Changing "Play Speed" toolbar to change tempo

Due to some circumstances, I use Audacity exclusively for listening to call recordings (VLC and Media Player aren’t available), so I pretty much don’t care about the editing capabilities of Audacity. Currently, the only way to change the tempo of the recording is through editing the file, which is troublesome for me, b/c I may want to change the speed I am listening at several times during the call–i.e. speed through uninteresting parts, and then slow down when I get to an important part.

It is possible to change the speed of the track by using the “Play Speed” toolbar…but then it sounds like a chipmunk. I’ve created a shortcut to change the tempo, and have been able to save some time that way, but it’s not ideal. So what I was wondering if there is a way to change the Play Speed toolbar to into a “Play Tempo” toolbar. Or something like that.

Audacity version: 3.0.2
OS: Windows 10

In a word, no. I know there is hope for a real-time effect to do this, but at this point I think it is mostly hope.

About a year ago, I did something along these lines. I ended up grabbing a modest chunk of audio, adding a label via Ctrl+B, Effect > Change Tempo on the result, then play. Ctrl+Z to kill the tempo change; Ctrl+Z to kill the label. In my case, it was fairly easy to identify the range just by looking at the waveform. Also note that a major change in tempo will result in audio distortion and you may be better off just training your ears. Good luck. :smiley:

Ok…So how does that help? Is it a different program I can use?

Thanks! I’ll see what I can do with that.

MadShifta is a free plugin which works in Audacity on Windows.
If you enable it when playing back at high speed you can shift the pitch down from chipmunk from to normal

Ah, I see that, now. Thanks, I’ll look into that.