Stretching

Hello!
I am a beginner with Audacity, but I am going to use it much, because I am making an electronic piece. Is Paulstretch the only way to change length of a passage? Are there other stretches? Of course, there is “change tempo”, but in my opinion tempo does not exist in the things which i do. There are only different densities of events in time-axis, which never changes. Is there any stretch (and opposite of stretch) which keeps a second and minute always equally long? Can a midi file be opened with Audacity? I didn’t try it yet.

If you set “stretch factor” to 1 there is no stretching, it just causes temporal-blurring, which is like forward & reverse reverb

In 2.1.3 (and earlier) you can import MIDI - but you can’t play it.

BUT in the upcoming 2.2.0 release we have added MIDI playback - we did also have MIDI stretching but that had to be temporarily removed for 2.2.0 as it was somewhat buggy. We do plan to re-introduce it for later releases.

WC

The other effects that affect time are Change Speed and Sliding Time Scale/Pitch Shift.

See: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/sliding_time_scale_pitch_shift.html

WC

Hello!!!

I like calculating everything.

That’s why I have some questions:

  1. If I have max. 10 seconds of sound, what is the easiest way to change the maximum dynamic? I would like to write it as a number, not to do it somehow with the computer mouse. How many dB is the maximum dynamic?

  2. I would also like to write exactly (not to click with the mouse), when some things happen - for example 4.568 seconds from beginning. How can I do that?

Do you mean that you want to change the “amplitude”? If so, then the maximum valid amplitude is 0 dB, which is equivalent to the full track height (+/- 1). The “Amplify” effect with default setting will amplify the selected audio to 0 dB. Amplify - Audacity Manual


You can set the cursor position and make selections by typing the time positions into the Selection Toolbar. Selection Toolbar - Audacity Manual

Hello!
Please help me. This kind of problem happens to me nowadays many times a day. Sometimes turning off and restarting computer helps, sometimes not.
When I try to do something to the pitch (frequency) or amplitude, but the computer says: “There is no space…”. What should I do? Please tell me. Unfortunately the pictures are in Finnish, but I hope you understand something from them.
pic1.jpg
pic2.jpg

P.S. Sorry: one sentence (When I try to do something to the pitch (frequency) or amplitude, but the computer says: “There is no space…”) became linguistically a little confused last night. But, however, please answer soon. Would reinstalling Audacity help (I don’t think so)?

P.S. Please answer.

P.S. Please answer.

Hello.
My old question was not answered. I think the main problem is that I have too many programs running automatically. That’s why I uninstalled Dropbox, which I don’t use anymore. I noticed that I have both Audacity 2.1.3 and Audacity 2.2.1. Can I uninstall the old one without causing problems with the new one?

Hello!
I haven’t written recently, because my questions have not been answered. But now I try again.

Let’s imagine this kind of event:

A: Sound starts. It’s A (440 Hz).
B: Sound starts slow pitch shift 1 semitone upwards (I would prefer the musicians’ word glissando).
C: Sound reaches the new A# pitch and continues that pitch without moving.

When I did my last piece, especially the point C was full of problems. The sound made a strange pitch step and click. I made some cross-fade and mix solution between points B and C. It helped, but the clicks remained sometimes. Do you know the best way to do this event?

Other audio software easily can create music composition (with glissando), using VSTi instruments e.g. see … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1xoVHnKpwM

Audacity is a Digital Audio Editor, it does not accept VSTi = VST instruments.

There are free Digital Audio Workstations (DAWs) which have instruments bulit-in or accept VSTi plugins, see …

Musagi is free … https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3p5ITkCpXw
but it’s 10 years old , I don’t know if it will work on modern computers ?.

Thank you for answer. But I want to make the things happen at extremely exact times (like 00:04:647), like in Audacity. Is it possible? About instruments: I prefer my own recorded sounds. Are glissandi possible however at exact times with some software?
Jukka

When applying effects, they are applied to the region of audio that is “selected”. You can select a region precisely by using the “Selection Toolbar”: Selection Toolbar - Audacity Manual

Note: “Time stretching” effects are never “perfect”. They have to make compromises. In Audacity, the “Change Pitch” and “Change Tempo” effects offer two algorithms; " SOLA" is the default and “SBSMS” is the so called “High Quality” option. SBSMS is much slower and does not always sound better, but it keeps the length of the audio exact, whereas the SOLA implementation is not always exact in length. The “Sliding Stretch” effect always uses SBSMS.

Hello!
Long ago I enabled in my Audacity a plugin which makes using recorded m4a files possible. I don’t remember the name of the plugin. Do you know the name? I need it for Audacities of my job. My own Audacity is probably the latest ones, and the language is Finnish. When I enable plugins, I go to Effects - Enable/Disable Plugin (I am not sure if it is exactly like that in English version). But I don’t find that “Effects: Enable/Disable” in Audacities of my job. How can that enabling be done in that case?
Jukka

FFMPEG , see … https ://manual.audacityteam.org/man/faq_installing_the_ffmpeg_import_export_library.html

Hello!
I have a ready piece, which has many, many Audacity tracks. I have mixed the tracks to 4 wav-files which each come out of their own loudspeakers. But at the middle of the files there are clicks which I want to remove. If I open the wav-files which Audacity, remove clicks and save the aup-files again as wav-files, does the quality become bad (because of changing file type back and forth)? Is there some better solution - something which keeps the file type all the time wav?
Jukka

Because WAV format is very high quality, and Audacity data is extremely high quality, the conversion back and forth is likely to have negligible effect on sound quality.

Ideally, you would have had 24-bit, 32-bit or 32-bit float WAV backup copies to work from, or your original Audacity project, rather than normal 16-bit WAV, but the difference in quality is extremely small.

The problems come if you try working from compressed audio formats, such as MP3 or WMA - in this case, there can be a noticeable drop in sound quality due to multiple encoding processes.

Hello. It has been a long time since I wrote to this forum.
Let’s imagine that I have an Audacity file which has many (about 80) tracks. I would like to select somewhere at the middle about 0.5 seconds of the piece. Then I would like to find fast enough the track which has during that time selection the biggest amplitude. Is the some “find the loudest track” tool?
Jukka