yong321 Groupie United States yong321.freeshe Joined 5544 days ago 80 posts - 104 votes Studies: Spanish
| Message 1 of 17 25 January 2010 at 11:59pm | IP Logged |
I want to slow down the speaker's talking when I play a sound file but it's not mechanically slowing everything down like when the old tape cassette is having a problem. When the tape does that, the pitch is lowered and the speaker is like swallowing something big. I want the talk to be naturally slowed down. Does this software exist? I'm not even sure if this is acoustically possible.
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Levi Pentaglot Senior Member United States Joined 5569 days ago 2268 posts - 3328 votes Speaks: English*, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Dutch, Portuguese, Mandarin, Japanese, Italian
| Message 2 of 17 26 January 2010 at 1:37am | IP Logged |
Funny, I just read a post a couple minutes ago on another website where somebody mentioned a free program that does just that. I hadn't ever heard of such a thing before. The program is called Express Scribe. http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/
Edited by Levi on 26 January 2010 at 1:38am
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Bruce Groupie United States Joined 6225 days ago 65 posts - 65 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French, German
| Message 3 of 17 26 January 2010 at 6:36am | IP Logged |
Levi wrote:
Funny, I just read a post a couple minutes ago on another website where somebody mentioned a free program that does just that. I hadn't ever heard of such a thing before. The program is called Express Scribe. http://www.nch.com.au/scribe/ |
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That's a neat program. I tried it and I already see some uses for it other than just slowing down audio.
Cheers
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microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5473 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 4 of 17 26 January 2010 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
I have done this with the free program Audacity. It works very well up to about 20% slow down. Beyond that it
starts to sound strange. I have also used it to speed up the speaking rate of an audiobook to make it more realistic.
See: http://audacity.sourceforge.net
Its free and available on all platforms.
Use the "Change Tempo" function under the "Effects" menu. (not the change speed function)
This will preserve the pitch of the voice.
Edited by microsnout on 26 January 2010 at 9:48am
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NuclearGorilla Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6788 days ago 166 posts - 195 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Japanese, French
| Message 5 of 17 26 January 2010 at 9:47am | IP Logged |
There are a number of programs that can do this during playback, including mplayer (with -af scaletempo), vlc, and Windows Media Player. In order to make the changes to a file, the free program audacity is capable of this.
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Kinan Diglot Senior Member Syrian Arab Republic Joined 5568 days ago 234 posts - 279 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, English Studies: Russian, Spanish
| Message 6 of 17 26 January 2010 at 9:59am | IP Logged |
Are you sure it's a good idea to slow the speech down in learning process?
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microsnout TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Canada microsnout.wordpress Joined 5473 days ago 277 posts - 553 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French
| Message 7 of 17 26 January 2010 at 10:18am | IP Logged |
Kinan wrote:
Are you sure it's a good idea to slow the speech down in learning process? |
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I would agree its likely not a good idea to get in the habit of doing this but I think it can be helpful at the beginner
level. I once started with a 20% slow version and moved progressively to 15%, 10%, 5% then finally normal speed.
This was a useful exercise to do once at least.
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Woodpecker Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5813 days ago 351 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Arabic (classical)
| Message 8 of 17 26 January 2010 at 10:43am | IP Logged |
I second the Audacity recommendation. I do have a bit of a leg up, as I used to do some theatrical sound engineering, but it's such an easy, intuitive program to use I imagine that even complete beginners have little trouble. The tempo change tool, in my personal experience, is very useful and effective for what you're talking about. I would imagine there are plenty of other programs that do the same thing, but I'd still recommend Audacity for the other tools it comes with. It's really excellent for cleaning static and distortion and clicks from material taken from tapes. I just used it to clean up some really battered old FSI stuff with very solid results.
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