Audacity Forum

Hello,
I am trying audacity for the first time and so far, I am liking it.

I do have a question about how to do a simple pitch correction.

I have a vocal track that is pretty good, except it has a couple of out of tune notes. I would like to pitch correct those notes.

I first tried the change pitch effect, but that seemed to shorten the notes (expected, I guess)

So I then I downloaded the trial version of Antares Autotune. I selected just the out of tune note, and selected the effect and tuned it. It seemed to work, but the corrected note was placed back into the track in the wrong place. It was shifted aprox 1/4 sec. to the right. Well, that just won't do.

I have been searching the web, but all of the links are for how to do drastic, Cher-like effects. This is not what I need. I am looking to just tweak a few notes into place.

Anyone have any pointers they could give me? Thanks in advance

-Geoffrey

Upgrade to Audacity 1.3.13 (you can get it here: http://audacityteam.org/download/ )
For high quality tweaking of the pitch, try the Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift... effect.
You will need to alter the Pitch settings, but keep the tempo settings at zero.

steve wrote:Upgrade to Audacity 1.3.13 (you can get it here: http://audacityteam.org/download/ )
For high quality tweaking of the pitch, try the Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift... effect.
You will need to alter the Pitch settings, but keep the tempo settings at zero.

I am on 1.3.13 already

I will try sliding time now. Thanks

steve wrote:Upgrade to Audacity 1.3.13 (you can get it here: http://audacityteam.org/download/ )
For high quality tweaking of the pitch, try the Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift... effect.
You will need to alter the Pitch settings, but keep the tempo settings at zero.

Intersting, I am just tried the sliding time pitch effect and got the same problem that I had Antares Autotune.
Must be something I am doing wrong

Anyone able to repro this or tell me what I am doing wrong
On one track, I:
1) select one word that I want to pitch correct. It is highlighted in dark grey.
2) go to effect menu and select 'sliding time scale/pitch shift'
3) in initial pitch shift and final pitch shift, I set the percentage to 1.000
4) click ok
5) dialog box comes up as processing is happening
6) main screen comes back and original selection is shifted to the right by about 500 samples.

What am I doing wrong?

I'll move this to the Audacity 1.3.x part of the forum as that is what we are now using.

I don't think that you're doing anything wrong other than expecting an exact result from an inexact effect.

Pitch shifting is the other side of the coin of "time stretching". The simplified explanation of time stretching works is that the sound is chopped up into lots of little pieces, then the pieces are either spaced out further or squashed together, then stitched back together again. To make the "stitching" seamless there is some clever "fudging" going on.
With the Sliding Time Scale / Pitch Shift effect the final duration (assuming that you only change the pitch and not the tempo) should remain unchanged, however you will notice that a small degree of time shift will occur. I've just tried this and the "shift" was 283 milliseconds. To achieve better accuracy with the timing it is necessary to do some manual adjustment. Here is how I would do it:

1) Select the section to be adjusted and allow a little extra at each end.
2) Duplicate this section (Ctrl+D)
3) Apply the pitch correction to the duplicate copy
4) Use the Time Shift tool (double headed arrow <-->) to move the processed duplicate exactly back in line with the original.
5) Edit the two tracks together (if necessary apply a short cross-fade to make the joins seamless).

It's a bit fiddly, but with care the results can be near perfect.