Good day! How does pitch actual work? If I select the whole track, does it take an average? Also, sometimes I notice that the pitch guage is off - like I know it’s a lower pitch, like in the hundreds, but the program measures it as being in the tens of thousands. What goes on here?
If you are referring to the Change Pitch effect, it analyzes a fraction of a second of the selected audio, at the start of the selection, and attempts to guess the pitch based on that analysis. If the start of the selection is a single note, then the estimation is usually pretty accurate. If the start of the selection is multi-timbrel, or has a lot of noise, then the estimation will probably not be meaningful.
In the Change Pitch effect, if you know that the guess for “from” pitch is wrong, then you can override the guess by typing in your own value. The only thing that is important with regard to the amount of pitch shift, is the “percent change” (The “semitones” setting is just another way of expressing the percent change).
Yes, I’m referring to Pitch Change in Effects. I had been selecting whole tracks and large sections. So, that’s not the way to do it? I want to edit two performances together that have very slight pitch changes due to changes in the environment. An instrument is slightly off pitch. So, I should find the matching passages in both tracks and measure the first pitches or at least the same pitches in the series and get my pitch measurements that way? Short sections and matching passages? OK. I’ll try that. It makes more sense. I should be able to estimate how many cents the one is off compared with the other.
Thanx. That helped.
I’ve got pitch problems in an 18 second clip. I’ve selected fractions of seconds for pitch estimates and get a lot of variety. Is there some standard allowance? They range from 194 to186 and then the odd thing is it jumps to 11025 but not for real. The audible pitch is still down there in the range or 186 to 195. But I’m getting that reading in the 10 thousands. I ought to be able to correct this with one increment for the whole clip.
Perhaps “Plot Spectrum” (https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/plot_spectrum.html) will work better for some of these awkward bits.
With Plot Spectrum, you will usually need to set the “Size” fairly high (usually between 1024 and 4096 works well), then look for a prominent spike towards the left of the spectrum.