Selecting different/multiple tracks

In advance: thank you for the help edgar-rft :slight_smile:

From the tutorials and examples I have seen, I have not been able to gather how to manage effects on multiple tracks.
What I am trying to re-create is this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ns9Cbk1bqGY, L from Death Note’s voice effect.

It is so tiresome and manual, computers and scripting should be able to do it automatically, but so far I have failed.
A script with a list of variables in the top should be able to do this, just like the GIMP scripts mastering several layers, I hope this is doable in Nyquist/Audacity too.

Kind Regards
-Ariensky

Two problems:

  1. In the video there are four audio tracks but Audacity internally is limited to “one track at a time”. This means that you can’t write a plugin like “do this with the first track, do another thing with the second track” and so on. If several tracks are marked with the mouse then Audacity applies the same effect to each marked track one after the other.

  2. Nyquist has no “change pitch without changing the time” effect. Nyquist has a “resample” function but this changes both, the pitch and the time, like a turntable player. Nyquist mainly is a music synthesizer, meaning that most Nyquist functions are designed to “generate” samples from scratch. Many Nyquist functions can be (ab)used to “process” pre-existing audio samples, but Nyquist was not designed for this purpose. That’s why Nyquist has no “pitch” function.

I’m sorry to tell but I have no idea how to get the L’s voice effect with Audacity in a less tedious way than shown in the video.

The only other way I know (with no money involved) is using the SoX commandline audio editor. SoX has a “delay” function to timeshift audio tracks and a “pitch” function that can change the pitch without changing the time. With a simple shell script it would be possible to write a little program that transforms a voice recording into L’s voice.

I thank you for your swift and thorough reply.
Sadly it is not doable as easily as I envisioned, but you have helped me on a track, that might lead to completion.
Further more Audacity might evolve to include this feature with time, now the issue has come up.

With the automation of tasks, macros; GIMP scripting, excel VBA, the day will come, where audio can be processed in the same way. I thought that day had come.
But I am too early I see.

I will return in the future to complete the task.
Thank you for your extensive help here in the forum edgar-rft, I hope our paths will cross again.
You seem rather competent and a willing teacher.
With people like you, the human race indeed will live well and prosper.

See you around
-Ariensky

Not strictly true if you write a plug-in to run on the current 1.3.x version of Audacity.
There are currently few plug-ins that use the feature, but the global variable SCRATCH can be used as a “track counter” so that different effects can be applied for each run of the plug-in.

Alternatively, using just one track, the track sound may be used multiple times to create “layers” in the effect, which can then be recombined with the function (sim).

Actually it does, though it is fairly low quality.
The function is (pitshift sound shift mix) Nyquist Functions
Although it is low quality, it is probably good enough for this application.

I’ll post an example plug-in shortly.

See here: L's voice simulation