Time stretching MP3 and other audio
Want to listen to that 8 hour audio book in 6 hours and not lose any details in the process?
I love Windows Media Player’s ability to speed up or slow down audio and video in real-time via its awesome Play Speed setting. This is commonly referred to as time stretching or changing tempo. If you listen to a lot of podcasts and audio books or watch a lot of instructional videos (like I do) this can save hours and hours in the long run.
The problem is that I like to listen to podcasts or audio books in the car, and I don’t have a fancy PC available to speed audio up in real-time. My Sansa e250 with Rockbox does lots of cool things, but alas it can’t speed up audio without the dreaded chipmunk effect.
I looked for a way to easily (and cheaply) time stretch my audio files, but mostly found a bunch of headaches. There are painful ways to do it with Audacity (open, apply filter, convert, save, etc.) and other audio editors. I think there’s a way to do it through WinAmp. There are also programs made to specifically convert audio like dbPoweramp, but I didn’t have much luck with that (and it’s not free).
My Solution
Here’s the best solution I’ve found so far (and I looked long and hard). It’s easy to setup and has worked super fantastically so far:
foobar2000 + SoundTouch DSP plug-in
1. Download and install foobar2000.
2. Download foo_dsp_soundtouch.dll from wherever you can find it (I got mine from here). This thing was a pain to find. You might also need the vc8 runtime files. They are included in the .NET runtime so might as well download and install that. Copy foo_dsp_soundtouch.dll to your foobar2000 components folder.
3. Drop an audio file (or a bunch of audio files) into foobar2000 (or use File -> Open). I’ll use an episode of the excellent Hanselminutes podcast as an example.
4. Choose a Convert option from the right-click context menu and set your encoding options (the ones in these pics work well for me).
5. Click OK and watch it churn out your sped up mp3(s).
Tips and Thoughts
I’ve been using 25% speed-up on audio books and informational podcasts and 12.5% on entertainment-related podcasts like Dawn and Drew. At 25% it’s easily listenable but you can really tell it’s sped up. At 12.5% you can really only tell if you listen to the original along side it. Also, I feel like I concentrate and pick up more (kind of a “flow” thing) when it is sped up.
Being able to drag and drop a bunch of files, right click once, and watch all the converted mp3s pop out is an amazing efficiency over some of the other methods I found.
So, let me know if you’ve found alternate solutions or can improve on this one (I haven’t tweaked many of the settings). And if you want to start looking forward to that hour-long drive to work in the morning, buy a cheap mp3 player and check some of these podcasts out.
[…] “Time stretching [MP3s] and other audio” by Blake Tolbert […]
Seeing if my comments work now.
many thanks:)
[Eng] The instructions were very useful, thanks.
[Spa] Las instrucciones fueron de gran ayuda. Gracias
Getting Started with WPF…
I don’t know about you, but it seems more difficult to get started with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) than it should be. I’ve been dabbling with it for a while, but I recently wanted to build a client-side application to track my…
the new audacity beta supports batch processing called CHAIN so you can have it convert several files automatically
Audacity is great at a lot of things, but it’s hard for me to see a better way to time stretch than foobar2000. Easy batch processing in Audacity will be very welcome though. Thanks!
“the new audacity beta supports batch processing called CHAIN so you can have it convert several files automatically”
yea but does it actually worked. last time i tried that audacity chain thing it filled my drive with massive temporary files and took more than 10x the time to process each file. and more clicks as well. the foobar once you set it up is very quick to use with drag and drop converting batches of files. very very fast, and multithreaded even. we are talking conversion at 150X~ using an e2200
An iPod will play any audible.com, iTunes audio book, or any *.m4b file at faster, normal or slow speed. See iLounge Books and spoken word stickies for how to make an m4b file.
All you have to do is, while playing audio of one of the above files, click the center wheel until you see speed settings and then move wheel to change to desired setting. About 30% faster without chipmunk effect. 90% of narrators come across fine at faster speed.
YOU ARE THE MAN!!!
I’ve searched all around for a way to do this!
…this process is by far the easiest!
…I love you man!
Thanks so much for all the trouble you took to explain everything in the detailed way that you did!
GomPlayer is better than Windows Media Player for listening on your PC.
I need to figure out how to do what you’ve described above on the Mac.
I’ll have to check out GomPlayer.
Don’t know how to do this on the Mac. They must have an easy button for it somewhere.
Thank you, Blake for this. I had tried other softwares like audio4fun etc.. but your method seems to be the best.
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Any tips for how to accomplish this feat on the Mac?
Answering my own question:
Amadeus Pro - $40
http://www.hairersoft.com/AmadeusPro/AmadeusPro.html
File>New Batch Processor
Works great. Demo available. Well worth the money.
I seem to get a sharing violation if I attempt to have save the new track directly over the old one. Would be nice to not have to manually rename or save to different folders. Thanks tho, real time saver!!
Only problem with this solution is that it won’t work for DRM protected content.
OK!
Update:
You can easily unDRM the files by using free2me and drmdbg. A small GUI for this has been created called unDRM.net.exe.
Note: Only works if you can actually play the files (i.e. you have the license).
Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
I listen to all of Leo’s TWiT podcasts and with my new job it’s getting impossible for me to keep up. I’m sure this will be the answer I’ve been looking for.
I also forwarded this to Leo’s Twitter account and Facebook page hopefully we can get him to recommend it on his podcasts.
FYI, I just set this up again on my new PC and it still works great with current foobar2000 versions (v0.9.6.8 at least).
I don’t have as long of a commute as I did when I wrote this but I still have to catch all of the Totally Rad Shows ( http://revision3.com/trs ).
I just skimmed the comments up to present and have to check out the suggestions. I’ve been working on the same thing for some years, but think of it as speed listening. Time stretching has also been applied to video by the U of Utah a few years back, but did not catch on, for use in viewing lectures. Here’s a gist of what I’ve got that adds to what others have said:
For several years I’ve sought software that increases the speed of podcasts and corrects the pitch to eliminate the chipmonk effect. Windows Media Player does the best job on a computer and Audacity will slowly convert a file using a 2-step process. Just this year FasterAudio.com and MP3 Speed Changer from http://www.crazyboomerang.com/ began offering software that will batch process audio files with pitch-corrected speeds over 200%. MP3 Speed Changer, at $20, is the cheapest and also the most stable of the two. However, I don’t think it is quite as good as Windows Media Player. MP3 Speed Changer is adequate for me and the developer has done past work to produce improved versions, so future versions may occur that offer better results. Speeds faster than 50% begin to introduce artifacts using MP3 Speed Changer, so I batch files to 50%. The MP3 speed changer can be used for greater speed with less chipmunk effect, then.
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