Audio experiment

Kalmaro · February 23, 2016, 6:33am

I have a question. I am recording myself playing a game for fun and I’ve slowed the game’s speed down. Just to see if I could.

Turns out, that is easy, the tricky part is that my game audio stays at a normal speed.

Does anyone know of a way to RECORD audio at a low speed?

If I could do that, I could just mux my video and audio and have a smooth looking recording when played back at normal speed.

So basically, I want to do something like play a game at 1/4 speed and also record the audio from it at 1/4 speed at the same time.

Any help would be appreciated.

steve · February 23, 2016, 8:20am

In other words, you want your recording to playback at 4x speed.

Have you tried recording the game at normal speed? Did it work? If you were successful with that then the next bit is easy - just use the “Change Speed” effect to stretch the recording to the required length: http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/change_speed.html

Note that the audio recording and video recording may drift in and out of synch if the video does not play at an exactly consistent speed. By using the “New Length” control in the Change Speed effect you can ensure that the overall length matches.

Kalmaro · February 23, 2016, 1:50pm

Well not exactly.

I’ve slowed down the game so I can play it at a slower speed. That way when I speed the game back up the game looks like I’m playing at normal speed again but I’m playing with faster reflexes.

The probems is that I can slow down my movement in the game but not the sounds and music from the game, they keep playing at normal speed like nothing is wrong.

So if, say, I get a 4 minute slowed playthrough, when I speed it up it’s 1 minute long

But I still have 4 minutes of audio that sounds perfectly fine. I could speed that audio up but even if I change the pitch, the audio sounds like it’s sped up still.

So I need a way to compress the time between sounds or something with the audio but I don’t think that’s possible. The compression effect that audacity has doesn’t cut it.

steve · February 23, 2016, 2:37pm

Of course it will, because it IS sped up.
Even if we have an effect that can speed up sound “perfectly” without changing the pitch - imagine if we have a recording of someone talking - speed it up 4 x and it will sound like they are talking super fast.

The only way that I see for making the recording “4 x shorter” without “speeding up” is to do lots of time consuming manual editing - if there is a sound effect that loops 16 times, cut it down to 2 times. If there is a tune that repeats 4 times, cut it down to once only, and so on.

Alternatively, just scrap the “in game” sound. Record yourself reading a “talk through” after you have finished playing the game, mix in some music of your choice, and add you talk-through and music to the (silent) video.

Kalmaro · February 25, 2016, 1:46pm

steve:

Kalmaro:

I could speed that audio up but even if I change the pitch, the audio sounds like it’s sped up still.

Of course it will, because it IS sped up.
Even if we have an effect that can speed up sound “perfectly” without changing the pitch - imagine if we have a recording of someone talking - speed it up 4 x and it will sound like they are talking super fast.

The only way that I see for making the recording “4 x shorter” without “speeding up” is to do lots of time consuming manual editing - if there is a sound effect that loops 16 times, cut it down to 2 times. If there is a tune that repeats 4 times, cut it down to once only, and so on.

Alternatively, just scrap the “in game” sound. Record yourself reading a “talk through” after you have finished playing the game, mix in some music of your choice, and add you talk-through and music to the (silent) video.

I think I’ll just do that, just add in my own music and talk through it. Thanks for the suggestion.