Digidesign X-Form

Digidesign's X-Form is a time stretching and pitch shifting plug-in, available on it's own or with the DV Toolkit bundle for Pro Tools. It is designed for users who want to compress or stretch out audio, giving a lot of control over what you can do. The interface is generally user friendly, containing a few different sections for audio, time, transient, and pitch. The audio has parameters to choose the type of audio (polyphonic, mono, etc), and an overall output gain knob. The time section, which is really the main part of the plug-in contains parameters for setting the time that you'd like to select, the tempo it is at, and the amount that you'd like to shift it. It will show you before you process it what your new tempo and length will be. Next, the transient section has parameters for sensitivity and window, while the pitch section has those for transpose, shift, and format. While this might seem like a decent amount, it is really pretty simple and straight forward, so I don't believe that you need the assistance of a manual for it.

SUITABILITY/PERFORMANCE

I have only had a need to use one instance of Digidesign's X-Form within a single session, as this is the type of plug-in that I use sparingly and only when something comes up where it is necessary to use it. I've been running X-Form on a Mac Book Pro that has a 2.2 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4 GB of RAM, and in Pro Tools LE 7.4 that runs with a Digi 002R. X-Form has never been taxing on this system at all, and I don't see it being a problem anytime soon because of the nature of it's use...

OVERALL OPINION

While I won't say that Digidesign X-Form is a necessary plug-in, it is definitely more than nice to have around. When I can I like to use Pro Tool's time stretching options, but not all version of Pro Tools have it, and X-Form can be a bit simpler to use and provides a little bit more control. The plug-in isn't as cheap as you'd like to see it be on it's own, but if you buy it with the DV Toolkit, which I would recommend doing, it is a pretty good deal. The DV Toolkit is a lot cheaper in terms of price per plug-in, so I'd encourage those interested in X-Form to check out this to see if it might be worth it to buy the entire bundle, as you save a lot of money and get a ton of really cool software...