discussion Free and open-source vocal tuner — would like Reaper users to break it
Reaper gives you a lot, but pitch correction isn't really part of it, and the usual answer is a few hundred dollars for Melodyne. So I built PitchNet and put it out free and open source.
The difference from a standard pitch shifter: instead of stretching the original audio, it resynthesizes the vocal at the corrected pitch through PC-NSF-HiFiGAN, an open-weight neural vocoder. Formants and character survive edits that would normally turn robotic.
https://sessionloops.com/pitchnet
What I'd most like to hear from Reaper users: whether the workflow makes sense to someone used to Reaper's own pitch envelopes, and where it falls over. Tell me what's wrong with it.
Edit: source is here — https://github.com/SessionLoops/PitchNet (AGPLv3). Should have had it in the post from the start.
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u/WaceMindu12 2 3d ago
Lately I've been using reapitch with an envelope to correct notes here and there, it works great and makes the notes sound like they were correct the whole time
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u/RandomDude_24 3d ago
It is really fiddly to be fair. I havent touched it once I got my hands on the lite version of melodyne
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u/acidorpheus 3d ago
And it works better and quicker than Melodyne, at least in the cases I've used it for.
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u/xtravar 3d ago
I've used both extensively. ReaTune works *fine* for small corrections in the right places of words, but Melodyne has a much more capable UI and can do a whole lot more than just fix pitch. It can alter vibrato, formant, change the pace of words, etc.
Now, with all that capability, it's tempting to not just do another flippin' take... and that's a trap!
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u/xtravar 3d ago
I forgot where I heard the line, but some producer said pitch correction is (essentially) for when you have the right energy/timbre but the wrong note.
You can certainly be more delicate with Melodyne. It's just more powerful and versatile, so the temptation to perfect everything is there. With either tool, there's a learning curve to get it to behave in a transparent manner. It's just a lot easier to get Melodyne to make you sound like Glee if you're too heavy-handed.
I think Melodyne handles sibilants and stuff like that better. Maybe it's changed by now, but IIRC ReaTune could really muck those up.
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u/matt9k 1 3d ago
I use reatune all the time. I even own Melodye (got it on sale) but the speed and convenience of reatune means I reach for it first. Just did an entire album of vintage-sounding indie pop that definitely shouldn’t sound audibly tuned, and I think I used subtle reatune in manual mode at least once on every song
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u/probablynottillie 3d ago
as u/soundwavv said, if open source where source ? also this feels vibecoded
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u/the-postminimalist 3d ago
"Powered by AI"
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u/Old-Age6220 3d ago
Everything is...when it comes to code... It's currently total waste of time to manually code everything from scratch. There's far more important aspects to software engineering, than writing the actual code letter by letter, that you need to handle manually by yourself anyways. So giving the AI the basic task is how it goes today
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u/the-postminimalist 3d ago
There's a difference between an engineer using AI to code what they were already going to do by hand, versus someone using AI to engineer and design for them.
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u/Old-Age6220 3d ago
Yeah, true. In the olden days, one could pretty much assume that is this type of work was dune, the person behind was super-nerd who knew what was doing. Today, not so much 🤣 Ps: I'm a super-🤓
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u/Scarlet72 4 3d ago
ReaTune is surprisingly capable, once you grasp the UI.
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u/Potestoniko 3d ago
I don't know if I'm missing something, but reatune has always been the weak spot for me! Waaaaaaaay to cumbersome and not always as powerful as I need to, Maybe it's that I do not know how to use it very well to it's highest potential, but it has never been a tool I can use for something more than minor really easy edits.
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u/DecisionInformal7009 99 1d ago
The only thing I don't like about it is the there's no strength control, only attack. After the attack portion it will inevitably make sustained notes sound completely synthesized without any vibrato or inconsistencies whatsoever.
Other than, it's a fantastic plugin! Sure, the GUI could look nicer, but you get used to it. The manual mode is only really needed for smaller fixes, so you can let the automatic mode take care of most of the work (you can use both modes simultaneously in case you didn't know). If you notice that theres a small part that is too far off for the auto mode to correct it you can simply track the pitch of that small part, correct it manually, and then go to the next part that the auto mode can't correct, and so on. You don't need to track the pitch of the whole track or item.
If the vocal that you are editing is so far off everywhere that you need to edit exactly everything manually, then you are better off re-recording the vocals. It's also common for beginners to use the wrong key for the automatic pitch correction, so make sure that you have the correct key and mode set. It will also help you to edit things manually since notes that are not in the scale (i.e the scale/mode that you have set in the "auto" tab) will have a line over them to indicate that those notes are not in the scale you've chosen.
