PaulStretch

Stretch a clip many times longer until it stops being a sound and starts being a place. Select a clip, run one command, pick how far on a slider, and drag the result onto the timeline.

What it does

PaulStretch: Stretch Selection posts a slider into the chat. Pick a factor, press Stretch, and the clip comes back as an audio card you can play, insert, or drag straight onto the canvas — it lands exactly like a sample dropped from the browser, with the same single ⌘Z.

Nothing is changed until you drag it. The original clip is untouched, and a card you ignore costs nothing.

The clip is stretched dry — as recorded, before its effect chain. Stretching the processed signal would smear the clip's reverb across minutes and then play that through the same reverb again.

How it sounds

The algorithm keeps each moment's frequency content and throws its timing away, replacing every phase with noise. That is why it does not sound like a slowed tape: there is no transient left to smear, so even a fifty-times stretch has no wobble or stutter in it. Percussive material turns into drifting pads; a chord becomes the room it was played in.

Both channels are driven from the same noise, which is what keeps the stereo image where it was. Per-channel noise would collapse it toward mono.

The slider's top end

The result travels back through the chat, which holds about three minutes of audio. The slider works out how far this clip can go and stops there, so the factor you can pick is always one that will actually come back — a four-bar loop reaches about 20×, a long take rather less.

If the clip is already longer than that, PaulStretch says so instead of failing halfway. Trim it, or stretch a shorter piece.

Installing

Developer mode: Settings → Developer, then Extensions: Install from Folder… and pick this directory. Build it first with cargo build -p ext-paulstretch --release.