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Forensic Examination of the Slowed Down Justin Bieber “Love U”


This will be my last post on the subject. It’s been fun to get a lot more site visits, but just for perspective, my friend Jerry’s Retarded Ravers Of America site was getting ten times the traffic ten years ago that my blog does today. It also feels a little weird riding Justin Bieber’s coat tails to this new level of web notoriety. As it happens the PaulStretch OS X posts consistently generate more traffic than anything else on this blog, which puts me in my place–doing a port of PaulStretch may be my most enduring Internet legacy, even if I wish I was known more for my own music.

Anyway, as regards the “Love U” stretched version, there was some speculation that it was a hoax, and then some speculation that the ‘group’ claiming they’d made the track themselves was itself a hoax. I decided to investigate, and came to these conclusions:

  • It was, in fact, produced using PaulStretch, perhaps even using my OS X port
  • The actual slowdown was actually on the order of 10x
  • It was pitched down a little more than a half-step.
  • Either it was MP3 encoded at a low quality/bitrate, or slightly lowpass filtered. My version (which is encoded from the raw output of PaulStretch) sounds noticeably brighter.

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3]
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/JB-USmile-Stretched.mp3

The original:
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

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Paulstretch for OS X — the Justin Bieber Edition

GO HERE FOR LATEST AND GREATEST

Well, someone may — or may not — have posted a slowed down version of Justin Bieber’s “Love U” and as a result my janky little blog is experiencing a 25-fold bump in traffic. I’m hoping the fine folks at Midphase don’t mind — I have an ‘unlimited bandwidth’ account, but I think it’s only unlimited until you start saturating their net connection.

Anyhow, if you’re here looking for Paulstretch, get it from this post — the new build can actually load MP3 files due to a new version of one of the libraries it needs. If you’re still on a Power Mac, go here.

The build scripts are Here, but don’t even bother unless you are an actual programmer, because I can’t troubleshoot your problems for you. What I wrote worked perfectly from a standing start back when I wrote it, but library versions change, source code archive links get moved, and you may not have all the build tools on your machine.

Let the stretching begin!
EDIT: I listened again to the example I put up back when I first started playing with Paulstretch and I still really dig it. It’s the Bitone Troupe’s cover of Björk’s “All Is Full Of Love.”

[audio:http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove-Stretched.mp3]
http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/BitoneTroupe-AllIsFullOfLove-Stretched.mp3

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PaulStretch — New Build For the New Decade…

EDIT: If you want the latest & greatest go here

Judging from the WP Stats, my posts about the PaulStretch extreme audio timestretching application are by far the most popular blog posts I’ve ever made, indeed I think people will be downloading it after I’m dead if this domain outlives me.

Well, today I took the time to ‘refresh’ the PaulStretch stuff. This means I updated all the libraries it depends on to current versions and rebuilt the program. I don’t mess with the program source code itself — nothing has changed in appearance or tools.

The one thing that has changed — and it’s a biggie! — is that it now can load MP3 files for processing without crashing. Huzzah!

If you want to know what I’m talking about, check the original post here. I’ve updated the build scripts but the instructions here still apply.

The application: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-x386.dmg

The build scripts: http://www.cornwarning.com/xfer/PaulStretch-OSX-Build.tar.gz EDIT: I had the link wrong. Sorry — one letter off.

The Disclaimer

I did this for my own amusement. I don’t want to be the guy providing tech support on Paul Stretch. So try and take care of yourselves. As far as I know no one has bothered to try and use my scripts to compile it for themselves, which I find annoying because A) people are so damn lazy and B) there should be hundreds of people around the world capable of building this program and troubleshooting any issues that come up. That’s why there’s no PPC or Snow Leopard build avaiable — not one damn person stepped up.

And as to the functioning of the program itself, or any new versions, that zynaddsubfx dude who wrote it went AWOL shortly after releasing the program. He’s never responded to any of my e-mails.