Slowing tracks on Audacity?

[SMILEYSIXX]

So my band is going to do a cover of Rush's Working Man, minus the solo, and in order to hear the song without it, I'm trying to use audacity to cut a rough form of what the song might sound like. But when I import my file of Working Man, it plays at a super fast speed for about half a second. I figure slowing it down my make it work, but it just turned it into a high pitched whine. Essentially, the track in half a second, but elongated. Does anyone know how I can get the entire song on there?

[chokeslam512]

If you have an iPod touch you can download Slowdown Music player for free. It works pretty well. It limits you to three songs in the memory at a time but you can always swap them out. I use it and it works great.

[SMILEYSIXX]

Can I cut music on it too? My main goal is to cut the solo out of Working Man so my band has something to work with.

[chokeslam512]

Oh, I'm not sure. Probably not on the free one. If you cut the solo out and make an MP3 out of it you could import that. Its a lot more work but it may be worth it. Good luck man, that's quite the undertaking, should be fun though!

[Bryan R. Tyler]

What file format is it, and do you have the LAME encoder for importing/exporting mp3s in Audacity?

[M0ses]

Originally Posted by Bryan R. Tyler

What file format is it, and do you have the LAME encoder for importing/exporting mp3s in Audacity?

This. You don't need to slow it down. You need to figure out why Audacity is doing that, and fix it. Because Audacity is perfectly capable of loading mp3s normally.

[Sbociol]

+1

[boynamedsuse]

In Audacity, open the file. It should run at normal speed if the file is not corrupted. What you describe may be a bad file. If you just need to change a file a little to make it easier to play along with or adjust to your tuning, the following should work.

Select the passage you want with the selection tool and use the edit function to cut the solo.

Then select the entire song and use Effect --> Change Speed to get the dialog box allowing you to speed up or slow down.
If the pitch changes too much, you can alter that too with Effect --> Pitch.

[SMILEYSIXX]

I've never dealt with audacity before, so I'm slightly uneducated on its functions. Any idea how to get it to import correctly? The file should be just an Mp3.

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Originally Posted by SMILEYSIXX

I've never dealt with audacity before, so I'm slightly uneducated on its functions. Any idea how to get it to import correctly? The file should be just an Mp3.

Do you have the LAME encoder I mentioned? And you should know for sure if it's an mp3 or not.

[SMILEYSIXX]

I don't know which encoder it is.

And it's mp3, but I've had issues with itunes songs before because apple has to make everything incompatible with other software.

[Bryan R. Tyler]

Originally Posted by SMILEYSIXX

I don't know which encoder it is.

And it's mp3, but I've had issues with itunes songs before because apple has to make everything incompatible with other software.

The only way Itunes will alter an mp3's file format is if you have Itunes set to convert them to AAC- it won't do anything to make an mp3 not work with another program if you're still using the original mp3 file you imported into Itunes.

And it's the LAME encoder (as I've mentioned). Just Google "lame encoder" and the second result tells you how to install it and have Audacity recognize it.

[SP_EB4L]

You always could export any AAC files back to mp3 and you don't have to convert mp3 to AAC files to get import in iTunes. I oftenly export AAC files from iTunes to mp3 for sequencing or music editing. Me, I use Amadeus (www.hairersoft.com) instead of Audacity because the greatest quality of Audacity is to be free not the ease of use and flexibility. Furthermore if you only want to slow down your track you could use Quick time with the A/V tools you couls modify to half speed. my two cents...