SPEED & PITCH SHIFTING
 
How come on a PC/Mac if you want to change the pitch or speed of an audio track or the whole song you have to use whatever DAW tools or plugins you have or even buy ($$$) a plugin or program that ends up leaving you with some level of digital artifacts and other anomalies destructive to the quality of your audio? (Even my MP3 player can change pitch & speed with terrible distortion making it a pain to listen to.) 
 
When you can download an APP for your mobile device... for FREE (w/adds)... that not only lets you change pitch AND speed on the fly but does it without any discernable quality loss. And it's FREE. How come?
 
Granted, the mobile app can't adjust formant but I bet it could.

Im with ya man.
Im from the age where every reel, machine I owned had a pitch knob.
Typically if I need to change the speed or pitch of something I will import the data to Sony Soundfordge.
Which (I believe) uses Izotope algorithms.
 
The day and age we live in, this should be as easy as turning a digital knob.
But for what its worth, we take a lot for granite in these times we live in. Some things are not as simple as we think.
These threads typically all end the same. I know someone is going to say "Well Reaper does it".
Sonar does it too, its just not as easy as I would like.

well . . . reaper does do it, and a lot easier than sonar, eg for changing a songs tempo just type in your tempo hit enter, done,  bobs your uncle, it's that easy, audio, midi, whatever, and zero artifacts or sound quality issues, compared to the cumbersome convoluted path you must take with sonar to do the same, i know which method i would rather. . . just sayin'

Well, so does m-Track, but it's full of other issues that make it a pain to use.
 
The reason mobile apps are "free" is they're driven by advertising, which I usually ignore, so the developers are getting paid whether you buy it or not. Imagine your DAW being free with half the screen taken up with ad space or a full screen ad popping up in the middle of a recording session.

Proper varispeed without loss of quality would be possible if the bit rate could be continuously variable (or at least variable by small increments). I await a future technological development.