While this IS a breakthrough technology, Bernie, I have a sneaky feeling that this is NOT going to be the answer we all want for editing entire mixes.

Note how all the examples are of single track sources... In other words, this may be possible to extract the pitch and timing information for just one sound, but add in the complexities of an entire mix, with pitched and non-pitched sounds all mixed together, and this starts to sound a LOT more difficult to do than these simple examples.

Note also that everything done in these examples are all fairly simple, quite percussive sounds (fast attack, fairly quick decay) with not that complex a sound spectrum. Nor are they whole mixes. I sincerely doubt that this system will be able to edit whole mixes for the foreseeable future, if ever...

There IS one system existing today that COULD allow us editing possibilities with multitrack audio, without having to go the full monty and actually use a multi-track DAW inside the arranger, though... Surround sound files. This is ONE file, all interleaved, with eight channels of audio (for 7.1 surround) or more, with other formats. If a surround sound player were incorporated into an arranger, different parts could be recorded to each of the channels, and a simple MUTE on any of them could eliminate a particular sound...

Of course, it still doesn't address the possibility of changing the sound, and pitch and timing changes would be difficult to achieve without artifacts, but it is one possibility... and if the Melodyne algorithm could be appied to each channel individually, a lot more could be achieved, also.

But don't forget, at the moment, Melodyne is an off-line process. In other words, it can't be used in realtime on an arranger, even if it COULD work on full mixes....

Strangely, just at the time when MIDI instruments are getting SO close to live audio that it is hard to distinguish the two, we in the arranger world seem to be hell-bent on moving to audio loop technology, with it's far more primitive editing possibilities. Personally, I'd MUCH rather have GIGA sized MIDI instruments and them played by MIDI instruments as the basis of our styles than an audio loop of exactly the same thing played and recorded on real instruments, with no possibility of editing.

The system we have now is amazingly flexible. All we need are better quality, multi-velocity samples, and the SA system to add nuance, and we have something entirely under our control that sounds within a hair's breadth as good as the uneditable full loop...