Celemony Capstan

Capstan – an end to wow and flutter

For over a hundred years, music has been recorded on mechanical mediums. And for over a hundred years, there has been a problem with this: wow and flutter. Who isn’t familiar with the wobbling and warbling, the droning and dragging? Mechanical degradation caused by defective devices or sticking tapes, by aging or defective storage. In the past, it was usually impossible to get rid of wow and flutter.

Countless recordings of renowned orchestras, big bands, and rock groups are currently slumbering deep in archives. Yet they are unusable, simply due to wow and flutter. The tapes worthless, the recordings lost to posterity. Until now.

For, in Capstan, there is now for the first time a program capable of removing wow and flutter from recorded music. Whether on tape, compact cassette, wax, shellac or vinyl.

Musical Intelligence

The Capstan algorithm is capable of recognizing not only the smallest amounts of wow and flutter but also continuous speed variations within the musical material.
Capstan’s detection of notes and their fluctuations is based on the patented DNA Direct Note Access technology made famous by Melodyne, an application used in studios all over the world for the editing of pitch and timing. Unlike Melodyne, however, Capstan employs DNA note detection exclusively to remove wow and flutter by means of varispeed. It allows detailed editing that extends even to let you draw in the curve by hand.

Precise Control

How far Capstan reaches into your music to correct wow and flutter is something you can determine precisely. The corrections are effected using high-quality varispeed, so no artifacts of the kind associated with pitch-shifting or time-stretching algorithms are introduced.

The Medium Is Irrelevant

Capstan is a purely digital solution that detects the wow and flutter in the music material itself.

Many Advantages

• Runs on Mac or PC and requires no additional hardware
• Handles all common audio formats
• For mono, stereo, multi-channel or multi-track recordings
• Detection based on our patented DNA Direct Note Access technology
• High-quality, varispeed-based correction free from pitch-shifting or time-stretching artifacts
• Works even when a tape has already been copied several times or has been digitized in low resolution

System Requirements

macOS:

• Intel Mac
• macOS 10.9.5, 10.10.5 or 10.11.3 to 10.13
• 4 GB of RAM or more
• iLok 2 or 3 dongle

Windows (64-bit):

• Windows 7, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10
• 4 GB of RAM or more
• iLok 2 or 3 dongle