tonal character at different pitches anyway.
For loop, the old Recycle format gets around this pretty cleverly. Since it chops up each hit of a loop, they can be played back at different tempos without having to do any time stretching at all. If you alter the pitch the hits in the loop, each hit just plazy faster or slower in the old fashioned way. No artifacts, easy on the processor.
