Shorten Audio Track

[GuidingLight]

Greetings,

I have a track that is 82 minutes long. Its a speech.

I need to get it under 80 minutes to fit on a cd.

Is there anyway to be do so without losing any of the speech?

That is increasing the rate of the audio track.

Thanks

[kozikowski]

You need it under 78 minutes to fit on a Music CD.

Select the entire track and Effect > Change Speed or Effect > Change Tempo. I think the tempo one tries to keep the voice pitch the same even though it speeds up the track. Fortunately, you don't have to go very far. These tools sound funny if you have to make major changes.

There is another way out. If you know your audience is always going to play the work on a computer, you can make a good quality MP3 of the work and burn a Data CD. Pretty much the first time somebody tries to play it in the car, you may run into problems, but in that case, you don't have to change anything. You can leave it the original length.

Koz

[PGA]

Reducing from 82 minutes to 78 minutes is approximately a 5% reduction. Change Tempo should handle this and give a reasonably good result. I've pushed music all the way to 10% change in duration.

[kozikowski]

10% change in duration.

"Not available in all states. Void where prohibited, May cause diaper rash, chapped lips and violet death. Consult your local listings. Not available without a perscription. Paid for by the 'Committee to Elect Barry Goldwater President'."

Koz

[GuidingLight]

You need it under 78 minutes to fit on a Music CD.

Select the entire track and Effect > Change Speed or Effect > Change Tempo. I think the tempo one tries to keep the voice pitch the same even though it speeds up the track. Fortunately, you don't have to go very far. These tools sound funny if you have to make major changes.

There is another way out. If you know your audience is always going to play the work on a computer, you can make a good quality MP3 of the work and burn a Data CD. Pretty much the first time somebody tries to play it in the car, you may run into problems, but in that case, you don't have to change anything. You can leave it the original length.

Koz

Thank you very much for your help. Audio came out as expected.

[solanus]

There's an old trick that advertisers use to get audio to fit within a time limit, that could probably shorten the whole thing without changing the tempo - but it takes a bit of work.
Spoken audio naturally has pauses throughout it, between words and sentences, while the speaker is searching for the right words to use, etc - and at least a few are absolutely unnecessary silences.
You can trim just a little bit out of a lot of these silences to reduce the whole thing by several minutes.
Radio ads do this all the time.

[kozikowski]

Audacity has Analyze > Silence Finder what might be able to automate this a little. Koz

[billw58]

There's also the Truncate Silence effect http://manual.audacityteam.org/man/Truncate_Silence which was designed specifically for this task.

-- Bill