(b) Does the slowing down/speeding up introduce any noticeable distortion.
oh yeh sorry forgot the "part the (b)" answer:
depends a couple of things:
"attack" - the speed at which a sound rises to it's peak -
anything with purely vocal work and/or bowed instruments and/or
"soft" woodwind (flute/ french horn) will sound better slowed down
and be able to be slowed down more than stuff with instruments with
a strong attack like pianos and guitars, Strong percussion
(particularly heavily reverbed rock snares) starts to sound bad
slowed down even just a little.
Quality of recording - a 98Kbps sounds bad enough at normals speed
and just gets worse and by 3/4 speed it's actually truly painful to
listen to in a very real mind jarring way
even a 320Kbps MP3 played less than 2/3rd speed is getting pretty
"crunchy" (the technical/studio term is "bit crunch" and is used as
effect by... well lets say not the kind of artists likely to release
an album of Hymns...... Tricky, Trent Reznor et. al.) where it
seems to be "stuttering" 20 or 30 times a second (which,
essentially, it is as it's chopping the audio up and relooping small
bits several dozen times a second).
Speeding audio quality up is pretty much independent of recording
quality and yu can usually push any quality recording up to twice
speed with it retaining "listenability" - past that it starts to
"gallop" as it's throwing away so much that you start to hear whole
syllables disappear from words after 2 times and by 3 times whole
words start to disappear.
I would guess unless the level of variance is between different
performers is, say more than 4/5 slower to 1.5 times faster (total
variance just short of twice the speed between the fastest and the
slowest) you should be fine for anything short of releasing it as a
CD for "listening pleasure" (though the amount of people I know
listening to MP3's ripped at sub 128Kbps seems to indicate a lot of
people have high tolerance for low fidelity audio)
--
Mark Secker Computer Support Officer
ph# 61-8-6488 1855 (ECEL) <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
University of Western Australia - CRICOS Provider No. 00126G
~
http://www.pbase.com/marxz
"It takes an idiot to do cool things.... that's why it's cool"
- Haruhara Haruka (FLCL)
Ubi fumus, ibi fumus
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