Slow down music (without distorted sound, just lowered pitch) using VLC

Playing music at a lower speed, by default sounds distorted on most if not all media players, and extremely rare it is to give the option to disable this hidden effect.

In vlc settings, go to advanced and take off timestretch checkmark. To save playback speed when skipping songs or even app restarts, enable it in audio category.

I want to see both options visible on the speed bar area. This allows much more visibility to the timestretch toggle (advanced is basically hiding it) and makes it also known that the speed can stay the same between song picks.

update: I have since extracted the zip from github and browsed nearly every folder in “application” / src/ vlc / gui /

I have seen the code for many of the functions

playback speed

equalizer, it has a checkmark in the “dialog” window that I can copy

the bookmarks (adds current playback time position) which I could use as a base for instead adding playback speed for the current song playing. Using that, a song can have multiple speed presets. Getting more complex is adding UI options to select a speed preset to play a song at. And more than that, making a playlist with such a feature to play songs at the desired individual speed, and expanding even further, allowing to add another speed and also modify the existing one, with higher two decimal place precision.

it is literally a copy paste operation, to add the two options (save speed for current song–if coded properly, for now, just overall speed) and much more importantly timestretch toggle. I can probably michael my way through adding those options.

I would like to make a few changes though, the slider takes quite some movement to start changing, causing large jumps in initial speed change, then requiring to find that area where you were and then fine-tune the speed you want to try. If you release the slider, the steps need to be repeated, causing lots of skips and pauses in the sound. I’d like to understand what causes this, because it isn’t obvious from the code, playback time seekbar behavior should be copied here, no sticky movement.

I’d also like a custom range for the slider, as for music, there isn’t much need to go up above about 1.10 or so, and 40-50% is about as low as you’d want to go. Limiting the range to a 70% or even 40% margin (60-100) would make it significantly easier to drag the slider and not be so difficult to pick a specific spot. I often have to try multiple times to pick an exact speed.

The up/down arrows only allow 5% adjustments, I think this should be customizable down to 1%, or even better would be 0.001 (99.999) or atl east two decimal places.

There are missing percentages, three to be exact between 0.82 and 1. Also 1.05 is not selectable with the slider, but is using the arrows. So, why are there missing numbers at all, since 0.8 and all the way down to .25 has all of them? The slider changes the speed non-linerally, to the point that it’s jumping 3, 4, 5, and sometimes 6% between points on the slider, a limited range would help this, but I haven’t been able to find the code for the slider itself, or if I have, it must be referencing something

Small lines for each percent, and larger lines for 10s and 5s. With a narrowed 40% range, this would allow 40 lines across the screen in 4 grpups seperared by every 10%.

I am reasonably confident I could understand how to make some of the simpler changes (moving checkbox to slider, arrow rate, drag delay, and limiting range) but I would have no idea how to add percent line markers, and may not be able to figure out why there are missing percents, or change precision so I will still need some community supoort.

I created (almost) a gitlab account, but upon verifying my email, I was quite eager to add my suggestions, I was then prompted to send my phone number to verify my account. The other option is to verify using a credit card.

If it works with a gift card I may go that route, but it’s a very unsettling way to provide verification to make gitlab “secure” by giving up some of my own security.

Do you all slow down your music, have you tried without tinestretch effect and if so, what songs, and at what speed, do you enjoy?