REplay PLAYer

Reviews

Going with the Grain (Dennis Miller)
Granular Synthesis - Ten granular synthesis programs to slice and dice your sounds
in: Electronic Musician, Oct 2008

(...) Karlheinz Essl has been quietly producing creative music tools for years, and REplay PLAYer is just one of his many offerings. The program’s interface is divided into four main areas: Mode, Grains, Pitch, and Scratch, with additional functions provided via pull-down menus (see Fig. 4). After loading a sample and turning on the audio engine, REplay will begin to generate grains from the source based on its default settings. You can use the Mode menu to choose how the sample will be scanned; options include scrubbing manually, Jump, which skips around in the file using distances you specify, and Loop, which has an adjustable speed setting (from 10 to 100% of the original speed).

Move to the Grain menu and you’ll find a 2D grid for adjusting granularity (grain size) on the x axis and Density on the y. Mouse movements you make update parameters quickly and feel fluid with nary a glitch, but you can select from one of several presets if you prefer to leave control to the program. Pick the Random preset, for example, and you’ll get a constantly changing grain cloud.

The Pitch area provides four ways to control grain pitch, which again include using presets and using sliders for adjusting pitch manually. There’s also a virtual keyboard for specifying a transposition up or down two octaves and the ability to set a minimum and maximum range from which the program will pick randomly.

REplay PLAYer has a feature that lets you crossfade between the original sound and the granulated version (with a random crossing amount, of course), the ability to host up to three VST plug-ins, EQ (also with a random option), and a random panning feature. All in all, a hefty tool kit for producing a wide variety of granular sounds. (...)

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Updated: 20 Sep 2008