On Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 11:05:15 AM UTC-5, John Battersby wrote:
> I just picked up a cheap AGPtEK mp3 player that, so far, I have been
> quite impressed with considering the cheap price. Anyway, one of the
> settings is variable speed playback. I set it below normal and when it
> encountered an MP3 file, the song played slower in speed, but pitch
> remained constant (this function didn't seem to work on anything other
> than MP3 files (not FLAC, for example)). Anyway, I'm wondering what
> purpose this has? In the studio, matching singer pitch maybe to a
> track, but jogging or listening in the car, not sure why.
>
> Thanks,
> John

In 1965 my mother made some reel to reel tapes about local history and recently I sent them to Southtree
digitizing. Little did I know that my mother was not consistent with her recording speeds and the old recorder she used has three speeds, normal, slow and fast. And little did I know that Southtree does not help with playback speeds so I spent 250 bucks to Southtree to digitize the tapes to CD ROM. Southtree only does data dumping. They don't help with playback speed issues. So now I have a bunch of CDs and only 1/3 of them are intelligible.. Now I have two choices 1. Repair the old recorder/player so that I can playback the tapes at the right speed or find a variable speed audio player so that I can slow down or speed up the CD audio playback. Thats my needed purpose.

> In 1965 my mother made some reel to reel tapes about local history and recently I sent them to Southtree
> digitizing. Little did I know that my mother was not consistent with her recording speeds and the old recorder she used has three speeds, normal, slow and fast. And little did I know that Southtree does not help with playback speeds so I spent 250 bucks to Southtree to digitize the tapes to CD ROM. Southtree only does data dumping. They don't help with playback speed issues. So now I have a bunch of CDs and only 1/3 of them are intelligible. Now I have two choices 1. Repair the old recorder/player so that I can playback the tapes at the right speed or find a variable speed audio player so that I can slow down or speed up the CD audio playback. Thats my needed purpose.

With a little computer savvy, you could 'rip' the CD audio
to sound files, and resample them so they play back at the
correct speed. Something like Audacity can likely do this.

Then you'd have to burn the files back to CD, if for some
strange reason that's the medium that you desire.

Toby

On Thursday, October 20, 2022 at 7:43:18 AM UTC-7, Tobiah wrote:
> > In 1965 my mother made some reel to reel tapes about local history and recently I sent them to Southtree
> > digitizing. Little did I know that my mother was not consistent with her recording speeds and the old recorder she used has three speeds, normal, slow and fast. And little did I know that Southtree does not help with playback speeds so I spent 250 bucks to Southtree to digitize the tapes to CD ROM. Southtree only does data dumping. They don't help with playback speed issues. So now I have a bunch of CDs and only 1/3 of them are intelligible. Now I have two choices 1. Repair the old recorder/player so that I can playback the tapes at the right speed or find a variable speed audio player so that I can slow down or speed up the CD audio playback. Thats my needed purpose.
> With a little computer savvy, you could 'rip' the CD audio
> to sound files, and resample them so they play back at the
> correct speed. Something like Audacity can likely do this.
>
> Then you'd have to burn the files back to CD, if for some
> strange reason that's the medium that you desire.
>
>
> Toby

I had a cassette of a group conversation recorded on a battery powered machine where the batteries were failing. Playback started out OK but sped up as the recorder slowed down. Working in Cool Edit Pro's pitch-shift module, and listening carefully, I determined that the ending pitch of the voices was about an octave higher. I set the app to change the pitch uniformly from "none" at the beginning to "x 1/2" at the end. The results were quite satisfactory!

"If you notice the sound, it's wrong!" Roy W. Rising

On 20/10/2022 15:43, Tobiah wrote:
>> In 1965 my mother made some reel to reel tapes about local history and
>> recently I sent them to Southtree
>> digitizing. Little did I know that my mother was not consistent with
>> her recording speeds and the old recorder she used has three speeds,
>> normal, slow and fast. And little did I know that Southtree does not
>> help with playback speeds so I spent 250 bucks to Southtree to
>> digitize the tapes to CD ROM. Southtree only does data dumping. They
>> don't help with playback speed issues. So now I have a bunch of CDs
>> and only 1/3 of them are intelligible. Now I have two choices 1.
>> Repair the old recorder/player so that I can playback the tapes at
>> the right speed or find a variable speed audio player so that I can
>> slow down or speed up the CD audio playback. Thats my needed purpose.
>
>
> With a little computer savvy, you could 'rip' the CD audio
> to sound files, and resample them so they play back at the
> correct speed. Something like Audacity can likely do this.
>
There are pitch maintaining plugins available which alter the length of
a track when played back. They can also mantain the correct length while
shifting the pitch.

As for the player in the original post from 2016, the speed facility was
sold as a way to help you understand gabbled speech by slowing it down,
or as an aid to learning a piece of music.

--
Tciao for Now!

John.

On 21/10/2022 3:37 am, Jack sprat wrote:
> On Saturday, April 23, 2016 at 11:05:15 AM UTC-5, John Battersby wrote:
>> I just picked up a cheap AGPtEK mp3 player that, so far, I have been
>> quite impressed with considering the cheap price. Anyway, one of the
>> settings is variable speed playback. I set it below normal and when it
>> encountered an MP3 file, the song played slower in speed, but pitch
>> remained constant (this function didn't seem to work on anything other
>> than MP3 files (not FLAC, for example)). Anyway, I'm wondering what
>> purpose this has? In the studio, matching singer pitch maybe to a
>> track, but jogging or listening in the car, not sure why.
>>
>> Thanks,
>> John
>
>
> In 1965 my mother made some reel to reel tapes about local history and recently I sent them to Southtree
> digitizing. Little did I know that my mother was not consistent with her recording speeds and the old recorder she used has three speeds, normal, slow and fast. And little did I know that Southtree does not help with playback speeds so I spent 250 bucks to Southtree to digitize the tapes to CD ROM. Southtree only does data dumping. They don't help with playback speed issues. So now I have a bunch of CDs and only 1/3 of them are intelligible. Now I have two choices 1. Repair the old recorder/player so that I can playback the tapes at the right speed or find a variable speed audio player so that I can slow down or speed up the CD audio playback. Thats my needed purpose.

In pretty much any audio editing software (even hobby-level) these days
you can change playback speed, with or without changing pitch. You need
the more basic function - changing speed/pitch.

geoff

When I used to do on-camera work, I used a cassette machine with speed control as an ear prompter. I would speak the words of the script as I heard them. If the producer asked me to speed up or slow down, no problem!!