[Dizzi45Z]

I agree with a lot of others here.

1. Elastic Audio does create quite a few artifacts, especially on polyphonic material such as piano, electric guitar and other similar instruments. More percussive instruments such as drums and percussion work much better with it as long as they arent too out of time.

2. Except for percussion and drums where I use Rhythmic Mode, I almost always use Polyphonic mode. Xform is sometimes better but takes way too long to render at times. With the drum set, I use Rhythmic mode on close mics and polyphonic mode on room and overhead mics. This avoids weird artifacts on sustained cymbals.

3. You get way better results if you delete analysis markers where they aren't needed. I will often go into clip properties right after a clip is analyzed for EA and change the detection settings to somewhere around 96%. That option is funny because there is a huge difference in the amount of analysis markers between 100-96%. I often find I get better results allowing analysis not to detect every single transient. If it is a spot that needs more detailed correction, then I will make sure it is detected more accurately on every transient. I also always remove every single stretching marker that isn't on a transient or a note. EA especially sounds bad if elastic audio is stretching with a marker in the middle of a sustained note.

4. Although you may still hear artifacts on the instrument soloed it is often easily hidden in a mix as long as it isn't too prominent.

5. My favorite trick with EA is to duplicate the track you want to fix and then quantize the duplicated track and mute it. Then when I hear spots I want to fix, I'll check the EA enabled track and adjust that track to what I want notes to be like and then copy that section up to the original track. The clip will render with the changes. This allows you to only risk EA artifacts on sections you fix rather than risking artifacts across your whole track just to fix one segment.

6. Finally, when ultimate fidelity is needed, splitting the clip and crossfading gives best results until you really have to stretch a note. In which I will use the elastic enabled track to stretch the note and drag it up to the original track. It is actually a pretty fast workflow when you get used to it.

Hope those help.