Elastic Time
In Pro Tools 7.4, Digidesign introduced a new technology called Elastic Time that changed the way to you could work with audio in Pro Tools. Elastic Time didn't take place in a separate window; you did it right in the main edit window, in line with all of your other MIDI and audio tracks. Elastic Time made editing the timing of audio as flexible as MIDI. In a MIDI sequence, you can easily shift notes in time. With audio, this was nearly impossible. You could edit, slicing up audio regions and reorganizing them, but it was very difficult and never sounded right.
Elastic Time allowed you to take an audio region and change the timing of each individual note. For example, you can start with a drum loop and move a snare drum hit earlier or later in the same drum loop without any change in the quality of the audio.
You can quantize all of the audio events to a grid just like you do with MIDI. You can even conform Elastic Time events to a groove template, so all of your tracks can have the same rhythmic feel. Elastic Time works on monophonic audio, polyphonic audio, and rhythmic/loop-based music. It even has a setting for varispeed, which is the old style tape speedup and slowdown effects. Figure 19-2 shows an audio region with Elastic Time switched on.
Figure 19-2: Pro Tool's Elastic Time
