Change Speed is now useless for retuning to A=432 Hz

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

I don’t know in which update this occurred, but it has come to my attention that the Change Speed effect in Audacity 2.0.5 is now all of a sudden rounding off the decimals from the input value. In other words, if I enter the value -1.818, Audacity is rounding it off to -1.000. This means that if I generate a tone at 440 Hz and apply the Change Speed effect with a value of -1.818, Audacity will not retune the tone to A=432 H, but to A=436 Hz. If the Change Speed effect is selected again, it can be observed that the previous value that was entered will appear as -1.000, even though it had been typed in as -1.818. The second proof is to open the Frequency Analysis, adjust the view settings to log frequency at the highest resolution, and simply observe the single tone peak exactly at A=436 Hz. The third and most accurate proof is to open the Change Pitch effect, which will now display the exact frequency of the tone, 436,634 Hz.

This error is renders Audacity 2.0.5 useless for retuning music from A=440 Hz to A=432 Hz, or any other form of precise frequency tuning, for that matter, whereas Change Pitch is inferior for this purpose, due to artifacts caused by stretching the waveform.

Very upset about this.

2

Thanks for the report. Nothing has changed, at least since Audacity 2.0.0.

I assume you have chosen to run Windows in a language that uses comma as decimal separator, like German or French. In that case type “-1,818” (without quotes) in Change Speed then you will get the correct speed change. That is why the Change Speed input box says “0,000” when you first open it in an Audacity session, the “,” indicating that the currently accepted separator is comma.

Audacity only supports the decimal separator chosen in Windows. If you need to run Windows in a language that normally uses comma as decimal separator but want to use period (dot) as separator, you will have to change the decimal separator for that language to period (dot) in the “Region and Language” setting of the Windows Control Panel.


Gale