Bands that play live usually play their own songs a bit faster, and some cover songs are at a completely slower speed and different style
If you have ever changed the playback speed on a computer and used a slower speed, you’ve heard the timestretch pitch matching effect. It works incredibly well when increasing speed, like for a podcast (not something I do, but some people save hundreds of hours doing it), but slowing down is like a robot, a very distorted sound with gaps, pauses and other issues in the output.
Hearing this garbage, it’s no wonder people never try a slower speed ever again, it sounds awful or annoying. Well, VLC is basically the only cross-platform (desktops and smartphones on all major operating systems) that actually offers the option to allow the pitch to go down with speed.
I thought the feature was removed when I reinstalled vlc on one of my devices, but looking through all settings, I finally re-discovered it in advanced. This is a horrible place to put this option, there’s no good reason not to have this visible where the speed slider is.
In advanced, turn off timestretch.
Turn on save playback speed, in the audio settings menu.
Start off near normal, with minimal adjustments and test that a while, then as you adjust to the slower pace, try slower settings. You’ll eventually find a speed that seems too slow for just about all music, so in between that and normal is where you should experiment. Find the speeds you enjoy for a particular song, and try another. You will find songs you enjoy possibly more, or at least as much, played slow.
Would anyone be interested in a thread, similar to “what song are you listening to”
What song & speed are you listening to?
What would be a good thread title?
You’ll be quite surprised what you find once you give this a try for a while, and I hope I can convince you to share this idea wirh others. Explain what a vlc is, what the timestretch effect sounds like (by playing a song with it enable at low 0.75 or 0.5 speed) and why it should be disabled to experiment with a slower song speed
Another idea is to play a song around family and friends that you all know, bht play it at a speed you thinj works better. This works in the 2-9% range, after that the pitch reduction is quite noticable.
If the other listeners don’t pick up on the drop in pitch or speed, just play the same song again at normal and wait for their reaction. I think it’s a fun experience and quite a unique one. I also hope this idea spreads quickly, so all music listebers can benefit.