handheld or other portable computing devices and 2 the mixing of such pitch corrected vocal performances with backing tracks for audible rendering on targets that include such portable computing devices and as well as desktops workstations gaming stations and even telephony targets implementations of the described techniques employ signal processing techniques and allocations of system functionality that are suitable given the generally limited capabilities of such handheld or portable computing devices and that facilitate efficient encoding and communication of the pitch corrected vocal performances or precursors or derivatives thereof via wireless and or wired bandwidth limited networks for rendering on portable computing devices or other targets in some cases the developed techniques build upon vocal performance capture with continuous real time pitch detection and correction and upon encoding transmission of such pitch corrected vocals to a content server where in some embodiments they may be mixed with backing tracks e g instrumentals vocals etc and encoded for delivery to a device at which they will be audibly rendered in some cases mixing of pitch corrected vocals with backing tracks may be performed at the rendering target itself typically first and second encodings are respective versions often of differing quality or fidelity of the same underlying audio source material although in some cases or situations different source material with equivalent timing may be employed use of first and second encodings of such a backing track e g one at the handheld or other portable computing device at which vocals are captured and one at the content server allows the respective encodings to be adapted to data transfer bandwidth constraints or.