Macro transposing weirdness

MacOS 10.14.6
Audacity 3.1.3

OK, here’s a weird one.

I created a macro to transpose, change the tempo, and truncate silence. The original mp3 is in C major. I wanted to transpose 20 files in a batch to G major.

  • Change Pitch” is the first command (up 7 semitones)


  • Change Tempo” is the second command (increase by 50%)


  • Truncate Silence” is the third command


  • Export as MP3” is the final command

So I set up the macro which ran correctly on individual files.

When I run it in batch mode against the 20 files,

  • the first file is processed correctly*


  • the second file is transposed to D major with the tempo shifted and silence truncated


  • the third file remains in C major with the tempo shifted and silence truncated


  • All remaining files are processed correctly*

*meaning they are transposed to G major, tempo shifted, and silence truncated

After at least 20 retries with the same results, I was playing around with doing files individually and eventually found this:

If you change the mp3 output quality to “extreme” instead of “standard” it creates all the files correctly transposed, etc.

Note that the Change Pitch effect does not transpose to a specified key, it shifts the pitch by a specified amount.

For example, if some music is in A major and you pitch shift by 2 semitones, then the result will be B major. If the music was in E major and pitch shifted with the same settings, the result would be F# major (not B major).

I can’t speak to the issue you reported, but you may be able to get the same results much much faster and with much much better quality by using change speed by 50%. Note: “C” x 1.5 = “G”