Stevie Ray Vaughan’s ‘Scuttle Buttlin’ is a song I’ve been trying to master for years. It’s about a million notes squeezed into one minute twenty seven seconds of blues mastery. That one song contains half a dozen of the coolest riff’s ever created in all of history, and I would dearly love to be able to play it true, but she is a tough mistress. Not only is there a constant cascade of notes to deal with, all packed as tight as sardines in a can, there’s also the fact that Stevie Ray almost always played with his guitar tuned one semi-tone below concert tuning, to allow him to use heavy gauge strings with lower tension and keep the skin on his fingers intact for an extra half-hour per show.

But for a track like Scuttle Buttlin, where Stevie plays half of the song using only open strings and fret 2 on D & B, 3 on G and 3 on the high E, transposing down to Eb without retuning the guitar means that all of his note progressions ‘collide’ with the bottom of the fretboard, something which previously would have me quickly retune my guitar many times over within a jam session, to often arbitrary pitches as I moved between different favourite tracks and solos.

Years ago I used to get around this by running either a tape-deck or CD-player through a couple of guitar pedals.. a pitch-shifter initially, later on switching to a ZOOM dsp multi-effects unit, but over the years some of that equipment broke down, got lost or otherwise destroyed, and besides which it was all a bit of a hassle to set up at intermittent intervals, and didn’t do a fanatastically good job anyhow.

Enter 2006, Tiger and AudioCodex. Now when I want to tackle Scuttle Buttlin ‘one more time’, instead of a 100W amp, tape player and two or three guitar effects units to set up, I pick up my acoustic, open my iBook and launch the ‘Codex. I can instantly load any track from my ITunes library, or from any other audio file I might have on my Mac, create a loop, and use the ‘in’ and ‘out’ looping region sliders to make playback repeat roughly over the piece of the song I’m interested in.

I can adjust the pitch of the track using the Pitch dial until the track is in tune with my guitar, using the stepper controls to fine-tune down to the cent (1/100th of a semitone, 1/1200th of an octave) before I start slowing things down with the ‘Time’ dial.

Once things are going slower I might fine-tune my loop in and out points using the steppers next to the readout fields ( I can also enter values directly in the fields themselves via keyboard if I feel like it). By right /ctrl-clicking on the steppers, different incremental values (from 1 second down to 1 milliscond per step) can be set via a popup menu, allowing me to quickly zone-in on precise in and out points, without being limited by my skills with mouse manipulation of limited resolution sliders or my ability to make precise selections in a visual waveform representation which again is often of limited practical resolution.

I’ll then often snap open the Equalizer and adjust the tone sliders to eliminate most of the frequencies Im not interested in... the guitar solo’s I’m working on are mostly in the 750 - 2500 kHz range, so I saved a special ‘Solo Practise’ preset (using the Equalizer presets popup menu) which I can load instantly when I want to practice.

Sometimes, eq alone is not enough; in these cases I open up the FxMachine window, and try adding alternately a bandpass unit, or a Parametric Eq, or even the cool AUDynamicsProcessor, which combines a compressor, expander and noise-gate network within a single unit, and which has some useful factory presets that AudioCodex fortunately provides access to via the Presets menu.

the ‘Codex automatically detects and displays any AU presets stored in the default location, (~user/Library/Audio/Presets), allowing me to use presets Ive created in other v2 AUPreset-compliant audio apps directly within the ‘Codex. I can also create new presets for any effect unit and they will likewise be available for use within those same other applications.

Plus, even if I don’t bother to save a preset explicitly by name, the ‘Codex keeps a private database of ‘last-used’ settings for each unit it loads, and automagically restores the unit to those settings next time you load the unit.

Automation of many such routine tasks is the real beauty of the ‘Codex; it automatically saves all of these settings for as many virtual loops as I care to define, and restores the rate, pitch, loop, FxMachine unit and Eq settings for each loop as it is played, without me ever having to fill-in a ‘Save’ or ‘Open’ dialog.

AudioCodex loops are 100% ‘virtual’ ; only the settings required to replay a file back in real-time under the same dsp conditions are stored, so I can go ahead and define as many looping regions for any given file as I like, without needing anything other than the original complete audio file available to play them back, and without adding a huge swag of uncompressed audio files to my hard-drive... 20gb in these old iBooks doesn’t go very far these days...

AudioCodex never messes with your original audio file collection, all effects are applied in RAM, in real-time as the (usually) compressed audio-file plays back. the ‘Codex is able to work with compressed formats natively, it doesn’t require that audio be in AIFF or WAV format specifically (although the ‘Codex will happily play and export both of those industry standard source-formats, as well as most other standard digital video and audio formats for that matter.)

Speaking of import and export formats, that’s another thing I missed in iTunes; it deals with a fairly limited range of file formats, both in terms of it’s ability or willingness to play a particular file, and also in terms of the relatively small variety of export formats ( and exposure of options relevant to those formats) available. AudioCodex on the other hand does it’s darndest to open whatever video or audio file format you throw at it, and even though still in early beta, already exports audio in a lot of different formats.

At the front-end, when asked to play a file, the ‘Codex first sees if it can play the file via Quicktime, as Quicktime both encapsulates and extends the Core-Audio-native formats. Next it sees if the file can be played via Core-Audio directly, and proceeds to do so in the case of the affirmative, however if the file can’t be played by Core-Audio then Quicktime will be used instead.

File-type filtering for Quicktime has intentionally been left quite open, and dynamically includes new file-types that Quicktime has been extended to support via the addition of third-party codecs and components. For example, installing the free ‘Flip4Mac’ component allows the ‘Codex to playback most WMV files with extreme competence, even allowing fixed-audio-pitch rate-shifting on the 600ṂĦz G3 iBook. :) Similarly, adding the Xiph Components opens up Ogg, Matroska, Flac and other av formats, while installing the DivX component will allow the ‘Codex to play back AVI encoded with DivX.

At the exporting end of matters, AudioCodex exports 9 different audio file formats, and allows for user-selection of most of the various data formatting options that Core-Audio supports, resulting in over 70 export file and data format combinations.

Things the ‘Codex doesn’t do as well as iTunes re file-handling:

1. the ‘Codex doesn’t export / convert to MP3
2. While the ‘Codex can ‘rip’ or convert audio cd files to mp4, aac, m4a or adts files, it has no ability to access online CD databases like FreeDB or CDDB, and cannot ‘fill-in’ id3 tags with any information it might uncover about a file in any case.
3. the ‘Codex can’t export unprotected AIFF files from protected m4p files (purchased through the iTunes store), this is iTunes /Apple-only stuff, which takes place in the background when you create an Audio-CD from a playlist containing ‘protected’ files.
4. 4: Probably other things too

Things the ‘Codex does as well as or better than iTunes re file-handling:

1. Exports to 9 audio formats with around 70 possible export combinations.

AudioCodex recently gained another iTunes-like ability, which is that it can now burn a playlist to CD or DVD with the click of a button or three. The disc-burning facility is quite unsophistied at this point yet still quite workable.

Key differences to the iTunes ‘Way of Dragon’:

1. the ‘Codex only burns data discs, with no automatic format conversion options, files are burnt to CD in exactly the same format as they are on-disk.
2. No AudioCD creation abilities at this time either.
3. All files for each burn will be in a single session’, stored in a ‘flat’ arrangement at the root of the session directory.

On the positive side:

1. the ‘Codex allows you to burn multi-session CD’s.
2. Burning options are set at burn-time, not through prefs.
3. All files are burnt directly from their actual storage locations; no temporary disc-image needs to be created, and the files do not all have to reside in the same ‘real’ file-system directory to be included in the disc.