Slow down music like a record (reduce pitch) no robotic sound, using VLC or web browser devtools or addons

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.

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Changing speed of youtube / online music videos, and allowong pitch to change

Maybe just buy music from artists you really enjoy.

But if you don’t have a local copy, and the artist provides ways to listen to their music for free, using youtube to control playback speed is very unique musical experience.

Open dev tools on a video website

Use mouse selection to select the video element. Right click the highlighted block in the code, and choose “open in console”

The console is a small hieght for firefox, it may be easier to see if you make it larger

Type in

.preservesPitch = false

then change the playback speed. If audio remains smooth, you’ve accessed a hidden option. Now enjoy some music at 25% lower speed.

There are addons that allow custom speed, and youtube also allows custom speeds I think, but limited to .10

Addon that does this with speed slider

Have you ever heard an advertisement played slower, you can now!

I don’t like the name, but the code in the following addon is clean and simple:

ScrewMyCode.in

Also the url for a website with the same code. It says soundcloud as an example but I haven’t gotten that to work.

The next update to this thread will be on how to modify both preservesPitch as well as speed even if it’s not shown as an option, so even for web-based spotify, pandora (usually good song selection), and many other music sources on the web. I’m still learning, so it might be several months, and it will definitely be a manual approach, not an addon, unless one is developed by someone else.

Change audio speed for streaming music on a web browser

I figured it out for streaming audio.

Press F12 on a page that has a song loaded. Scroll to the bottom, which might list the most recent loaded audio.

Right click it “show in console”.

Wait for temp1 text to show up.

In firefox, the text should be showing up in green to let you know it is going to affect something.

.preservesPitch = false

After pressing enter, repeat the two steps to get back into the console, should say

temp2

.playbackRate = .84

An addon global speed does a good job, but no idea how to set the hotkeys.

A slightly improved online and realtime tempo and pitch change website.

If decreasing pitch when slowing down music os not your bag, then try

https://bungee.parabolaresearch.com/bungee-web-demo

Supply music files and enjoy a tempo you like best for any music you have downloaded.

If you apply the effect in a DAW you’ll find the artifacts are much less noticeable. Depending on the software used, resampling to 192kHz before applying the effect may also help. For just slowing down songs you shouldn’t be able to notice artifacts until the slowdown is pretty extreme.

When doing it on the fly in a player/browser though they tend to do it quick and dirty and as a result it often sounds bad.

I notice the repitition of the time-stretch effect at 92% and it becomes quite annoying much below that.

At 64% speed it is unlistenable.

I have considered how sampling rate affects both time-stretch and sound quality of slower packback speed without the effect. I have a copy of an album at 96 kHz and even at half speed, the cymbals are incredibly present, very high-treble, similar to normal speed which is very unique, whereas usually they are quite dulled, which I find nicer to listen to, I don’t want that much treble in the mix when all other sounds are pitched down.

For a higher-quality time-stretch, audacity does a good job, but it is time-consuming for every adjustment, multiple minutes per change.

For an increibly similar implementation of audacity’s high-quality stretching mode, but with faster adjustments, there is bungee

https://bungee.parabolaresearch.com/bungee-web-demo

If you have music downloaded, you can upload the files that website (one at a time) and once it is done loading you can disconnect your network if you’re not using it at the moment, and everything happens locally in the browser.

I think most software uses an incredibly old time-stretch method and it’s now a great time to start suggesting software developers to use these new methods, such as whatever Audacity uses, and improve upon that. It would still sound garbled, but at least it wouldn’t sound choppy.

There are many different pitch shifting algorithms. Anything unlistenable at 64% is not a very good one.

You may want to try Reaper. It has an unlimited free trail, supports windows and linux and features several time stretch options. The default “Elastique Pro” is quite good and there are about five other algorithms as well as a few variations to try. It changes both rate and pitch shift modes on the fly while listening.

Drag tracks into a project. To adjust rate right click the waveform > item properties > playback rate. Different time stretch options are in File > Project Settings… > default pitch shift mode.

Didn’t know this at all, very cool.

Bungee website also has many time-stretch algorithms to try as well, and elastique (non-pro) is an option.

Audacity, bungee, bungee pro, elastic, signalsmitch and superpowered sound about the same. Rubberband isn’t quite as good, but better than

“this browser” which I think is sonic, must be similar to what is used by most programs.

I wish modifying playback speed was less niche / more people would try it. The tempo of a song is like a drug, it creates excitement, so slowing down music takes away that effect, which is probably not what people want to experience, a less exciting song, but even just 10% can make an amazing difference, even 5% slower is nice of a tempo is just a bit too energetic.

Yeah, being able to manipulate audio it’s right up there with image and video editing. Audio is also a bit unique in that there’s a huge plugin ecosystem that most/all audio software is able to use. Even just playing around and not investing into a bunch of software, there are tons of free plugins.

I started out just trimming the intros and outros of tracks but tweaking tempo, eq, compression etc. is all pretty satisfying. Even a 3% tempo change can make a pretty dramatic difference.