Preferred software for stretching audio?

[Cygnus111]

I've got a live video of a band I like, and I just found a better sounding audio from the same show. The problem is, due to battery issues (or possibly tape issues), the audio runs slightly slower than the video. What software is good at time compression/expansion? I'm using an old copy of Soundforge but it's not very accurate. The songs are long, so over time it eventually goes out of sync even if I start syncing from the beginning of each track. This copy of soundforge appears to only adjust to the nearest quarter of a second, and I need something that you can fine-tune a little better than that.

Any suggestions?

[davexnet]

Perhaps Audacity, it seems to have reasonable sound quality.
If you don't mind spending some $$$, there's always Prosoniq's Timefactory
http://www.prosoniq.com/www/TimeFactory_II.html

Which version of Sound Forge are you having issues with? How long is the audio in question?

[Cygnus111]

My copy is OLD. V4.0. The first track I'm working with is close to 19 minutes long. I did my calcs and found the audio is 1.473 seconds shorter than the video, using the exact same start and end points. As a check, I overlayed the new audio track and the audio track I extracted from the video, and at the beginning they're perfectly in sync. Over 19 minutes that may not sound like much, but by the end there's a noticeable delay between the audio and video.

I was also googling Adobe Audition, as it seems some people use that one too. Or maybe the newer version of Soundforge has improved compression/expansion algorithms?

[hech54]

I use Reaper. I have an OLD free version from when it was first introduced.

[hello_hello]

There's a plugin for foobar2000 called Soundtouch which does time stretching and pitch adjusting when converting. It adjusts according to the percentage you specify, in increments of 0.01%.

Have you considered adjusting the frame rate of the video rather then re-encoding the audio? Maybe a .001 frame per second speed increase might get it fairly close.

[AlanHK]

The first track I'm working with is close to 19 minutes long. I did my calcs and found the audio is 1.473 seconds shorter than the video, using the exact same start and end points.

You can do that with Audacity.
Open, select the track, use Effect/Change Tempo
Put in the new length, to nearest .01 sec.

[jman98]

Just to mention other tools that can do it, it's not free but I've got an old version of Cool Edit that can do this kind of thing and I have used it for just such in the past.

[pepegot1]

You can do it with a Video Editor like Vegas, VideoStudio Pro X5, etc.

[Cygnus111]

You can do it with a Video Editor like Vegas, VideoStudio Pro X5, etc.

Just curious, because I'm doing this project in Vegas; are you talking about expanding the audio or compressing the video? I've seen people say to compress the video but I'd think that might have some funky results. Whichever method you were suggesting, can you explain how you would go about this in Vegas?

I'm going to check out Audacity and see what that's about as well.

[SixFiftyThree]

I use Reaper. I have an OLD free version from when it was first introduced.

I second this, you can easily do it in Reaper. Best DAW I've ever used, and it's cheap. But you can just use the trial version for this purpose (no limitations).

[Cygnus111]

I went with Audacity because the price is right. It did exactly what I needed, but much to my horror I discovered the audio is actually varying speeds within each track. Now I have to decide if I really care enough about this to start editing segments at a time instead of songs at a time, which is going to be a major pain in the ass. I may just abandon it, but at least I now know about a new piece of software that may come in handy in the future!