Playground Forums

Currently when doing a boot camp lesson the accompaniment / backing track plays at full tempo and at the 'slow' tempo on the slider bar but not at any tempo between the two. It would be really nice if the backing track played at any tempo, something like the functionality in Transcribe!.

The accompaniment is an audio file. Well, two of them. One for the slow speed and one for the full speed. It's so you don't have to depend on having the right synth voices to play the accompaniment. They'd have to record one for each tempo. Time and pitch shifting the audio in real time would be too much for most systems to keep up with while trying to grade your playing.

But I've thought it would be nice to have a tempo appropriate accompaniment regardless of tempo too. I just don't have a clue how they'd do it.

They don't need to have separate audio files for every tempo. You can change the tempo without the changing the pitch, you can change the pitch or key without changing the tempo, or any combination of the two in the digital realm. The program I mentioned, Transcribe!, is one of several and can even slow down video along with the audio. Most if not all DAWs have similar functionality.

I agree this should be feasible. On ancient or super lightweight systems where one is worried about real time performance a corresponding temporary audio track could be generated in the couple of seconds it takes to close the timing dialog and go back to playing. Typically in the Bootcamp the audio tracks are really short. It's a real pity Playground has been in maintenance mode for years now.

It's hard to imagine the issue is processing power. Desktops passed the threshold for real time audio processing by the mid 90s. I can imagine there are other issues but I would think even a mid-range tablet or phone would have the raw processing power.