Hello all, I am having a problem with audacity. I’m trying to match certain sounds to the correct pitch of certain notes in songs. I know i can highlight the song note, go to effects, and click “change pitch” to see what note it is, then press cancel. But when i change the sound to that note, it just never seems to sound right. Something always seems off. Any ideas as to how i can fix this/what i should do?
Which Certain Sounds?
Human voices don’t pitch shift very well past maybe two piano notes. Some sounds your mouth makes don’t pitch shift at all and people sound really odd if you try.
Is that what you’re trying to do?
Koz
No, i’m not trying to change voice. Basically what i’m doing is making songs out of sounds. Some of the sounds have to be pitch-changed in order for the notes to match up. I’ll do all of the different notes, background stuff, every different track i can manage, and then delete the song file so that all i’m left with is the song made out of sounds. I hope that made sense, its pretty hard to explain it 
If you only want to correct a few “sour notes” here and there (without re-pitching the whole song) you need a tool like Auto-tune, Melodyne, or GSnap. (GSnap is free.)
But, if you have a “regular song” with instruments & vocals you won’t be able to fix the vocals without messing-up the accompaniment (or vice versa).
You should not rely on Audacity telling you what note it is unless it’s a single voice or instrument. If it’s a voice or instrument against a background, use Preview in Change Pitch to experiment so as to find the percentage change that sounds right.
Gale
There is also an optional Pitch detection plug-in available here: http://wiki.audacityteam.org/wiki/Nyquist_Analyze_Plug-ins#Pitch_Detect
Again it can only detect the pitch for single notes, but in tests it has shown to be pretty accurate.
More information about this plug-in here: https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/pitch-detection-plug-in/29126/1
Installation instructions: http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/effect_menu.html#nyquist_effects