Changing speed without changing pitch
The naive way to speed audio up is to play it back faster, which is what happens when a tape runs quick: everything rises in pitch and voices turn comical. That is almost never what you want. This tool uses time stretching instead, which resamples the audio in short overlapping windows so the duration changes while the pitch stays where it was. Speech sped up to 1.5x still sounds like the same person, just talking faster.
The range runs from 0.25x to 4x. Values well outside 0.5x to 2x are chained internally in stages rather than applied in one pass, because time stretching degrades if pushed too far in a single step. That keeps extreme settings usable, but they are still where artefacts show up first.
What each range is good for
- 0.5x to 0.75x — slowing down to transcribe an interview, or to work out a fast musical passage note by note.
- 1.25x to 1.5x — the sweet spot for listening to lectures and podcasts faster. Almost no audible artefacts and a large time saving.
- 1.75x to 2x — still intelligible for most speech, though sibilance starts to sound brittle and heavily reverberant recordings smear.
- Beyond 2x, or below 0.5x — expect a noticeable metallic or warbling quality. Fine for effects, not for material anyone has to listen to attentively.
Time stretching is hardest on sounds with sharp transients and long reverb tails. A dry voice recording survives 2x far better than a live concert recording of the same length.
Speed, pitch, and when you want both
If you actually want the old tape effect — faster and higher, or slower and lower — apply this tool and the Pitch Changer together in the same direction. Speeding to 2x and raising pitch by twelve semitones reproduces what doubling playback rate does naturally.
If you want to change pitch and keep the length, use the Pitch Changer on its own; it compensates internally so the duration does not move. The two tools are deliberately independent so you can adjust one without dragging the other along with it.
Preview runs in your browser. The stretch itself is applied on the server when you export, and the uploaded file is deleted as soon as your download completes.