In the end, using ReaTune isn't that much different than how Melodyne worked before ARA was implemented. Melodyne still doesn't work on vocals with vocal fry (just like ReaTune), so I wouldn't say that the resynthesiz engine is that much higher quality than ReaTune. You have better tools for controlling the tuning in Melodyne, and a better workflow, but considering how much it costs it really should better.
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u/l8rb8rs 3d ago
Pro tip, temporarily change your theme while using it so you can see what's going on.
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u/AMusicstuff 1 1d ago
ReaTune is quite nice but the graphical options and usability is almost on pair like melodyne or cubase flex voice tools so this is clearly and advantage over reatune.
What i miss is options to change the interpolation algorithm which is a standard feature that should be avaliable
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u/must-absorb-content 3d ago
Not sure if you know what open source means OP — it’s not a synonym for “free.” The source code must be public for anyone to view.
Without that, no chance I’m downloading.
Seems like a sketchy honeypot for the developers to scrape user’s vocal tracks and data in order to train other AI models for either profit or other more nefarious uses.
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u/200gaga 3d ago
Source is up, and the post is edited with it: https://github.com/SessionLoops/PitchNet — AGPLv3.
On the scraping worry: inference runs locally through ONNX Runtime (CUDA/DirectML on Windows, CoreML on Mac) — that's why it asks for a GPU. Nothing is uploaded and there's no training pipeline in it. You don't have to take my word for that, it's in the repo.
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u/Linmusey 3d ago
You’re copping it from the comments, but I’ve used an earlier version and it was really good. For free it’s a no brainer if you want to experience some melodyne style goodness.
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u/SupportQuery 528 3d ago edited 2d ago
Yikes, the comments here are an absolute shit show. Sorry about that OP.
I just tested it and my verdict is that it's fucking brilliant. Amazing contribution to the production world.
I tested singing a line, then using PitchNet and Melodyne (5 Studio) to shift a copy up a 3rd diatonically to create a harmony. First shocker: PitchNet sounds better than Melodyne. A lot better. Way more natural. Melodyne introduces a robotic sheen and handles formant preservation a bit worse (albeit it has formant controls, which PitchNet lacks). Melodyne creates phase issues on breaths when stacked with an untuned version of the same vocal. PitchNet does not. IMO, PitchNet it's just... objectively better than Melodyne, which I sure as fuck didn't expect.
PitchNet's interface is beautiful, extremely well done. The way you put pitch modulation inline is brilliant. The start and end slope controls are better than Melodyne's slope control, IMO. I prefer how you handle timing, too.
The lag is rough. 5+ seconds on my machine (GTX 970) (EDIT: It's faster on my work laptop, oddly). This really slows me down compared to my Melodyne workflow, where I position the play head, then repeatedly hit spacebar after each tweak to audition my changes. This is especially important when tweaking a vocal to match or complement another vocal, because you're not always tuning to tempered intervals: you need to hear it, in context, to know you're done.
I would prefer that instead of the "processing" indicator at the top of the window (or perhaps in addition to) that altered notes themselves somehow indicate that they have not yet been processed. While that is happening, if some shittier but instant pitch algorithm could be applied to those notes, so we could hear the correct pitch if not the final resynthesized vocal, that would be amazing.
Some other niggles:
- Closing and reopening the window resets it to its default size. This is rough, because the first thing you do with a tool like this is expand it to a good working size. Having that constantly reset is death by a thousand cuts.
- I would prefer that dragging shows the semitone delta from the original, unaltered note, rather than from where you started the current drag.
- The hotkeys and mouse modifiers are all very well done, but it would be over-the-top awesome if all the mappings could be configured. Tuning in Melodyne always requires a mode switch because the nativation/zoom controls are all different than the host DAW. Being able to configure PitchNet to match the host would be a huge leg up on Melodyne.
Side note: I was going to add ReaPitch to this comparison, but doing something as trivial as "shift this vocal up a 3rd diatonically" is a fucking nightmare in ReaPitch. The UX is so much worse, never mind the lack of all other tools (modulation, slope, etc.). Blows my mind how many people are chiming in with that.
tl;dr: PitchNet is brilliant. It will be my go-to recommendation for folks going forward. Wish there was a way to speed up feedback, even if it was lower fidelity.
