If you have a tube amp, that is. If not, slow down your tunes.
So I get daily use of VLC playback speed set to slower than 1. In using it for quite some time, I want to make it better, or provide suggestions so that a developer can implement my ideas. It would really mean a lot to include these features and would really “whip the llama’s ass”
- Winamp media player
of all other media players that have no comparable features for this option. I want to make UI changes to the slider, add two or three checkbox options to it, and add new features by utilizing exisiting features and re-designing them.
For the slider area, I want to add the following options:
Add speed to current song
Maintain original audio pitch (or allow pitch to go up or down with speed). There should also be a help icon by both of these options explaining in more detail what they do, especially now my new idea of saving playback speed per song, but also mentioning that slower playback speeds by default sound choppy and distorted, and strongly recommend turning it off. In fact it could go one step even further and by default disable pitch effect for slower speeds, and auto-enable for faster than 110%. This would allow increasing the energy and pitch slightly for playing faster music, but enable the effect for speeding up podcasts and such automatically.
I estimate that only 1 in 1,000,000 vlc users will ever see the advanced settings, or open them. Of that approximately 750 people who do, even less will take a look at the timestretch option. Of that smaller number, even less maybe 25% will actually try toggling the option off.
Of those people, they also need to be curious enough to combine that with trying playback speed. I’d say we’re now down into the double digit range of the total users who have disabled timestretch AND tested it using both faster, and slower playback speeds.
Does that seem a fairly reasonable estimate?
How many people here have done this experiement with playback speed? I bet it’s less than 0.001% 1 in 100,000. And since there sren’t 100,000 people on this forum, nobody here, except me, has used this combination of features.
So I’d like these options clearly labeled and visible in the area that they change.
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Reduce slider range to sensible defaults and offer a custom option. 60 to 110
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Reduce or removr slider drag delay / sticky movement. Causes sound to skip and pause during adjustment
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I can do this one: change arrow rate from 5% to 1% default with custom option, and without “round to integer” code in the main speed code for it to work. Allow .1 .01 and .001 speed changes with arrow
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Lines, light orange for each %, and saturated bold lines for 5 and 10s. Not only would it look great, it would make the bar easier to understand where the numbers are in the bar, vs only seeing it above the bar. Maybe even have a color gradient, of different orange shades.
For saving speed per song, here’s why. Overall speed is nice, but let’s think about creating a playlist of songs, and the speed is set to 76%
That’s a very calm and relaxed pace, but we know the speed of the songs in a playlist will vary wildly. There are numerous ways to skin this fish:
Pick a speed for one of the songs and modify all other songs to be similar. Audacity already has BPM scanning, but I like the idea of manual tuning. Takes a long time, but I think it’s worth it.
There would be as many custom speed presets for each song, with a default speed as well, which can be modified, or swapped to another default speed for a playlist.
You could have one playlist full of your favorite nusic, but on average, about 7.76% slower, and another playlist 17.76% slowerr, and another player 1.776% faster.
This allows to have a set of songs that you have determined sound better at mildly faster, somewhat, and a lot slower. And for songs that are already at about the right speed, less adjustment could be set for those, where songs that are significantly faster could be set much slower to match the desired tempo.
It is far out there, I know it, but that’s what makes this such an exciting idea, nobody has done this before! And with the power of open-source, it is completely possible, the functionality is already there in the bookmark + current speed code, just bring those two ideas together and done!
Outside of a playlist, you may just not enjoy the faster tempo of a song, and are surprised that the song is a bit faster than it plays in your mind, and you didn’t realize this until you played it again a few years later in a shuffle.
So you could always set that song just 7.76% slower so that it plays at the speed you already thiught it did. You also might be in a more relaxed mood and had a smoke, and want to hear that song at 21% slower, like some hiphop remix use for slowing down the music, so instead of continually manually setting speed for every single song, every single time it plays
just have speed preset “bookmarks” once you find the speeds that work best for both the original tempo and your state of mind.
The playback rate code I think, should be simplified, it’s doing both multiplication, and division, with paranthesis, so it’s now alegra, right, just for setting the rate. Hopefully that can be simplified so it can be easier to work on, understand, and less less processing.
I’d also like a gander at the timestretch code file, couldn’t find it from the github archive. It sounds like it’s skipping parts of the music, might have something to do with
toDouble
in the rate code.
I think that covers it all, just a couple minute changes here and there, nothing too major.
Oh, and all these nee features would be explained in great detail for first-run welcome screen!