Anyhow know why my files might be speeding and or slowing down?
The only thing I can tie it to is the project I’m on calls for a lot of smaller files to be imported and pasted together. It’s 99% fine, but every so often, one of the fimported bits is slightly (9.2%) faster or slower and needs to be adjusted. One was 27.6% too fast, the rest all consistanty 9.2+ or - Obviously the origs are fine.
I only found one similar post on an audacity forum board, but the single response didn’t work for me: to close out and reopen to purge memory.
Anyone who’s run into this and figured it out, your help is greatly apprciated!
I bet they’re not. Audacity has a bad habit of importing, opening, or playing music files that it doesn’t completely understand. Audacity is a terrible converter, so even though it is suggested that you can mix and match many different wild sound file types, it rarely works out well.
I bet if you identify your broken sound clips and use Super, Switch, or other file conversion program to convert them to the Audacity preference settings you’re using, and then reimport them to the show, the speed problems go away.
Or get significantly worse. The object is that all your clips are homogeneous.
Check the sample rates. If you are using Audacity 1.2.x, all clips in a track must have the same sample rate or they will play at the wrong speed (the difference between 44.1kHz and 48kHz is around 9%). In Audacity 1.3.10 you can mix files of different sample rates on the same track.
I guess now is a good time for more detail on the problem since the responses have been appreciated, but might not be applicable to this particular problem.
= The originals are fine and all from the same source. Actually they are parts of the same interview that got chopped up into little pieces for a slideshow–by me–and the bitrates have never been changed.
The new project is to put all those smaller pieces back together into another order, and that’s where the problem begins. I put them all back together… nobody else has ever changed or messed with them… and I never did anything but export them all to MP3’s from AUP’s. The originals all sound/play fine.
Once a hundred or so of the small pieces are back into one AUP, about 1 out of 10 will play slower or faster. Bitrates never touched, files play fine before being imported, no adjustments of any sort have been made apart from the converting back and forth, and never had this problem before in a year of almost daily use.
So that’s a bit of clarity… greatly looking forward to hearing your input now that there’s more detail.
Still available, but if I were to chop it up again, I’d be doubling-back to redo what already has been done (tons of work). Trying to figure out what caused it and a fix to be sure it doesn’t happen again.
You may not be aware, but each time an audio file is encoded to MP3 format there is a loss in sound quality. This loss in quality is cumulative and cannot be repaired. It is strongly recommended that you work from uncompressed audio formats whenever possible.
Edit a file > Export as MP3 (slight quality loss) > Import MP3 > Export as MP3 (second generation - sounds worse) > Import 2nd generation MP3 > Export as MP3 (3rd generation - starting to sound pretty bad)…
Have you tried importing these files into Audacity 1.3.10? You may find that the speed problem is solved.
I’m on a high-security network that doesn’t allow downloads, and like the mililtary we always use older versions of things, so no way to upgrade… I MIGHT be able to make an argument to review the newer version IF I could prove that would fix this problem, but it would be like getting a law passed through Congress and possibly take as long.
About the loss of quality, not worried since it’s an instructional lecture that doesn’t need to sound like great music - it’s only been exported once and now being dragged back to the table for a reorganization. Again, if I could fully support that was the problem, I might be able to argue for recutting everything from scratch, but w.o support on that being the issue, it wouldn’t be worth the pitch.
Not sure we’ve gained any ground, but sincere thanks nonetheless!