Operating Melodyne with Rewire

In this tour, you will discover how to connect Melodyne via Rewire to a compatible DAW and run the two programs in tandem.

Rewire and Melodyne

Stand-Alone’s support for the Rewire protocol provides an alternative to running Melodyne as a plug-in. This will be of particular interest to users whose DAWs either have no plug-in interface or were previously incompatible with Melodyne. Thanks to Rewire, you can now overcome such shortcomings and run Melodyne in tandem with your DAW with much the same ease as that afforded by the plug-in implementation. For this to be possible, of course, your DAW must support Rewire; but the overwhelming majority of DAWs do.

When Rewire is active, the transport functions and tempo of Melodyne and the DAW are coupled: commence playback in one and the other starts too, with both running automatically in sync. In addition, multiple audio signals can be transferred from Melodyne (the Rewire slave) to the DAW (the Rewire master) where they will then be available on separate channels of the DAW mixer.

Activating Rewire in Melodyne Stand-Alone

To use Rewire with Melodyne, you must launch your DAW first and Melodyne Stand-Alone subsequently. Melodyne will detect the presence of a Rewire master (your DAW) and thereupon activate a device called ‘Rewire’ in the preferences property sheet. If, on the other hand, you launch Melodyne when the DAW is not running, Melodyne will revert as normal to the audio device last used.

You cannot change the sampling rate or size of buffer used by Melodyne in Rewire mode, as the former is dictated by your DAW and the latter fixed.

Activating Rewire in your DAW and establishing the link

Please read the documentation of your DAW to discover how to arm its tracks for Rewire – the procedure varies from DAW to DAW. Regardless of the exact procedure, however, you must select ‘Melodyne singletrack’ as the Rewire device and one of the maximum of four stereo channels available as the input to the track.

Selecting Rewire channels in Melodyne

You can tell Melodyne is in Rewire mode from the presence in the interface of an additional Rewire frame complete with drop-down menu.

You can open multiple documents in Melodyne and route their signals to up to four different stereo channels in your DAW. The menu allows you to select the stereo channel to which the signal of each document is routed, whereby multiple documents can be assigned to the same stereo output.

Synchronization and tempo behavior

All documents loaded in Melodyne start in sync with the DAW whether you activate playback there or in Melodyne. By the same token, you can halt the playback either from Melodyne or the DAW.

Melodyne adopts the tempo of the DAW and speeds up, or slows down, the playback of the opened documents so as to ensure they match the tempo of the DAW. In Melodyne’s tempo display, you will see first the current DAW tempo followed (in brackets) by the original tempo of the current document as detected by Melodyne.

For the document in question to maintain perfect synchronicity with the DAW, Melodyne must have detected its correct tempo, as only then can it speed up, or slow down, the playback of the document to match the tempo set by the DAW. Since tempo is a matter of interpretation, however, it can happen that Melodyne’s tempo is double (or half) the tempo intended and consequently that the document will play back at twice (or half) the intended speed. To remedy this, click the ‘...’ button next to the tempo display.

When the define tempo dialog opens, select ‘Multiply tempo by... ’ and, if for example you want to halve the tempo, select the option beginning ‘1/2 =’ from the drop-down menu.

This dialog also allows you to set a particular tempo or cause Melodyne to redetect the tempo of the document by conducting a fresh analysis.