Hello team,
I use the Change Pitch effect quite a lot.
The note identification is useful, but needs to be improved.
It is often calling a note a semitone down.
The Audacity tone generator generates 221.608 Hz for A3 .
So note identification seems to be keyed to a fixed A4 = 443, roughly.
A recent recording was at, say, A4 = 436 Hz.
In lieu of jacking up the entire recording to match Audacity’s A = 443,
I looked for a setting to peg the tuning note, in my case to 436, but came up empty.
So, why 443, and why not mutable?
In most cases it is irrelevant. The “Change Pitch” effect changes the pitch by a “ratio” rather than “from an absolute pitch → to an absolute pitch”. Thus, changing from “A” to “A#” (+ 1 semitone) is identical to changing from “Bb” to “B” (+ 1 semitone). The displayed “from” pitch is calculated from the first few hundred samples, which may or may not be meaningful. For example, if you are changing the pitch of wind noise, then the displayed pitch is fairly meaningless as wind noise does not really have a distinct pitch, but rather just a bunch of frequencies.
If you really need a pitch / frequency approximation as accurately as possible, then use “Plot Spectrum”: https://manual.audacityteam.org/man/plot_spectrum.html