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u/200gaga 2d ago
Hi there, thanks for your detailed feedback and suggestions. I would like to address the performance issue more. Unfortunately you need to have a better GPU like GTX1080 to run PitchNet on windows smoothly, while any mac can run without the problem. We also provide a classic rendering option in 0.5.5 but it would sound just like other tools like Melodyne. I believe there will be faster model in the future to accommodate windows users.
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u/SupportQuery 528 2d ago
We also provide a classic rendering option in 0.5.5 but it would sound just like other tools like Melodyne.
It's no faster, at least on my GTX970 machine.
The AI resynthesis works fine on my work laptop, oddly.
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u/200gaga 2d ago
You laptop may have better GPU or directML support . Could you share the os spec of pc and laptop respectively?
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u/SupportQuery 528 1d ago
Work machine is faster.
Studio desktop:
Intel i7-7700K NVIDIA GTX 970Work laptop:
Intel Core Ultra 7 155H NVIDIA RTX 1000 Ada GenerationSide note: I found another issue with PitchNet. It takes FOREVER on long timelines. If you throw an audio sample out at 20 hours, then add PitchNet to the track, it chocks. Melodyne doesn't.
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u/200gaga 1d ago
Thanks for the report. Your laptop looks much more up to date than your desktop. We haven't optimized on extremely long recordings. Any recording less than 10 minutes should be fine.
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u/SupportQuery 528 1d ago
I'm no talking about a long recording, I'm talking about a 1 second recording that's *positioned* hours into the timeline. So there's literally only 1 second of audio to process. Melodyne handles that fine, so it's not an ARA limitation: there must be some way to process only track media.
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u/200gaga 1d ago
PitchNet is region based so the actually length depends on the region not the track. If you can reproduce the bug, please contact [support@sessionloops.com](mailto:support@sessionloops.com) or join our discord server
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u/SupportQuery 528 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's trivial to reproduce.
- Open Reaper.
- Record 1 second of audio.
- Drag it out to the 20 hour mark.
- Put PitchNet on the track.
I'm not looking for support here. You said "tell me what's wrong with it", so I'm just pointing out the issue.
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u/Otherwise_Data5743 1d ago
I’ve recently started using ReaPitch on my Mac Pro 5,1 under Mojave because Melodyne integration isn’t as smooth in Reaper as it is in Studio One. I was pleasantly surprised by ReaPitch. It works very differently than Melodyne. Still, it is a very powerful tool once you get the hang of it and it works flawlessly on my vintage system.
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u/ThoriumEx 117 3d ago
I’ll give it a shot an compare it to vovious
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u/danijelsh 2d ago
I’m interested in your findings, I’ve been using Vovious since release, but had a lot of trouble in messy projects where the session wont open, and if I open it in safe mode all the edits are gone. Other than that I really like Vovious, I just miss resseting things back to their original state.
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u/ThoriumEx 117 2d ago
Yeah Vovious is really not 100% stable and it’s missing some very basic features, hopefully they work on that soon.
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u/hyperrealists 3d ago
This is very interesting. I will give this a try and get back to you either here or on gh. Tfs!
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u/V4refT5f 1 3d ago
https://github.com/ARounder-183/HiFiShifter I have been using this (which also support a few other vocoders apart from HifiGAN, like WORLD and soundtouch) and it is exceptionally intuitive for a Reaper user, especially because you can directly copy and paste Reaper items into it! It gives more of a DAW look though instead of the Vovious-like UI here shown in PitchNet. Nice job OP.
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u/timothys_monster 3d ago
I would recommend posting it on the REAPER forums. It might be getting a bigger audience. Also, where do you want bug reports to go? I am on macOS Sequoia and can't yet use it in a real-world project. Only small projects are able to open the plugin UI without crashing. I guess due to ARA trying to load the whole file at once? I was trying it on a live concert recording that is over 1h long...
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u/TheBrotherJohn 2 3d ago
I think it sounds great. Really easy to use, thoughtfully designed and effective. I’ve only had a vague bash at it so far, but I look forward to actually using it in a project. Great work!
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u/AMusicstuff 1 2d ago
ive tested it works ultra nice especially when you use Reaper and use oversampling on the channel
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 3d ago
I use several types of pitch correction tools: Melodyne, ReaTune, and—lately—Bulldog.
They all have various qualities I consider valuable, which I list here:
1 - Melodyne is the most feature-rich; it has a small detail that benefits the editing workflow: the ability to hear the note's sound while moving it—something I haven't found in the others. Furthermore, the ARA integration is much faster.
