change speed and loop temporarily for musicians

Mint 19.3 Cinammon - Audacity 2.2.1 loaded from the Mint Software Manager.

I want to choose a small section of a song file and slow that section down with Change Speed and then loop the slow down section so that I can learn parts. Is there a way to do that temporarily and not have to actually set a section, run the change speed to it and not have it actually change the track replacing the original speed with the slowed down speed? I just want it to loop while I learn a part and then go back to the original speed after I exit the loop.

Right now I have to work on slowed down loops in a copy of the file. That works but it would be better if I could just do this on the fly. Does somebody have a workflow for this?

I’m a musician and I do that to learn the hard passages of a song.

What I do is copy the hard/solo parts in to a new Audacity file and there I change the speed, play the loops, etc to study.
So, I end with two audacity projects: One with the name of the original song at normal speed, and the other named with -SOLOS- with all the slowed down parts.

The only other option I can think for a temporary change is Ctrl+z :mrgreen:

Select the section you want to loop.
Adjust the playback speed.
Hold down shift-key and press the play-at-speed green triangle …

https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/play_at_speed_toolbar.html#loop

This will change the tempo & pitch.
If you only want to change the tempo, without changing the pitch, see …
https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/change_tempo.html

Of course the problem with that is that I don’t want to change the pitch. Sounds like that is not possible to do on the fly and requires processing it through Change Speed.

Change speed also changes pitch. Change tempo changes speed but preserves pitch.

That’s how I would do it.

I stand corrected. Yes, you are right. I want Change Tempo. I have been using Change Tempo but wrote it in this thread wrong. Thanks.

Now on to the next question, about distortion in looping. I’ll do a separate post.