I digitised my entire music collection using Audacity for the vinyl and tapes and NERO for the CD’s and put it all onto iPods. There are around two thousand audio tapes about half of which are recordings I made of FM radio shows. One of these came onto the iPod yesterday and is running too fast, there is a pitch control on the tape deck and if tapes appeared to be running too slow, six minutes over the ninety etc, I would speed up the pitch and must have done so with this one but it is too fast. The annoying thing is that it is just under ninety two minutes long but the speed has ruined the tape, it is like comedy level speed with the voices etc.
I am currently re recording it from the MP3 on Audacity, the tape is in one of around eight storage containers, but can’t figure out how to slow it down, if I open the Effects menu the sub menu cannot be used, if I open the Pitch And Speed option from the Edit menu only Pitch, not Speed, is useable and I cannot hear anything changing in real time.
I am playing the original file in Windows Media Player and recording to Audacity. Once I finish recording or during recording how can I slow it down to what it should be.
If these recordings were the result of a portable tape recorder running on low batteries, you can fix the pitch, but the “wow and flutter” also present due to irregular power will be challenging to do anything about.
The tapes were recorded into Audacity via a Teac W1200 tape deck plugged into the PC whereas the originals will have been recorded on my separates system or the Sharp radio cassette recorder which preceded them and all on mains power.
The Teac has a rotary pitch control which I tweaked if I felt a tape had ran too slow, ninety seven minutes etc, I would re record but I could not hear what I was recording whilst doing so so it was guess work. A couple of the files you can hear via the DJ’s voice that they are running slightly fast but nothing like this one.
If you go to YouTube and do a search for TheLozengesOfTruth John Peel you will find the preceding tapes which I have uploaded, one or two were slightly fast and I mention this in the description.
I’m not sure if those effects work in real time. Try stopping playback before applying the effect.
Select/highlight (Select All) before applying effects.
If it’s still greyed-out, go to Effect → Plugin Manager and make sure they are all enabled.
Change Speed and Pitch is what you want. That’s the same as changing analog playback speed.
There’s no need for that! Open the MP3 (or WAV) in Audacity.
If you have WAVs, use them. As you may know, MP3 is lossy compression. Information is thrown-away to make a smaller file. When you open an MP3 (or other compressed file) in Audacity (or any regular audio editor) it gets decompressed. Then if you re-export as MP3 it goes through another generation of lossy compression and SOME “damage” accumulates. You may not hear any quality loss, but avoid it if you can and try to minimize the number of times it’s re-compressed.
Thank you for this, I took the action you mentioned and slowed it by 5% then 10% then 15% and it has added ten minutes to the length of the recording but still running too fast whereas when I took it to 25% too slow and if I adjust the Pitch at all it badly affects the sound quality. I will keep trying though, this seems like the best course of action.
I save everything as both WAV and MP3, the WAV as a master file and the MP3 to go onto iPods and convert to MP4 for upload.