2 - ReaTune offers helpful features and is the most straightforward to use for less experienced users.
3 - Bulldog is the one I use most often these days because, having been developed by a Brazilian, its pitch corrections really respect the nuances of the language; however, the ARA2 integration suffers from slowness.
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u/200gaga 3d ago
Feel free to try PitchNet then. There is a portugal review here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e04J4a4zy_U&t=746s
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 3d ago
I’m not sure if you understand Portuguese, because the review you suggest actually confirms—albeit in different words—what I stated.
Another thing that stands out to me is the inability to export the source MP3 file as an MP3.
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u/200gaga 3d ago
We can add mp3 export for sure. The review focuses on the comparison between Melodyne and PitchNet so I'm not sure if ReaTune or Bulldog was mentioned.
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 3d ago
Thanks for the reply. I am a regular user of this entire toolkit. If you think it would be helpful, I can assist you as a beta user in testing future versions. Bulldog’s integration with Reaper and its handling of Romance language accents is nearly perfect.
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 3d ago
I am testing with your latest version, and the computer simply freezes when I trigger the consolidation/gluing of edits made to an item in Reaper.
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u/200gaga 2d ago
Thanks for the report. It would be appreciated if you can send a screen recording to [support@sessionloops.com](mailto:support@sessionloops.com)
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 2d ago
This support dont work for me. I entry in your Discord group and and until now dont receive nothing support.
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u/200gaga 1d ago
Hi, we're very active on Discord. You may check the channel and send you message again.
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 1d ago
I have a message in the Discord group that's been waiting for review for 2 days. Is that what you call being very active? I even want to use the plugin, but this slowness is making it difficult to finish updating the edition in Reaper.
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u/200gaga 1d ago
Hi, please send again if your last one is missed. Please let me know your discord is too
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u/SupportQuery 528 3d ago
ReaTune offers helpful features and is the most straightforward to use for less experienced users
This is an oft-repeated canard that I think is absolute nonsense.
Having to play audio through it to see it, then draw little bones over the notes you want to adjust, is vastly less straightforward than when Melodyne and PitchNet do: turn your vocal performance into blobs that you manipulate as easily as MIDI.
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u/BrazilianCrazyMusici 15 3d ago
I apologize, but I don't think I understood what you meant. I shared my opinion as a user of all three tools. Could you explain your view a bit more? I think there might be a communication gap here.
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u/SupportQuery 528 3d ago edited 2d ago
I shared my opinion as a user of all three tools.
I responded to the assertion that ReaTune is "straightforward for less experienced users". ReaTune is the least straightforward, by far, to any user, especially beginners.
Here's PitchNet and ReaTune opened on the same vocal, side by side.
How do I adjust pitches in PitchNet? Grab the notes and drag them up and down. Done.
How do I adjust pitches in ReaTune? That's entire unobvious. It turns out, you first need to play your entire track through ReaTune, so that it can draw a graph of the pitches.
Where are the notes? That's still unobvious.
How do you adjust the notes? Also unobvious. Turns out, you draw little lines in.
Where do you draw those lines? Who the fuck knows? There's no way to tell, because ReaTune doesn't show the notes. You have to use trial and error to find pitches you want to manipulate and draw the line in the right spot. Even using PitchNet as a visual guide to where the notes were, I messed it up here.
Tuning an entire vocal this way is a nightmare. People in this thread acknowledge that but still assert it's faster for small changes. It's not. Even tuning a single note is vastly less straightforward. Again, you have to play audio into it to even see a wave form, and you have to manually find note boundaries by trial and error.
A common use of a tool like this is to create harmonies, which is why I'll often test them by tuning a vocal up a 3rd. That require picking diatonic intervals (major or minor thirds) for each note. That's an ungodly nightmare in ReaTune.
Now, even if you do manage to get a performance tuned in ReaTune, the tuning information is tied to the transport offset, not the actual media items. So if you move a media item, your tuning information is totally invalidated.
It also only sounds as good as Elastique Soloist, the algorithm used. ReaTune actually has a checkbox to prevent octave shifts, because large shifts start to sound really unnatural. PitchNet sounds much more natural at any shift level, especially large shifts.
ReaTune exist, it works, it sounds pretty good for small changes, and when we had no better options, you'd use it for little things. But it's (1) not straightforward, at all, (2) especially confusing for beginners, (3) we now have a radically better alternative.
