Slowing down mp3's

jonahall

jonahall

jonahall

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Joined
18 Oct 2002
Posts
320
Location
Near Bedford
Hi all

My other half does Tai Chi, and has been given an mp3 of the music to practice to in between her classes.

She would like me to slow it down (but without changing the pitch) so she can practice in a leisurely way!

Can anyone point me to a bit of software that can do this? Since this is the one and only time I will want to do this, some freeware would be best :)

Cheers - Jon
 
Oh it's possible - I have been Googling.

There's a program called Guitar and Drum Trainer that allows you to do it, but not to save off the altered file - which of course is what I want to do!
 
jonahall said:
Oh it's possible - I have been Googling.

There's a program called Guitar and Drum Trainer that allows you to do it, but not to save off the altered file - which of course is what I want to do!
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then just botch it - line out to line in and and record it lol
 
you can do it with foobar and the soundtouch plugin, but you cant save the output...i dont think. let me investigate.

the dave - yep. thats how it works:)
 
I have programs that will do this, but mine sound very bad. If you use it any more than a tiny bit it goes all echoey and wierd :( . I know some are good though :)
 
Cool Edit Pro has given the best results when I've tried to do this. But even then, anything more than about 30% starts to sound bad.

I believe Ableton does this very well, I have a copy which I've yet to install, lying around somewhere.

How many tracks is it??
 
Thx for all the replies.

Just one track. I found something called Amazing Slow Downer which does what I wanted. The demo only does certain tracks on a CD, so I put the file onto a CD and did it from there!

Cheers all - Jon
 
I've been using a program for years called Soundforge and it does it with ease.
You just put the time in that you want it to be but it can have strange effects -

First bit is original at 5 secs long
Second bit is 7.5 secs long
Third bit is 10 secs long

Example
 
number one, you will lose sound quality, number two! it wont be exactly the same pitch. number three we never time stretch audio silly move.
 
Neon said:
number one, you will lose sound quality, number two! it wont be exactly the same pitch. number three we never time stretch audio silly move.
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It will be at the same pitch.
I do this trick so my lead guitarist can learn guitar solos easier.
 
dmpoole said:
I've been using a program for years called Soundforge and it does it with ease.
You just put the time in that you want it to be but it can have strange effects -

First bit is original at 5 secs long
Second bit is 7.5 secs long
Third bit is 10 secs long

Example
Click to expand...

Interesting, your one sounds very much like mine. Mabye they all do that echoey thing. I think the problem is with mostly drums or other fast attack sounds. I did note the other day though it did a good job speeding things up :)
 
Audacity has the following menu functions:

Change Speed : Alters pitch and speed together as normal
Change pitch: Alters pitch / key without altering speed
Change Tempo : Alters speed without altering pitch.

I use the third one all the time. A lot of my Elvis backing tracks were a bit too slow. A 5% increase in tempo did the trick.
 
Neon said:
number one, you will lose sound quality, number two! it wont be exactly the same pitch. number three we never time stretch audio silly move.
Click to expand...
it's not really about quality and yes it remains the same pitch. i guess you just actually have to try it and you'll see:)

Mabye they all do that echoey thing. I think the problem is with mostly drums or other fast attack sounds. I did note the other day though it did a good job speeding things up
Click to expand...

its because of how it actually works. If you just slow a song down, it'll naturally stretch the audio so that everything remains constant but the result is it plays at a lower pitch. To slow audio down but retain the pitch, you have to play each sample at the same speed as you would normally. That means to slow it down, you actually have to make the song longer by repeating samples - making the song appear to play slower - which is where the echoing comes from. imagine one sample of audio containing the 'Tssss' sound of a hi-hat. no imaging slowing it down by say, 75%, by added identical samples directly after it.....'TsssTsssTsss'. Its easy to see where the echo comes from:)

speeding up does the exact opposite - it removes frames. thats why if you make audio much faster, it sounds like your skipping forward on a cd player almost, rather than just speeding the audio up:)

I think that's easy to understand lol.
 
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I gathered that was how they worked, but thought they might have some more advanced, more effective ones by now. Like with the hi-hat example, rather than repeat the full part over to extend it, just repeating the middle part of the sound would be far less obvious. ie, Tsss becomes Tssssss, as opposed to TsssTsss, don't repeat the attack. The program would need to detect attacks and such to do it, but it might well be possible as a process effect, not likely in realtime.
 
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