Need media player that can speed-up

[-Habanero-]

What's a good media player that can play the content at a faster speed without changing the pitch of the audio such as Youtube that lets you select 1.25x 1.5x and 2x speed?

I tried VLC but it skips frames and every other media player changes the pitch.

[jagabo]

Potplayer and SMPlayer can do it. But whether frames are skipped will depend on the nature of the video.

[johnmeyer]

VLC does it. I use it all the time. Press the [ key to slow down and the ] key to speed up. Press the = key to return to normal speed.

[-Habanero-]

I didn't know I can speed up with the [] keys in VLC. Before, I would right click, go to playback and increase the speed there but it would always be jagged and skip frames. Speeding up with the [] keys renders perfectly smooth playback.

Huge thanks for this.

[pandy]

A bit contradictory expectation (play faster but keep same pitch of audio) doable but with quality cost for sure (there is no optimal audio transpose algorithm for this).

[johnmeyer]

A bit contradictory expectation (play faster but keep same pitch of audio) doable but with quality cost for sure (there is no optimal audio transpose algorithm for this).

Actually, advances in software can now give you speed change with pitch correction that is amazingly good. At some point, the algorithm does break down, with changes more than about 50% faster becoming unintelligible, simply because the mind can't keep up, and on the slow side, anything less than half speed sounds like everyone is quite drunk. However, for +- 5-10%, you can now get audio that has very little flanging or hollow sound.

I use a professional speed change program, and can adjust music by 5-10% without any tell-tale artifacts. That was not possible ten years ago. I do this for lots of reasons, but often do it for dance productions where the dancers often prefer slightly slower music.

[-Habanero-]

Yeah, I don't need a high quality one. I only do a 1.5x speedup and never more than 2x. I can understand speech just fine at these rates unless it's James Woods.

My Sound Forge version is 10 years old and the time stretch features produce better quality than some recent programs I tried.

[johnmeyer]

My Sound Forge version is 10 years old and the time stretch features produce better quality than some recent programs I tried.

I have to disagree with you a little bit on that one. I too still use my old Sound Forge DAW from time-to-time, but I don't think Sonic Foundry/Sony ever included the newer Ensoniq time stretch software that they added to Vegas about eight years ago. The Ensoniq software changed everything and is what I have been using for all my time changes. The differences are not subtle at all, and you'll never go back to the older algorithms once you hear how much better the Ensoniq algorithms are.

[-Habanero-]

The time stretch tool on my Sound Forge is from XFX Plugin pack so I'm guessing it isn't Ensoniq. Can you speed up a speech sample by 50% and post it here so I can do a comparison to see the difference?

I tested it against Izotope's stretch tool and the results were better despite being WAY faster than Izotope.

[johnmeyer]

Here is a link to a professionally-recorded WAV file, along with three stretch+pitch-correction examples at half speed, and three at double speed. I used Vegas 10, Sound Forge 7's own stretch, and iZotope RX3 Advanced. The order of quality is pretty clear: Sound Forge is by far the worst, followed by Vegas's elastique stretch. iZotope, as usual, has the best quality. It is an incredible piece of software.

Comparison.zip

[pandy]

A bit contradictory expectation (play faster but keep same pitch of audio) doable but with quality cost for sure (there is no optimal audio transpose algorithm for this).

Actually, advances in software can now give you speed change with pitch correction that is amazingly good. At some point, the algorithm does break down, with changes more than about 50% faster becoming unintelligible, simply because the mind can't keep up, and on the slow side, anything less than half speed sounds like everyone is quite drunk. However, for +- 5-10%, you can now get audio that has very little flanging or hollow sound.

I use a professional speed change program, and can adjust music by 5-10% without any tell-tale artifacts. That was not possible ten years ago. I do this for lots of reasons, but often do it for dance productions where the dancers often prefer slightly slower music.

Still at some point you need to sacrifice quality - i saw such things implemented on relatively low speed HW (somewhere around 300 - 500MIPS in total) - it works up to some point and that's all - beyond particular point you reach border where one algorithm can't cover every aspect of signal processing related to keep particular quality and loose data at the same time...

[johnmeyer]

[QUOTE=pandy;2453999]

Still at some point you need to sacrifice quality - i saw such things implemented on relatively low speed HW (somewhere around 300 - 500MIPS in total) - it works up to some point and that's all - beyond particular point you reach border where one algorithm can't cover every aspect of signal processing related to keep particular quality and loose data at the same time...

Listen to the samples I uploaded and decide for yourself. The quality is pretty impressive. For speech (which is what was requested) it sounds weird, just because people don't talk like that. However, the lack of artifacts is amazing.

If you apply this technology to music instead of speech, small adjustments can be done without anyone being able to detect the change.

[-Habanero-]

Thanks john, I do notice a small difference in quality but I'm still satisfied enough with the quality of my SF.
Here it is.

[johnmeyer]

Yeah, that sounds fine. Speeding up usually has fewer issues, even with older software. In particular, you don't get anything like the flanging and "gravelly" sound that happens when you slow down the audio. This makes sense because when speeding up, the software just (more or less) throws things away, but when it slows down, it has to manufacture new stuff to insert.

The only issue I've ever had when speeding up audio while maintaining pitch is that the lesser software programs often delete the audio in such a way that all you hear are plosives.

A good way to compare the quality of various software when speeding up is to try even faster speed changes.