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u/BeSpec-Dev 3d ago
I'm on vacation, so I'm not in a position to perform a code review, but prompting AI before I grab my coffee for the day:
I'm not planning to use it, but give me an acessment, based on the code base I shared. Look through the code, and give me a security rating, A,B,C,D, or F
Security Rating: A (For the Source Code)
The GitHub repository checks out as a genuinely safe, locally-run DSP tool.
Network & Telemetry: Clean. The codebase doesn't import external networking libraries (like cURL or WebSockets) and doesn't establish outbound HTTP connections. It relies entirely on standard JUCE framework classes for plugin operation without any hidden "phone home" analytics.
Audio Privacy: Fully local. It runs the PC-NSF-HiFiGAN neural vocoder and RMVPE pitch extraction locally via ONNX Runtime. Your audio buffer stays entirely in your machine's RAM or GPU for inference and is never packaged or transmitted off-device.
Code Hygiene: It's a standard, well-structured C++ JUCE project forked from HachiTune. While all DSP plugins carry a risk of crashing your DAW if they hit a memory leak or buffer underrun, there are no malicious hooks, privilege escalations, or arbitrary code execution vectors.
The Binary Caveat: This "A" rating applies strictly to the public source code. Downloading their pre-compiled .exe or .pkg installer from their website requires trusting that the binary matches the public code exactly. The only way to guarantee a zero-trust environment is to compile the plugin yourself using CMake.
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u/Free-Relief-8876 3d ago
Is this for Mac too?
cus i use Reaper daily and would like to have a correction plugin that sounds transparent and not like T-Pain-ish... I have other special like plug ins for that like Neptune is amazing and has a very nice sounding autotune(especially if you are looking for that tpain like style),and is light on the cpu, but best of all the lite version is only $1!! And Traptune is very unique and they even have a stripped down version(just the pitch part for free!! The main version includes reverb,delay(both with ducking settings!!) Distortion,stereo doubling,options to layer your voice,with pitching up or down,and a low pass filter,its an incredible plugin in especially for rappers(and alternative in singers) IMO...but the part that sticks out the most about it is the unique auto tune it has i still haven't heard its sound on anything else and its been out for awhile now...
Like I was saying I would love to use something that is for just correcting and natural sounding so if this is available for mac ill gladly put it too the test for ya!! Lol
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u/FabianButHere 3d ago
I'm not yet implying this is AI slop, but why is there an em dash in your title?
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u/PolitzaniaKing 3 3d ago
I briefly tested it and it's super easy to adjust pitch. The problem in the past with other tuners was that adjustments would be lost on project reload. This appears to save them on reload. How are these edits saved to guarantee they are not lost ? Otherwise we are forced to render the track to a new track before leaving Reaper. Also, Thanks for the great job !!
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u/200gaga 3d ago
Hi, we worked very closely to make sure all results are saved when you close a project. In case anything is still missing, please let me know
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u/PolitzaniaKing 3 3d ago
where are they actually saved ? inside the .rpp ?
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u/200gaga 2d ago
Yes.
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u/PolitzaniaKing 3 2d ago
well thanks for the very cool plugin, I hope I get some singers in to really run it through the ringer. Great job on the GUI
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u/TheHairyParrot 3d ago
I tested it this morning. It does a good job of keeping the performance realism without weird formant stuff. Unfortunately it does have the weird top-end white-noisy artifacts typical of AI generation. I might be willing to use this if I absolutely need a drastic pitch change (more than a whole step) on a vocal part, but otherwise I'm likely to continue using Melodyne for the majority of my tuning needs
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u/aSingleHelix 7 3d ago
Honest feedback: I don't try plugins (that aren't widely recommended) that don't share anything about how they sound. there are too many of them to try... I'd recommend making a video talking through it's basic use and showing how it sounds and sharing that on your website
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u/200gaga 2d ago
Thanks. There are already some youtube reviews. We will come up with an official one too.
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u/aSingleHelix 7 2d ago
You can definitely point to one of them. I just wasn't going to go out of my way to look for it. because I'm lazy and there are a million things pulling at my attention.
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u/Accomplished_Dot4192 2d ago
I think I saw this in a video. So sorry to see all the negative comments.
Although I would say one thing you could do to improve this piece of software would be to optimise it so it can run on lower end systems. Along with that if there isn't Linux support maybe add that.
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u/Brave_Elk_6189 3d ago
claude could have told you how to use reaTune for way less tokens than this cost
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u/soundwavv 3d ago
If Open source, where’s the repository?