PaulStretch: Turn Any Clip Into a Place

Some sounds are better slow. A synth loop, a vocal breath, a single snare hit — stretch them far enough and they stop being a sound and start being a place: pads, drones, beds that sit under a whole track.

PaulStretch is a Layers extension that does exactly that. Select a clip, run one command in the chat, pick how far on a slider. A 16-second loop comes back as two minutes of texture.

See a run, start to finish

This is the chat as it looks in the app, with the clock compressed. Click any stage to jump to it.

Why it doesn't wobble

Ordinary time-stretching tries to keep a sound recognisable, so at extreme factors it smears and flutters. PaulStretch takes the opposite approach: every frame keeps its spectrum, and its phases are replaced with fresh randomness. There are no transients left to smear — so even 50× turns into a smooth, even texture instead of a slow, warbling tape.

Both channels share the same random phases, so your stereo image survives the trip instead of collapsing into mono mush.

One slider, honest limits

Before you choose anything, the form works out how far this clip can go and stops the slider there — up to 11× for a 16-second loop, up to 100× for short hits. You never pick a length whose only outcome is an error.

Nothing changes until you say so

The result arrives as a card in the chat. Press play to hear it, drag it onto the canvas, or hit Insert. Don't like it? Ignore it — your project hasn't been touched. The original clip is rendered dry, before its effects, so the texture starts from the raw sound and your chain can shape it afterwards.

Things to try

• A one-bar vocal chop at 20× — an instant choir pad.
• A single snare or cymbal hit at 80× — a slow wash to open a track.
• A field recording at 8× — a bed that never loops audibly.
• Your whole chord progression at 4× — the same song, heard from far away.

Get it

PaulStretch is free. In Layers, open the Extensions window, find PaulStretch under Browse, and install it — it checks the signed catalogue and updates itself when a new version ships.